Bedouin Culture in the Bible 0300121822, 9780300121827

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b e d o u i n c u lt u r e i n t h e b i b l e

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clinton bailey

Bedouin Culture in the Bible

new haven & london

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933624 ISBN 978-0-300-12182-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Maya My wife and helpmate for many years Who has kept beauty in our lives Through her taste, her inspiration, and herself

We are shepherds . . . and our forefathers were shepherds, too. (Genesis 47:3)

contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Finding the Bible through the Bedouin  1 1 Bedouin and Israelites in the Desert  12 2 Bedouin Culture in the Biblical Home  34 3 Desert Society  69 4 Desert Laws  107 5 Desert Religion  139 6 Desert Oral Traditions  167 7 Bedouin Israelites in the Hebrew Bible  204 Appendix: Moses and the Midianites  217

Notes  221 Bibliography of Works Cited  241 Index of Bible Passages Cited  251 Index of Arabic Spellings  263 General Index  273

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acknowledgments

although i did research on Bedouin culture for over forty years before working on this book, I was quite unfamiliar with the Hebrew Bible, which I had never formally studied. Naturally, I gave it a careful read before beginning to write, but I was still an outsider to biblical studies. Therefore, I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of eminent scholars of the Bible and related subjects who willingly spent time going over my successive drafts, guided me through the minefields of this highly studied field, and encouraged my efforts. In particular, I thank Jeff Tigay, of the University of Pennsylvania; the late William Hallo, of Yale University; Joel Kraemer, of the University of Chicago; Israel Eph‘al and Steven Fassberg, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; James Kugel, of Bar-Ilan University; Ziony Zevit, of the American University of Judaism; Marc Zvi Brettler, of Duke University; Diana Lipton, a Biblicist in Jerusalem; and Jonathan Rosen, of New York, an independent writer and scholar on subjects related to Judaism. My leave to write this book was enabled by a number of dedicated friends who found it in their hearts to supplement my limited savings with generous support over the past ten years. I hereby express my deep gratitude to them: Merle and Stanley Goldstein of the Elms Foundation, Providence; Irene Pletka of the Kronhill-Pletka Foundation, New York; the late Alan Slifka and Ariella Riva Ritvo-Slifka of the Alan B. Slifka Foundation, New York; Jean Ungeleiter of the Dorot Foundation, Providence; Peter Geffen of the Kivunim Foundation, New York; Charles Bronfman of the Andrea and

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acknowledgments

Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, New York; Marcie Polier-Swartz of the Marcie Polier Family Foundation, Los Angeles; and Phyllis Hattis of Phyllis Hattis Fine Arts, New York. I am particularly grateful to three people at Yale University Press: Jonathan Brent, who contracted this book when he was associate director of the Press; Sarah Miller, the editor for Literature, Language, and the Performing Arts, who shepherded my manuscript through several revisions over eight years with great patience and dedication; and Margaret Otzel, the production editor for this project, who brought this intricate manuscript to fine fulfillment as a book. My thanks go also to Kip Keller, who copyedited the manuscript, and to three persons for their permission to use photographs: Zev Radovan of Jerusalem, Zoltan Matrahazi of Budapest, and Drora Danin, of Jerusalem, who allowed me to use a photograph taken by the eminent desert botanist Avinoam Danin, her late husband. My thanks are also extended t0 Bill Nelson for making the maps. Above all, my thanks go out to my wife, Maya, to whom this book is justly dedicated, and my four sons—Michael, Daniel, Benjamin, and Ariel—for always finding fascination in my work.

Introduction: Finding the Bible through the Bedouin

in the late summer of 1970, i was living in the heart of the Negev des­ ert at a fledgling educational institution called Midreshet Sde-Boker, from where I conducted ethnographic research into Bedouin culture—the culture of nomadic dwellers in the desert. One Sunday as I sat in my study preparing a lecture that I was to present to a conference the following Friday, a Bedouin friend, Swaylim Abu Bilayya, of the nearby Azazma Sarahin tribe knocked on my door.1 Having not seen him for a while, I was happy at his visit. I prepared some tea, which I served him as we sat facing each other over my desk. Before drinking it, however, he suddenly surprised me by asking, “Why are you angry with me?” “Angry? Why do you think I’m angry?” I replied. “Because you haven’t visited our tent for many weeks,” he stated, with a somber demeanor. “I haven’t visited you,” I explained, “because I’ve been busy with a project I must finish by this Friday. But I have no reason to be angry with you, and I shall be honored to visit you on Saturday.” My friend Swaylim seemed pleased with my explanation, drank his tea, and left. Two days later, on Tuesday, however, he returned to my house, and after I had prepared him some tea and we were seated in my modest study and about to chat, he looked at me gravely and said, “You must be angry with me. Otherwise you would not postpone your visit till Saturday.” Again I explained that I needed every spare moment to finish my project,

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introduction

which was due on Friday, and that he must not attribute my absence from his tent to anger or anything else. He nodded in agreement, drank his tea, and left. On Thursday afternoon, however, he came yet again, and once more we drank tea. But this time, when he began complaining about my absence, I decided to get away from my desk for a bit. “Where are you camped?” I asked. “Over the hills to the west,” he said. “Did you come here by foot or by camel?” “By foot.” “Good!” I proclaimed. “I will take you back in my jeep.” When we arrived at Swaylim’s encampment, he insisted that I drink coffee in his tent, in keeping with Bedouin custom. The subtle late-afternoon light of the desert and the sight of Swaylim’s wife at her ground loom, weaving a long strip of black goat hair for the roof of their winter tent, created a pastoral atmosphere that seduced me to comply. Coffee would not take much time. Upon entering the tent, however, I was quite astonished. Gathered there, some twenty to thirty men—clansmen and neighbors—rose to receive me, obliging me to pass among them from right to left, shaking each one’s extended hand and uttering the accepted greetings. Then I was seated on a carpet next to the elder of Swaylim’s clan and was offered the traditional three tiny china cups of bitter black coffee. When I had finished the drinking and announced my intention to leave, Swaylim suddenly appeared before me, his hands drenched in sheep’s blood. “You can’t leave now,” he declared. “We’ve just butchered your dinner. You can’t leave till after you’ve eaten!” Aware of the revered rules of Bedouin hospitality, I resumed my place on the carpet and stayed. But I was angry. Preparing and cooking a sheep would take at least three hours, time I could hardly afford to lose if I wished to finish writing my lecture by morning. In any case, I passed the interim in conversation with all those present; but when the bowls of mutton were finally served, I, still miffed by what I considered an imposition, indecorously took one bite to fulfill my obligation and rose to leave. At that, all the company shouted, “Where do you think you’re going?”



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I answered, “I’ve eaten and I’m going back to work.” “You can’t leave now,” they protested. “We want to talk to you.” “We’ve just been talking for three hours!” I pointed out. “Yes. But now we want to talk to you about something serious!” What was serious to my companions was a favor they wished to ask of me. The time had come for them to circumcise their sons before they attained the age of thirteen, as prescribed by the Islamic faith, and they wanted to hold a monthlong circumcision party in a special encampment. The favor they wanted was for me to speak to the Israeli army and get them permission to set up this camp adjacent to one of the Negev roads, whereas standing orders required the Bedouin to camp on the far side of the hills bordering these roads. To the Bedouin, not to hold the party where it could be seen by passers-by was tantamount to being inhospitable, as if they were not desirous of guests; hence, their request and its importance to them. Despite my familiarity and friendship with almost all the men involved, they would not risk asking me to trouble myself on their behalf without first giving me something that would both counterbalance their request and obligate me. When Bedouin want a major favor from someone, they precede their appeal with a “favor” of their own, often a meal of mutton or the gift of a sheep, their dearest possession. Such a favor, or gift, obliges; and even though its repayment might well be greater (“A favor comes on a donkey, but goes back on a camel”), one cannot turn down the request. That was the intention behind inviting me to dinner. The effort of those present to get to Swaylim’s tent three times that week on camelback, in anticipation of my coming, highlighted the necessity of giving me the gift. Although Bedouin in a position to help others may in fact undertake such obligations without a “deposit”—especially when they extend protection and charity to people in need—they are not normally eager to incur an obligation, preferring to keep themselves unfettered by commitments and thus free to address security and economic interests as they arise. Therefore, they are loath to receive favors and gifts. “A favor,” they say, “weighs more than a mountain.” For me, nonetheless, this experience with Bedouin co-option through a gift proved an epiphany. It opened my eyes to the possibility of finding many features of Bedouin life that are relevant for understanding events

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introduction

and facets of desert life depicted in the Bible. In this specific case, it at once clarified what happened to the biblical forefather Abraham in an episode I had read as a child. There, the patriarch tried to obligate Abimelech (reportedly a Philistine, but arguably a prominent chief in the northern Negev, just south of ancient Philistia) to recognize his ownership of a well that he had dug the previous year but that Abimelech’s shepherds had seized. As the Bible relates: Abraham took issue with Abimelech over the well of water that Abime­lech’s herdsmen had seized, but Abimelech argued that he hadn’t known or ever heard of the seizure. . . . So Abraham set seven ewe-lambs of the flock by themselves. Abimelech said to Abraham: “What mean these seven ewelambs which you have set apart?” and he said: “You will take these seven ewe-lambs of my hand, so that you confirm it is I who dug this well.”2 (Gen. 21:25–30)

It was this insight into a quite minor biblical event that led me eventually to write the present book. Although I am not a professional Biblicist, but rather a curious Bible reader who hoped to find further similarities between Bedouin life and events in what is called the Hebrew Bible (known in Christianity as the Old Testament), I used the forty-five years (1967–2012) that I had spent often living among Bedouin in the Sinai and Negev Deserts —studying, witnessing, and taking part in their lives—to suggest new insights that might elucidate our traditional understanding of much in the biblical text. I also felt that an abundance of these insights might enlighten us regarding the possibility that many of the ancient Israelites, as the Bible depicts them, were in fact nomadic or of nomadic heritage; that is, not mere fabrications constructed anciently by the Bible’s authors, as several modern Biblicists maintain.3

The Bedouin: An Ancient and Unchanging Culture Bedouin culture may not be able to shed light on all, or even most, of the Bible’s often ambivalent content. It is, however, a good context for understanding much of it, being a culture that existed at the time the biblical texts were composed. Down to the second half of the twentieth century,



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when major changes occurred in the lives of the Bedouin, theirs was one of the world’s most ancient extant cultures—a culture of survival through adjustment to the conditions of the Middle Eastern deserts in which they lived. I learned about this culture from the Arabic-speaking premodern Bedouin among whom I carried out ethnographic studies—“premodern” here meaning that they had grown up in age-old, traditional lifestyles before modernity entered their deserts. I first met them in the mid-1960s when camels and donkeys were still their only means of mobility, bread and milk products were their main daily diet, body-length gowns were the type of garment worn by both men and women, and their few, simple household accessories were regularly made at home (such as hand-carved wooden bowls or camel saddles, the woven parts of the tent, and skins for churning milk and carrying water) or were bought or bartered for in the market (cotton elements of apparel, metal trays and pots for cooking and making tea and coffee, glasses and china cups for drinking, blankets, and sundry food stuffs such as sugar, tea, and coffee). Hence, their culture, deriving mainly from their natural environment rather than from the cultures of others, appeared to me as an urtext of many references I found in the Bible. Since these premodern Bedouin were my main source of information about this nomadic culture, I refer to it here as “Bedouin,” despite the fact that “Bedouin” comes from the Arabic, which was a language that arguably did not exist during most of the biblical times covered in this book. In Arabic, a Bedouin is a badawi (pl. badu), “a person of the badiya, or desert.” But my use of the term “Bedouin” goes beyond the standard definition of these people as “Arabic-speaking nomads,” because the language that Middle Eastern, desert-dwelling nomads spoke in any period of their long recorded history (approximately 2500 BCE–2000 CE) is irrelevant to what I define as their culture of adjustment, which existed long before those who lived it spoke Arabic. The fact that this culture goes back to prebiblical times makes it relevant for understanding the Bible better. In addition to being ancient, this culture was basically unchanged for millennia—because meager and unreliable desert rainfall was always its author. The consequent paucity of water, as discussed in chapter 1, pre-

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vented Middle Eastern nomads (and what some Western scholars call semi-nomads) from relying on agriculture as the basis of their economy, and forced them, instead, to live mainly by raising livestock.4 With desert rainfall not only sparse but also spotty, moreover, Bedouin herdsmen could tend animals only if they migrated from place to place, searching for the noncontiguous pasture on which their goats, sheep, and camels had to feed. Migration, in turn, had its own effects on Bedouin life. In their material culture, for instance, the Bedouin tent addressed the need for a mobile shelter; and a frugal diet and a dearth of possessions suited their existential need to “travel light.” Their migrations in search of sufficient pasture regularly forced the Bedouin to live in dispersion and in areas remote from governmental presence. This obliged them to form social groups—clans and tribes—that took the place of governments in ensuring their personal security and access to water and pasture for their livestock. Their distance from governmental law enforcement also obliged the ancestors of the present-day Bedouin to devise their own legal system, with laws and institutions that addressed the problems characteristic of a nomadic society, a legal system that has prevailed down to the present.5 In the spiritual and psychological realms, the Bedouin developed values, perspectives, and religious beliefs that helped alleviate their arduous life of frequent movement and relieve their fear of the dangers endemic to desert life.6 The foregoing details are the broader and more salient features of a culture that emerged to enable people to survive in their natural habitat—the desert. So long as a group of Bedouin did not change their residence to another cultural milieu, or insofar as modern technology and communications did not come along to change their lives within the desert (which happened mainly in the second half of the twentieth century), their options for survival did not change either. And since survival required successive generations to adjust to the unchanging conditions they found in the des­ erts, their culture remained largely changeless, consisting almost wholly of the means they needed for making that adjustment. The historian Michael Rowton, who examined four millennia of nomadic life in the deserts of Mesopotamia, likewise attributed the changelessness of societies such as those of the nomads he met there to “the effect of the



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physical environment on the history of a given area.” Calling this effect “topology,” he saw the topology of the Bedouin as involving “both seasonal migration and the rugged nature of the terrain,” the latter also a military factor that protected the integrity of their culture. The fact that this ancient topology lasted until the mid-twentieth century tells us that it was only then that governments finally acquired the military technology to penetrate the desert and suppress Bedouin autonomy, which had lasted for 4,500 years.7 Documentary evidence exists to indicate just how old and how unchanging this desert culture was. In particular, nomads under the name “Shasu” and “Martu” were first recorded in about 2500 BCE, during the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt and the Sumerian period in Mesopotamia, respectively, establishing that what we herein are calling Bedouin culture has survived at least from then—from then through the biblical period and all the way down to my own desert-dwelling Bedouin informants—a stretch, as noted, of almost 4,500 years.8 One telling sign of this continuity is the way that nomads were depicted by their sedentary neighbors throughout the intervening ages and into the present. Although interpretations of Shasu, for instance, differ in the scholarly literature of ancient Near Eastern studies, Egyptian representations of their activity that the Egyptologist Donald Redford cites from a number of original sources, resemble several Egyptian characterizations of Bedouin that could still be found in the recent, premodern past, such as wandering, pasturing, providing services, raiding, plundering, exhibiting lawlessness, and generally being a thorn in government’s side.9 In like manner, the literature of the sedentary Sumerians depicts the Martu, or Amorites, of the nearby Syrian desert as “barbarians” who “live in tents buffeted by the wind,” “know no house, know no city,” “know not grain” [cultivation], “cause only disturbance,” and “hunt down . . . and slaughter gazelles”10— depictions that reflect recent impressions held by settled populations in the Fertile Crescent (“Bedouin are mangy; keep away from them”)11 and Iraq.12 These examples from Egypt and Sumer go far toward confirming that Bedouin culture was ancient and largely unchangeable. Consequently, it is an appropriate source for situating some biblical narratives regarding daily life and for letting us enter more deeply into the actuality of the Bible, most of which was written in stages somewhere between the tenth and sixth

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centuries BCE;13 that is, some two thousand years after the first recorded presence of the Shasu and Martu. While a majority of the consequent similarities are particularly pertinent to the narratives in the Pentateuch, in which the Israelites are mainly depicted as desert dwellers, we also find them relevant for understanding the Israelites in their stages of settlement in the rocky hill areas of central and northern Canaan, where much of their desert culture stayed intact. Further suitability for observing aspects of the Bible through the Bedouin derives from the fact that the nomads whom I studied and among whom I lived were situated in the Negev and Sinai Deserts, the settings of much of Genesis and Exodus, in which the main characters are presented as nomads. This location helps us understand, for example, the economic activity, the types of dwellings, the place-names, and the diet ascribed to the biblical figures in these books. Helpful, too, is the fact that my Bedouin prototypes from Sinai and the Negev were not only ancient but also “pure,” as Rowton designated nomads that stayed deep in the desert, keeping their original culture from dissipating through proximity to, and dependence on, settled societies.14 This was clearly true until the twentieth century in the Negev, where intertribal relations remained significantly independent of outside authority, despite the Bedouin being nominally under the control of the Ottoman Empire.15 Moreover, just as the Bedouin society I first encountered in the 1960s was still very traditional, preserving conventions and ways of thinking that conceivably went back many centuries, the resemblances to the Bible that I witnessed among them might also best be understood by trying to think like a premodern Bedouin. This mode of thinking, which gives a different perspective from the modern views held by most Bible readers today, will become clear through the many forthcoming examples of Bedouin culture.16

The Bedouin Presence in the Bible The Hebrew Bible is ostensibly a theological saga seeking to define the Israelites as the people of a god called Yahweh (in English, Jehovah). As ethnic backdrop, Genesis, the first book of the Bible, portrays the forefathers of the Israelites as nomads dwelling in the arid and semiarid southern and



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eastern areas of the land of Canaan, to which they had immigrated from the northern desert fringe of Mesopotamia. The Bible’s second and fourth books—Exodus and Numbers—portray the descendants of these people as having fled from Egypt, where they had dwelled for some generations, and as living in the deserts of Sinai and Transjordan, preparatory to their attributed reentry into Canaan, the land that Yahweh had promised them. The books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth depict subsequent generations of Israelites as semisedentary former nomads settling into a life of agriculture in the hill country of central and northern Canaan, but retaining many remnants of nomadic life, especially in their social organization and behavior. Such vestiges persist in portrayals of the Israelites (in the books of Samuel and Kings, and the concurrent Prophets) as an almost fully settled people in the successive united Hebrew kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon, and the subsequent divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Although many contemporary Bible scholars have found it hard to affirm the historical veracity of the individuals and events portrayed in the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua and Judges,17 the ubiquitous cultural evidence conveyed in this book should strengthen the recognition that at least some of the ancient Israelites—even if they cannot be identified personally —were in fact of nomadic origin. And if that is so, it should also prove logical that the generations of scribes and editors who later composed the Bible were partly the descendants of these nomads, and who integrated in their holy book stories and other elements of a culture with which they were familiar through an oral tradition, even if it was hundreds of years old. These suppositions will be discussed in chapter 7. While rereading the Bible in preparation for writing this book, I noted what appeared to be resemblances to Bedouin culture as they emerged from the text, some from biblical narratives and some from autonomous biblical elements, such as laws, practices, and allusions. In Genesis alone, I identified some twenty-five stories reflecting a tribal background and bearing characteristics of Bedouin oral narrative. Resemblances emerged also from desert experiences ascribed to the Hebrews of the exodus as occurring in Sinai and Transjordan—such as their eating unleavened bread, manna, and quail, and their dwelling in shrub booths—all of them Bedouin practices from these areas that made their way into Exodus, Leviticus, and

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Numbers. I also found throughout the Hebrew Bible numerous Bedouin likenesses in the domains of economics, material culture, social values, social organization, legal practices, religious behavior, and oral traditions. Finally, I noticed random but subtle and authentic allusions to Bedouin culture interspersed sporadically in the Prophets, the book of Job, the Song of Songs, and the book of Ruth. In Psalms, too, the famous line “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack naught at all. . . . He lets me lie still in lush pastures” (23:1–2) refers to the relief that otherwise exhausted desert shepherds feel after a season of ample rainfall has made pasture plentiful—as opposed to the many years of drought that force them to chase after their hungry flocks as they disperse in search of a rare blade of grass. Hence, the abundant and varied Bedouin materials collected here constitute a cultural document that supplements materials learned from other fields such as ancient Near Eastern history, biblical studies, archaeology, and anthropology. It is a document, moreover, that in addition to helping us address the question of who the historical Israelites really were—and perhaps establishing that nomads were at least a part of the ancient Israelite population— sheds new light on the Bible’s text and furnishes fresh insights into our customary perspectives on some prominent aspects of Judaism and their biblical origins. Some of these insights touch upon the Israelite god Yahweh (enunciated in Judaism as “Adonai”), the attribute of this god as unseen, the original significance of circumcision, the eating of unleavened bread during Passover, the dwelling in thatched booths during the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Jewish prohibition against eating pork and other forbidden foods. Nevertheless, while Bedouin-like findings in the Bible are many, this book does not suggest that Bedouin culture was unique to the Israelite experience. Scholarship has shown that influences from other ancient Near Eastern civilizations—such as the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, and Canaanite—were pervasive, especially in some literary, theological, institutional, and legal domains.18 Similarities may also be found between biblical phenomena and ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean in the realm of daily life, such as sheep raising, religious sacrifice, blood revenge, social organization, and poetry.19 It may therefore be claimed that the biblical parallels I identify with Bedouin culture are not exclusive to



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that source and may equally derive from ancient Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean basin, or elsewhere; just as it may also be noted, on the basis of worldwide anthropological studies, that other peoples too have customs and practices similar to those that we find in the Bible and that are not exclusively Bedouin.20 In the minutiae of life, for example, even peoples far removed from the biblical world may, like Bedouin, base their flocks mainly on females, use the term “bread” for all food, use flint for cutting, guard the premarital virginity of their women, demand honesty from judges, offer sacrifices to ancestors, and use proverbs in daily life, all of which is clearly true. Still, such resemblances do not necessarily negate the likelihood that the Bible’s authors acquired these depictions of Israelite behavior from Bedouin influences. After all, the great abundance of Bedouin similarities, the common logic of these similarities between Bedouin and biblical experiences, and the ancient proximity of Bedouin to what the Bible cites as Israelite abodes make it more likely that the origin of almost all the biblical materials presented in this book stemmed from Bedouin rather than nonBedouin cultures. To keep the materials in this book in groupings that highlight a Bedouin presence, I developed them in chapters that deal with specific aspects of the two cultures being compared: economic, material, social, legal, religious, and literary. My presentations of the Bedouin-Bible similarities throughout the book usually begin with an explication of the former, owing to the 4,500 years of Bedouin cultural history, of which the depicted period of Israelite nomadism in the Bible was but a relatively brief epoch. All my biblical references come directly from the Hebrew Bible, in order to focus on what the Bible actually says and to see it in the context of its cultural world. Hence, my preparatory reading of it in Hebrew and English was intentionally direct; that is, without reference to the voluminous Jewish homiletic texts (Heb. midrash) or to the traditional exegetical texts, through which the Bible was conventionally explained in both Judaism and Christianity. This is in keeping with what the Biblicist Benjamin Sommer defined as a fundamental goal of the modern scholarly interpretation of the Bible; namely, “to distinguish between what the Bible says and what the classical rabbis and church fathers say the Bible says.”21

1

Bedouin and Israelites in the Desert

the arid and semiarid areas where the Bible situates the early I­ sraelites —the Negev, Sinai, and Transjordan, and the hills and deserts of eastern Canaan—is where nomads have chosen to live for the 4,500 years since at least the recorded Shasu during the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty (2,500 BCE) down to the Bedouin of the mid-twentieth century.1 Before the modern era, relatively few Bedouin in each generation abandoned this way of life to settle elsewhere permanently, and the many that remained in the desert were at home with its hardships. To express their sentiments toward their difficult climate and topography, they would say, “All lands are lush in the eyes of their people.”2 To survive in the desert, though, Bedouin could live only a nomadic life, as noted in the introduction and as portrayed in the Bible. The veracity of the biblical portrayal of the Israelites at various levels of nomadism in the deserts can be confirmed by examining the climatic conditions in these areas and comparing how both premodern Bedouin and the biblically depicted desert dwellers adjusted to them in their economic life.

Water Among Bedouin, the territory held by one’s tribal confederation is one’s home area. It is there that a Bedouin has uncontested access to what he terms “the trough and the grassy valley,”3 alluding to water and pasture, the

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Fig. 1. A Bedouin drinking water with care. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

two most vital, but scarcest, resources necessary for the survival of a desert pastoralist. Bedouin oral tradition highlights both the essentiality of water and its dearth through accounts of its miraculous discovery when it was needed to save people’s lives. In northwestern Arabia, for example, a sacred shrine marks the spot where the ancestor of the Azazma tribal confederation, an Azzam, was saved from dehydration after his shepherdess mother ran out of water while at pasture; the thirsty infant kicked the ground with his heels till he formed a hole from which water sprang.4 In northern Sinai, twelve kilometers west of the town of El-Arish, a child of a waterless shepherdess of the Masa‘id tribe discovered a source, thereafter called the “Well of the Masa‘id,” in the same way.5 Even thirst-stricken dogs are recalled to have miraculously discovered water. In central Sinai, there is a mountain pass, Nagb Wursa, named after a dog called Wursa, which was left behind by its master, an Abu Turban of the Ayayda confederation, when it became too enervated by thirst to proceed on their journey. By digging in the ground with his paws, the dog discovered a spring that saved him from dying.6 In the west-central Negev, one finds a spring that was uncovered under similar circumstances by a dog belonging to a section of the Azazma Sarahin tribe who were thereafter known as the Kallab (“Keepers of the Dog”).7

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bedouin and israelites in the desert

In the Bible, the discovery of rare water in the desert was seen as no less miraculous, the only difference being the explicit role of God in the biblical telling. Accordingly, the experiences of the Bedouin shepherdesses and their children cited above were reflected in the case of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, who found water for her son Ishmael after they had strayed in the desert of Beersheba and their water ran out. The Bible relates: “God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; so she went and filled the water-bag and gave the lad water to drink” (Gen. 21:19). Again, when the Children of Israel in Sinai complained over the lack of water for drinking, God miraculously made it available out of rocks (Exod. 17:1–6; Num. 20:2– 11) and sweetened it with bark from a desert tree (Exod. 15:23–25). Even without God’s intervention, the Bible portrays the discovery of water as wondrous. Thus, the Israelites, after their depicted exodus from Egypt, “rejoiced and broke into song” when they found a well of water in the parched Araba depression while wandering between Sinai and Transjordan: Well up, O well—Sing to it! Well that headmen dug, That good folk burrowed with their staffs And from the desert [gave us] a gift.8 (Num. 21:17–18)

The early Israelites were apparently so struck by the essentiality of water to their survival in the desert that they left this awe as a legacy to descendants such as the prophet Jeremiah, who, upon referring to God himself, called him a “source of living waters” (Jer. 2:13; 17:13). Water in Middle Eastern deserts being so scarce, many Bedouin wars were fought over the possession of its sources, from antiquity down to the recent premodern past. Such occasions must have been so frequent that “watering place” became a metaphor for battle. Thus, a Bedouin adage that says, “Count your kinsmen before going to battle,” uses the metaphoric phrase “going down to the watering-place” for “going to battle.”9 The water to which one “goes down” refers to wells, springs, or rain pools, which are mainly found in low-lying wadis where floodwaters collect. In the Bible, too, the position of low-lying sources of water is the origin of the idiom



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“going down to battle” (Heb. yored li-milhama); it was used by the future king David when he set forth the principle that fighters who go to battle will share the booty equally with those who are left in camp (1 Sam. 30:24). In a widespread Bedouin story from a nineteenth-century war over water, a leader of the Tarabin confederation in the Negev, Hammad al-Sufi, whose allies of the Azazma confederation had just been driven from the Well of Khuwaylfa and its surrounding pastures by members of the Tiyaha confederation, avowed that he would yet fill his coffee pot from the waters of that well.10 The livestock-raising Azazma, knowing that “pasturelands without water are like pure poison,”11 understood that the Tiyaha hoped they would abandon their pastures once divested of their watering place. Similar to the predicament of the Azazma was that of the biblical Isaac, when the shepherds of Abimelech (apparently a powerful chief in the Negev) drove him from the wells of Esek and Sitna (Gen. 26:20–21) with the intention to expel his flocks from the pastures nearby. Likewise, when Abraham’s cousin Lot wanted to separate their flocks so that his could have more pasture, he deliberately chose to move to the Jordan Junction, near the Dead Sea, having seen it to be “well-watered” (Gen. 13:10). By the same token, Caleb’s daughter, Achsah, who, together with her husband, Othniel, had received a “dry desert area” (Heb. eretz ha-negev) as a marriage gift from her father, implored him to give them some water sources, too, obviously for them to graze there with their flocks12 (Josh. 15:14–19).

Rainfall In Sinai, the Negev, eastern Canaan, and Transjordan, three characteristics of the rainfall—its low level, its yearly irregularity, and its monthly inconsistency—account for the fact that premodern Bedouin as well as the depicted ancient Israelites lived there mainly as raisers of livestock rather than as farmers. Rainfall in these areas depends on depressions of barometric pressure (lows) that occur during the winter season over the area of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. The more removed a region is from the depression’s center, the less rain it receives. Hence, while rains in northern Israel, which is closer to Cyprus, average around 35 inches per

16

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year, annual averages in parts of the more southerly Negev, which is relatively distant from the depression’s center, range from a lowly 8 inches down to 0.8 inches of rain.13 These lower amounts are barely sufficient for growing even a modest harvest of barley or wheat, crops that require as little as 6 inches of rain. Moreover, only rarely does the winter barometric depression move south of Cyprus, which would bring its center nearer to the Negev. When this happens, however, the Negev might get more rain than usual. For example, in 1963–64, a year when the barometric depression moved south, the central Negev (where the annual rainfalls average roughly 4 inches) received 6 inches of rain; in the previous year, 1962–3, only 1 inch fell there. Such a fluctuation in annual precipitation is typical of the deserts in question, which consequently renders any annual average irrelevant for agriculture. For example, in Beersheba, in the northern Negev, the precipitation for three successive years in the 1970s measured 9.2 inches (1970–71), 13 inches (1971–72), and 6.5 inches (1972–73).14 Forty-five miles to the south, in the same years, the totals were 4.4 inches, 6.2 inches, and 1.6 inches.15 Owing to these sizeable annual fluctuations and the overall low level of precipitation, someone wishing to engage in agriculture in the Negev or Sinai Deserts would find it impossible to base his economy on this activity alone. The monthly distribution of rain is also too irregular for an aspiring Bedouin planter to depend on, even in the semiarid climate of Beersheba, which receives an annual average of 8 inches of rainfall, hypothetically enough for growing winter grains. Thus, even in years of sufficient rainfall, it may not occur during the right time of the growing period. In particular, to have his seeds sprout, he would need at least 2 inches of rain within the first month of his sowing, which Bedouin in the Negev and northern Sinai have traditionally begun in mid-November. Next, he would need a minimum of another 2 inches in March to ensure that the grain would contain enough moisture to withstand the hot and dry winds that blow in April, a month or two before the harvest. While rain throughout the growing season is, of course, desirable for keeping the plants moist, these two timely rains—in November–December and March—are essential.



bedouin and israelites in the desert

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This fact is demonstrated by the three years noted above for the vicinity of Beersheba. Bedouin in that area deemed the crop of 1970–71 a poor one, despite a satisfactory yearly rainfall of 9.2 inches.16 The five-month growing period began in late November, and the monthly rainfall was as follows: Month

inches of rain

November December January February March April

0.8 2.5 1.6 0.65 0.68 2.7

While the critical rains of November–December were fine, those of March were too sparse. Thus, although there was much rain in April, it came too late to keep the grain growing apace during the heat waves of that month. In 1971–72, the following year, the crop was considered excellent,17 not primarily owing to the sizeable yearly total of rainfall (13 inches), but because 6.5 inches fell in November and December, and 2.4 inches came in March. By contrast, the year 1972–73 was deemed a disaster,18 not just because of the low yearly total of rain (6.5 inches), which might have been sufficient for a fair crop had its distribution been better, but also because the March rains failed, totaling only 0.7 inches. The importance of the proper distribution of rainfall in the growing season is embedded in the consciousness of Bedouin planters, as reflected in their sayings “If the year has been droughty, we still have March [i.e., to redeem it]; and if it’s been lush, we still have March [i.e. to ruin it]” and “March sustains the crop or March destroys it.”19 In addition, although the more northern parts of the country enjoy more rainfall than the south, they too are often subject to almost the same unstable distributions. In the Bible, the consciousness of capricious rainfall distribution was prominent in the minds of the ancient, formerly nomadic Israelites (see

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chapter 7), who either conquered central and northern Canaan (as the books of Joshua and Judges relate) or had lived there for several centuries before these depicted conquests, as Bible scholars such as Martin Noth believed.20 In either case, we find the seventh-century author of Deuteronomy appealing to this overall Israelite awareness when he portrays God as promising them the highest reward for obeying His commandments: “Rain for your land in its proper time, the early rain [November–December] and the late [March]” (Deut. 11:14; italics added). And when the Israelites did not behave well, God held back what the prophet Amos describes as the March rains: “I therefore withheld the rain from you / Three months before harvest time [i.e., June]” (Amos 4:7).

People of Livestock Owing to these phenomena of irregular yearly and monthly rainfalls and the low level of precipitation in the deserts where the Bible situates the early Israelites, an estimated four out of five years are insufficient for raising a proper crop, precluding agriculture from being one’s main source of sustenance. As a result, dwellers in these deserts chose to live primarily from raising livestock. This we learn from premodern Bedouin of the recent past as well as from Old Testament depictions. Of the latter, one example is when the sons of the patriarch Jacob identify themselves to Pharaoh, duly declaring: “Your servants have been people of livestock from youth to the present, we and our fathers” (Gen. 46:34). The primary consideration of a Bedouin and a depicted Israelite was that a year with insufficient rainfall for farming did not necessarily amount to a drought for herding. The advantage in livestock raising stemmed from the critical rains needed for sprouting pasture. As a rule, a minimum of only 2 inches of rain must fall before mid-February—the middle of the normal, three-month winter pasture season of annual grasses—so that these essential plants can grow—growth that takes a month—before the onset of the usually desiccating heat waves of April. Only an exceptionally plentiful subsequent rainfall after mid-February might compensate for a tardy earlier 2 inches of precipitation. An example of the effect of early rains on pasture



bedouin and israelites in the desert

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can be seen by observing rainfall in the central Negev for the seven years between 1967–68 and 1972–73.21

Year 1966–67 1967–68 1968–69 1969–70 1970–71 1971–72 1972–73

inches total rain

inches by Feb. 15

Bedouin evaluation of pasture

3.8 5.5 3.2 1.7 4.4 6.4 1.6

2.8 1.2 1 1.1 2.4 3.9 1.6

good, despite low total rain middling, despite high total rain middling, despite low total rain drought good excellent drought

Besides the timely rainfall needed for pasture, raising livestock in the desert has two further prerequisites. First, the stock owner must mainly raise animals that can live under arid conditions. Thus, Bedouin in the areas under discussion have traditionally raised dromedary camels, black “hejazi” goats (which originate in western Arabia), and a type of fat-tailed sheep called the awassi—all three excel in the conservation of their bodily water and enjoy a high tolerance for water depletion.22 The camel is particularly adaptable. It keeps from losing water by urinating infrequently (by concentrating its urine relative to the liquid component) and sweating relatively little. It can raise its body temperature by as much as forty-three degrees Fahrenheit during the heat of the day (thus diminishing the temperature discrepancy between it and the surrounding environment), and it is insulated from the direct rays of the sun by its thick coat of hair.23 A camel can go without drinking for 20–30 consecutive days in the winter and 5–7 days in the summer; it can lose up to 27 percent of its weight in water without damaging the consistency of its blood (in contrast to a human being, who can lose barely 8 percent). In addition, a camel, even after acute dehydration, can regain in one drinking all the water it has lost, and its appetite soon thereafter. I witnessed this phenomenon in the southern Suez Canal Zone in November 1973 when a Bedouin of the Ayayda confederation and I watered camels that had not drunk since being abandoned by soldiers of

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Fig. 2. Camels drinking. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

the Egyptian Camel Corps three weeks earlier. Although enervated to the point of collapse, the twenty camels, once we watered them, immediately got to their feet and fell upon the fodder that had been left in place. To a slightly lesser extent, a Bedouin’s goats and sheep share some of the water-saving mechanisms of a camel. The goat, for example, can raise its

Fig. 3. A shepherdess with a flock of goats and sheep. Photo: Clinton Bailey.



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body temperature (up to twenty degrees Fahrenheit) on a hot day, and its coat of black hair protects it from radiation by deflecting the sun’s rays.24 Similarly, the awassi sheep, by concentrating most of its body-fat in its tail, facilitates the exit of heat from elsewhere in its body, thus reducing its need to sweat.25 In sum, all of a Bedouin’s livestock need to drink relatively small quantities, making it possible to maintain them in the arid desert. As compared to a cow, for example, which needs twenty gallons a day in hot weather, sheep and goats need only four gallons, and a camel, only eleven to sixteen gallons every two or three days. Accordingly, we find that these three types of livestock are accurately attributed to the desert-dwelling nomadic patriarchs Abraham (Gen. 13:5, 21:28–29, 24:10), Isaac (Gen. 26:14, 27:9), and Jacob (Gen. 30:37–43, 32:15– 16). Evidence of camels found in Middle Eastern deserts goes back to the second millennium BCE, and their domestication to the thirteenth century BCE,26 when the prototypes of the biblical patriarchs may have been part of a notable immigration to Canaan from Aram, such as that identified by the historian Andre Lemaire.27 Hence, when Abraham dispatched his servant to the land of Aram to find a wife for his son Isaac, he sent him with camels (Gen. 24:10). As to black goats, the patriarch Isaac’s wife, Rebecca, when plotting to have her son Jacob usurp his older twin brother’s blessing from their dimsighted father, applied the hair of two young goat kids to the former’s arms to simulate the hairy arms of the latter (Gen. 27:9). When Jacob subsequently seeks to placate Esau for this misdeed, he does it with a gift of 200 she-goats and 20 billies, 200 ewes and 20 rams, and 30 milk camels with their colts (Gen. 32:15–16). Two generations earlier, as seen in the introduction, Abraham, when trying to induce Abimelech into letting him own the well he had dug at Beersheba, gave him seven ewe lambs. The biblical text also confirms the type of sheep that the Israelite patriarchs kept as the fat-tailed awassi. The book of Exodus (29:22) depicts God instructing Moses to consecrate the priests whom he has newly appointed with a sacrifice, of which one component is “the fat tail (Heb. alyah) of a ram.” Although fat-tailed sheep are found in all the desert areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia,28 the biblical emphasis on the tail of the awassi particularly finds its parallel among the Bedouin, who have

22

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always relished its fat as a great delicacy; indeed, their poets traditionally praised a host as being especially generous if he threw this fat onto a bowl of mutton that he was serving his guests.29 In the Bible, accordingly, the prophet Samuel serves Saul such a tail to honor him, having just chosen him to be king of Israel (1 Sam. 9:24).30 Although cows and oxen are also ascribed to the patriarchs (Gen. 12:16, 26:14, 32:16), such mentions of cattle may either be a form of exaggerating their wealth or a reference to the bovines they may have maintained in the Hebron Hills, where they spent their summers and where water was sufficient (13.5 inches average annual rainfall). Hence, we have the calf that Abraham is said to have slaughtered for his guests at the Terebinths of Mamre, near Hebron, when they came to herald his aged wife Sarah’s pregnancy (Gen. 18:7). By contrast, the Bible does not portray the patriarchs as using cows when in the Negev (lit. “dry land”). Migration The second requirement for raising livestock in the desert is the need to migrate with it to find pasture, because desert rainfall is normally spotty, rarely falling over broad areas and covering them with contiguous fresh grasses. Moreover, Bedouin migration is seasonal.31 First, since their animals must be watered frequently during the hot and dry season (June–October), they spend this period encamped in proximity to wells and springs, where it is also essential to ensure that some pasture is available, even if dry after the summer’s heat. Second, to ensure the availability of this pasture, Bedouin leave the summer watering areas during the first rains of the late autumn (November) or early winter (December) in order to leave behind the moist annual grasses and flowers that these initial rains cause to sprout, and to seek fresh pasture in the desert spaces. The winter and spring months are then spent going from one patch of pasture to another. The livestock gain their daily needs in liquid from the succulent grasses and from the rain pools formed on the ground, in the hollows of rocks, or in underground sand traps that catch, over bedrock, limited quantities of rainwater, which wells up when the Bedouin dig holes in the sand. In the late spring, migrating Bedouin gradually make their way back to the summer watering places, using rainwater cisterns carved out of



bedouin and israelites in the desert

23

stone by themselves or some bygone persons to water their livestock as the weather gets warmer and the annual pasture becomes dry forage under the hot winds (Ar. khamsin) of April. By July, they will have returned to their summer water sources, where they remain, as noted above, until the first rains come. At this point their annual migration is complete. In the northeastern Negev, for instance, premodern Bedouin of the Zullam confederation spent the summer near the wells of Bir Mashash, Bir al-Milikh, and Bir Arara, after which they sought fresh pasture in the mountains overlooking the Dead Sea.32 In southeastern Sinai, members of the Tarabin tribes spent the summer at wells near the Gulf of Aqaba, such as Nuwayba, Bir al-Malikh, and Bir al-Sowra; but after the rains, they took their livestock to graze on grasses in the hilly areas near and on the Ijma plateau. In northwestern Sinai, tribes of the Ayayda confederation spent the winter grazing in the dune areas of Kathib al-Khayl, Ayshuba, and Umm Khashib; but in the summer, they sought pasture along the banks of the easternmost tributary of the Nile River or, since 1869, the Fresh-Water Canal, running from the Nile through Wadi Tumaylat and between Abu Sultan and Jinayfa.33 This westward migration toward Egypt reminds us of the ancient Bedouin-like nomads from Edom, or Transjordan, who migrated there in June to find better pasture, as recorded by Egyptian border guards in the late thirteenth century BCE.34 Often, too, in the autumn, before the coming of the winter rains, Bedouin from the central Negev and Sinai would send their flocks and camels to less arid areas of the northern Negev to graze on the stubble of harvested fields. This was the case in the eighteenth century CE among Bedouin of the Tiyaha and Tarabin confederations of east-central Sinai, who brought their livestock to the northern Negev fields of the Wuheidat confederation (whom they eventually expelled at the end of that century);35 and so it still is, at the time of this writing, as members of the Azazma confederation of the arid central Negev find pasture each autumn on the harvested fields around the present kibbutzim of Dvir and Lahav, fifty miles to the north. Migration has thus been a basic feature of the desert culture of the nomadic Bedouin who inhabit Sinai and the Negev, just as it is in other parts of the Middle East.36 The Bible, in keeping with these Bedouin principles of seasonal migra-

24

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tion, shows us Abraham spending the summers near Hebron, where there were wells, and the winters in the Negev, where he found ample pastures near Gerar, or what the Bedouin presently call Wadi Shallala, in the western Negev (Gen. 20:1), and near present-day Beersheba, where he eventually dug his own well, perhaps to prolong his stay until May and harvest some winter grains he might have planted there, using, when possible, its average annual eight inches of rainfall. In like manner, from what we can gather from Genesis 26:6 and 26:12, his son Isaac spent at least a part of some summers near the well of Beersheba and wintered to the northwest in the pastures at Gerar, where he, too, planted grain.37 Jacob also migrated, sending his flocks from the Hebron area, where he passed the summers, north to the district of Shechem (the present-day area of Nablus) to pasture (Gen. 37:12). This move was most likely made in the early fall before the coming of the winter rains so that the livestock could supplement their autumnal forage of sub-shrubs and dry annual plants by grazing on the stubble of the reaped fields in this more watered and richer area, some sixty miles to the north. Although the Bible is silent on both the season and, hence, the reason for this migration, they may be affirmed by the fact that the cistern into which Joseph’s envious brothers cast him was “empty, there was no water in it” (Gen. 37:24); that is, the heat of the summer had dried up what was left of its water from the previous winter’s rain. The migration patterns of the depicted nomadic patriarchs of the Old Testament were thus similar to those of the premodern Bedouin, both peoples finding it crucial to adjust to the paucity of rainfall in the southern parts of the country. The biblical authors, for their part, deemed such a distant migration, owing to its sheer necessity, a reasonable element to include as a prelude to the story of Joseph in Egypt. Moreover, the remoteness of the Negev and Sinai relative to the irregular movements of barometric depressions in the eastern Mediterranean means that years of drought in those deserts are more numerous than in areas with sufficient precipitation, often leaving the land without pasture at all. Indeed, two to five years of drought can come in succession,38 with disastrous effects on livestock, especially goats and sheep. For example, under circumstances of sufficient rainfall, a Bedouin flock owner can expect that about half the females will give birth during the lambing season



bedouin and israelites in the desert

25

of October. This will be the second lambing of the year, the first having transpired in April, at the end of the winter pasture season. If the winter rains are late or too scanty to nourish fresh pasture, two things will happen.39 One is that the mothers that conceive in October and lamb in April will not have enough milk with which to nurse the newly born lambs and kids, who will therefore die. The other is that the mothers who normally get pregnant after an otherwise good pasture season will be too weak to do so. Hence, the flock owner will have no increase. If the drought continues into the following fall, an estimated 20 percent of the flock will die from undernourishment during the ensuing winter, and another 20 percent before the next season of expected rain. If the drought persists into a third year, the owner may lose his entire flock. His only option would be to take the flock to a distant place. Bedouin history tells of several migrations of Bedouin fleeing continuous drought, both to and from the Negev, and hoping to better their lot in an area that had experienced good precipitation. One migration from the Arabian Peninsula was in the seventeenth century, bringing the current Bani Ugba to the Negev and the Aheiwat and Masa‘id tribes to Sinai.40 During the nineteenth century, the Arabian Bani Atiyya tribe attempted to invade the Negev and stay there.41 Similarly, large-scale migrations occurred from within the Negev to neighboring lands. In 1915, Negev Bedouin looking for pasture crossed over into Transjordan, and in 1913, they went as far as Upper Egypt.42 In 1973, I met, in the Suez Canal Zone near Fanara, descendants of the Negev Tarabin whose nineteenth-century forebears had fled prolonged drought in the Negev and stayed on. The map of Egypt is replete with areas and villages named after Bedouin tribes that emigrated from Arabia to Egypt over the ages, some in search of pasture during periods of drought. It is against this historical background of Egypt as a refuge for Bedouin escaping drought-blighted deserts to the east, including biblical Canaan, that we find the sons of Jacob, like their forebear Abraham, described as going there because “the famine [i.e., drought] was severe in the land” (Gen. 12:10, 43:1). Drought also drove biblical pastoralists in the Negev toward the east, such as the tribe of Simeon, which—during the reign of the Judahite king Hezekiah (727–698 BCE)—is said to have invaded the Mount Se‘ir

26

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area of southern Transjordan, where “there was pasture for their flocks”43 (1 Chron. 4:39–42). The prophet Jeremiah (14:3–5) left us a picture of the helplessness and despair that came with drought: “Shepherds44 sent their youths to find water. They came to rock-pools but found no water. They returned with empty vessels and, in shame and humiliation, they covered their heads. . . . There was fear for the land, for there had been no rain. . . . There was no grass. . . . There were no plants.” Moreover, the desperation of desert dwellers during continuous years of drought often became so extreme that they not infrequently destroyed distant farmlands by grazing on them. This happened, for example, when Bedouin from the southern Negev reached the central part of the country, in 1910, and the Jezreel Valley, in the north, in 1927.45 This destructive raiding was sufficiently frequent in antiquity to justify the words of biblical Joseph to his brothers, newly arrived in Egypt, a country of farmers, cautioning them that “to the Egyptians, all shepherds are an abomination” (Gen. 46:34). The threat that migrating nomads posed to sown fields also accounts for the refusal with which Moses was met when he asked the Edomites and Amorites in Transjordan to let his group pass through their lands on his way north, from where he planned to enter Canaan. Aware of their suspicions, Moses tried to mollify them, saying, “We will not pass through fields or vineyards, and we will not drink water from wells. We will follow the king’s highway, turning off neither to the right nor to the left, until we have crossed your territory.” To the Edomites, he even pledged, “We will keep to the beaten path . . . and if we or our livestock drink your water, we will pay for it.” As we might expect, however, both peoples succinctly replied: “You shall not pass through!” (Num. 20:17–21, 21:21–23). The book of Judges (6:3–5) specifically relates such destruction of crops, citing the nomadic Midianites, Amelekites and Kedemites, who, “after the Israelites [now living in central Canaan] had done their sowing . . . would come up with their livestock and tents . . . and raid the land and ravage it.” Herding Common features of Bedouin culture and biblical accounts also manifest themselves in the economics of livestock raising and the management



bedouin and israelites in the desert

27

of flocks. For example, Bedouin flocks of goats and sheep—like flocks elsewhere—consist mainly of females. Although every lambing produces offspring of both genders, it is the males that are mainly used for sale or slaughter. Normally, the Bedouin sell or butcher females only over the age of six or seven years; that is, after they no longer can lamb. While the sale of a male commands its price, which helps to cover its owner’s current expenses, females are a Bedouin’s ongoing investment. It is they who reproduce, expanding their owner’s capital—by 50 percent per year in the event of a single lambing, or 100 percent in plentiful years of rain and pasture, when they give birth twice, each gestation period lasting five months. In Bedouin eyes, therefore, female lambs and kids are naturally preferable to males, as expressed in a proverb disparaging neglect: “He who’s absent from the birth of his goat will get a male kid.”46 Accordingly, Bedouin flocks, as mentioned, mainly consist of female goats and sheep. The Bible, too, depicts female flocks as the norm, something that the biblical authors may have even taken for granted. In Genesis 30:36, for example, Laban’s flock, shepherded by Jacob, is cited in the feminine (i.e., tson Lavan ha-notarot), indicating the sole natural option. Moreover, the Bible mirrors the Bedouin predilection for slaughtering males rather than females for food. When angels in the guise of guests visited Abraham at Hebron to announce that Sarah, his wife, would bear a son, he slaughtered a male—a calf—for their lunch (Gen. 18:7, 8). Again, in Genesis 27:9, the two goat kids that Rebecca orders her son Jacob to bring her so that she can prepare a meat feast for Isaac must naturally be males. Subsequently, Jacob, a shepherd for his father-in-law, Laban, for twenty years, argues his faithfulness to the latter by avowing that in all that time he did not eat even a single animal of his flocks, using as his example a ram, thereby expressing the apparently instinctive sentiment that only a male animal could be taken into account for eating (Gen. 31:38). Finally, even when Joseph’s brothers slaughtered a goat in order to dip his coat in its blood and report to their father that a wild beast had devoured him, that goat too was a male (Gen. 37:31). Indeed, the injunction against eating milk with meat (Exod. 23:19), expressed through the example of “boiling a kid in the milk of its mother,” refers to the butchered kid as a male, literally presenting it in the masculine as “his mother” (Heb. imo). Finally, the Bible reflects the reti-

28

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cence to slaughter female animals for meat by stipulating the use of males for almost all types of ritual slaughter (see, for example, Exod. 34:19; Lev. 1:10, 16:5; Num. 6:14, 7:15–19, 15:11, 15:24, 28:3, 29:2; Deut. 15:19). Females are sacrificed only for the expiation of sins (Lev. 4:28–32, 5:6; Num. 6:14, 15:27), perhaps a rare happening that explains the aberration. The same norm is reflected in regard to marketing, since only males are put up for sale. The prophet Ezekiel (27: 21) reveals this in his dirge over the eastern Mediterranean port city of Tyre: “Arabia and all Kedar’s chiefs traded with you in fat male lambs, rams, and billy goats.” Accordingly, the economic policy of Bedouin is to maintain only enough male stock to impregnate the main flock. They estimate that one ram can mount up to thirty ewes, and one billy goat can suffice for over six times that number of female goats.47 On this basis, we find Jacob applying the principle of females constituting most of a flock, when he presents his brother Esau 200 female goats but only 20 billies, and 200 ewes but only 20 rams; that is, one male for every ten females (Gen. 32:14–15). In the opinion of Bedouin consulted, this would be an extremely safe percentage for the purpose of increase. Hence, we might assume that the biblical authors had Jacob showing this generosity to ensure that Esau would be pacified after the former, his younger twin brother, had usurped their father Isaac’s blessing of the firstborn (Gen. 27:1–41). Obviously, if Esau did not need so many males for mounting the females, he could always either have sold them or butchered them for meat. Bedouin, in the case of camels, also sold the males, sturdier than the females, for the carrying trade, as confirmed in Isaiah 60:6–7, where “a multitude of camels . . . young bull-camels” (italics added) are envisioned as bringing gold and frankincense to a Jerusalem restored after exile. To raise livestock, flock owners in the desert often hire shepherds. A Bedouin adage observes, “Livestock without a shepherd don’t come home.”48 Herdsmen, however, are commonly indigent persons; otherwise, they would hardly agree to a life of solitude, spending days and nights away from human company. Their lives are also arduous, living in the open during hot days and freezing nights, as asserted by the biblical Jacob to his employer and uncle, Laban (Gen. 31:40): “Scorching heat ravaged me by day and frost by night; and sleep fled from my eyes,” a depiction mirroring the Bedouin



bedouin and israelites in the desert

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proverb “A camel-herdsman’s only cover is the warmth he gets from snuggling the camels.”49 In Bedouin society, hired, needy shepherds were held in disdain, an attitude also expressed in the Bible by down-and-out Job, who, wishing to show his contempt for the people who taunted him, depicted them as the offspring of forebears whom he would have despised to hire even as shepherds (Job 30:1). Bedouin law reflects this disdain by seeking to protect flock owners from any laxity or excesses on the part of a shepherd, who may be pasturing far from their supervision. In particular, shepherds are held accountable for any injuries caused to the animals under their care, such as falling from cliffs or miscarriages; and for their butchering of more than the single animal allowed for food during a year of employment. Reflecting these obligations, the Bible presents the shepherd Jacob, in trying to show that he has conformed to the laws of the desert, as asserting to Laban, “Your ewes and she-goats never miscarried, nor did I feast on rams from your flock” (Gen. 31:38).50 On the other hand, Bedouin law also stipulates certain measures to protect shepherds, perhaps out of acknowledgment, however begrudging, of the indispensable role they perform. Recognizing that “all a shepherd has is his fatigue and can’t afford to waste it,” the law seeks to ensure that the livestock owner does not exploit his destitution by, for example, docking his agreed-upon wages or firing him for mishaps that are not his responsibility, such as wolves snatching lambs or kids at night, when the shepherd has a right to sleep.51 In the Bible, accordingly, we again find Jacob, in his confrontation with Laban, accusing his employer of having reduced his wages “ten times” over the years, even for animals that were torn at night (Gen. 31:39, 41).

Desert Agriculture Even though the climatic conditions of the desert favor livestock husbandry as the main branch of the traditional Bedouin economy, many of the Bedouin in Sinai and the Negev engage in some agriculture, growing winter barley and wheat in the Negev and in parts of northeastern Sinai; and dates in southern and western Sinai, where sandy oases store suffi-

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cient subterranean water. Grains, primarily barley, which the premodern Bedouin called “the father of our lands” for keeping them alive, traditionally made up 80 percent of their diet—a fact that led them to use the same term, aysh, for both “life” and “bread,” whether made of wheat or barley. The customary breakfast of a livestock-raising family, apart from drink, consisted of dry bread baked the evening before and left over from dinner. Lunch was fresh bread made from the flour provided to the shepherds and shepherdesses, and perhaps eaten with a few munches of hard, dry cheese or a dip made of edible leaves such as those of the saltwort bush (Atriplex halimus). Dinner, served after everyone had come home from the day’s grazing, was again bread in the form of a mush soaked in a soup of plants or liquid butter. Since a Bedouin family of seven persons would need nine pounds of flour a day to survive on such a diet, the yearly need, which would thus come to about 1,300 pounds, would be considered a gift if it could be grown by themselves, as opposed to paying for it in the market with the little money that a Bedouin might have.52 As noted above, although barley and wheat require only 5.5 inches of rain yearly in order to grow, large harvests are rare, owing to the low quantities, uneven yearly average, and irregular monthly distribution of rainfall. In 1971–72, a year that was considered excellent just ten miles northeast of Beersheba, a dunam (a quarter of an acre) sown with 18 pounds of seed produced 44 pounds of grain, giving the planter a total of 2,200 pounds for the 50 dunams he planted. He thus had enough to eat that year and, fortunately, much of the ensuing one, which turned out to be a drought year, producing no crop at all.53 Even a Bedouin planter in the more southerly and arid central Negev will plant in hope that his harvest, however meager, will provide at least some of his yearly needs in grain. Hence, despite expected drought, he will sow every year “in the dust” (afir; that is, before any rainfall), hoping against all odds that enough rain will fall to produce grain that will cover his annual needs in breadstuffs. He simply tells himself the old adage: “Sow, even if it’s lost, rather than regret;”54 maybe an unusual winter of plentiful precipitation will be awaiting him! Accordingly, after the harvest of 1972—a year of exceptionally plentiful rainfall in the central Negev, which followed two years of drought and preceded another drought the following year—I



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Fig. 4. A Bedouin sowing grain in the desert. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

counted shoots of barley containing an almost unprecedented one hundred seeds from each individual seed that my friend Swaylim Abu Bilayya had only halfheartedly planted. “Look at this!” I thought, immediately reminded of the Bible’s depiction of the patriarch Isaac, who sowed in the desert and, in a good year, “reaped a hundredfold crop,” something the Bible deemed a miracle (Gen. 26:12). As mentioned, the sowing of grains is done in November and December, the months of the first rains. This includes the plowing of the fields. In the desert, the animal pulling the plough is a camel, usually a male, which is stronger than the female. At this time, however, the male camels, which are rutting and aggressive, must be muzzled lest they bite the plowmen. Then, after five months time, when the grain is ripe and harvested, it is threshed, for which task camels are used again, either to trample the harvested crops or to tow the threshing board. At that point, however, they are no longer in heat and can work without a cumbersome muzzle. This usage may be reflected in the Bible, albeit in regard to oxen, which conceivably replaced camels as the primary threshing animals for Israelite agriculturalists settled in central and northern Canaan. Hence, the book of Deuteronomy (25:4), composed in the seventh century BCE, admonishes the muzzling of an ox while it is threshing. It states no reason for this, but oxen, like

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camels, although ferocious when rutting, are benign during the harvest season. Bedouin gauged much of their agriculture timetable by the appearance of stars. For example, mid-January is when the star Sirius appears on the eastern horizon at nightfall, signaling to them their last chance to sow winter wheat, as indicated by their maxim, “If Sirius rises at nightfall, put the barley back in the sack and sow wheat, O Sowers.”55 Of the two grains that they plant, wheat is known to the Bedouin as finer, but barley as hardier. After the first rains, barley can survive a subsequent break in the rainfall for as long as a month without drying up and wilting—twice the tolerance level of the more delicate wheat. If there is no rainfall in November, as often happens, Bedouin will postpone their wheat planting for a month or so, that is, after Sirius appears in mid-January, after which subsequent rains are more likely to be consistent. The authors of the Bible also knew about the role of stars in regulating agricultural activity, either by directly witnessing or hearing about them. Exodus 9:18–30 confirms this in describing the seventh plague against Pharaoh, a hailstorm. The biblical authors set the plague in April, when the winter barley was close to ripening; and it was therefore destroyed. The wheat, by contrast, was specifically not destroyed, “as it ripens late” (Exod. 9:31–32), a sign that it was planted later. The Bible’s authors may have known the connection between rains and harvests from ancestral experience in the Negev or perhaps in central Canaan (for example, the tenth-­ century-BCE Gezer Calendar indicates the harvesting of barley and wheat in successive months).56 In this episode, therefore, they may have substituted Canaanite for Egyptian climatic conditions, since crops in Egypt have always been irrigated by the Nile rather than by rain. For guidance in regulating the growing of dates, the Bedouin in Sinai look to the star Canopus. This star makes its appearance on the southern horizon, in the evening sky, in mid-October, when the date harvest takes place. Relevant Bedouin maxims say, “Canopus makes the ripe dates fall” and “Under Canopus, the loops [of the date sacks] are fastened.”57 The Bible, too, accurately uses the date harvest for setting the Sukkot holiday around the month of October and requiring the Israelites to take “the fronds of date palms (Heb. kapot tamarim) and rejoice” (Lev. 23:40).



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This indicated that the dates were expected to already be harvested, their clusters no longer needing the fronds to support them. We also encounter the precision of biblical timing for the Feast of Weeks, the biblical holiday that celebrates the beginning of the grain harvest. The Bible designates it as occurring seven weeks after Passover (Lev. 23:15–16), thereby placing it in the months of May or June, when Bedouin, too, traditionally harvest their barley and wheat crops.

2

Bedouin Culture in the Biblical Home

Material Culture In describing its main early characters as nomads, the Hebrew Bible provides us with features of their material culture and social behavior that correspond to facets of premodern Bedouin life in the same areas: the Negev, Sinai, and the hills and deserts of eastern Canaan. These parallels between Bedouin culture and biblical accounts are particularly evident when seen against the reasons that engendered them. Domiciles Desert nomads, migrating in seasonal search of pasture and water for their livestock, need a mobile shelter most of the year. They find it in the tent, which they are able to fold and bind to a pack animal and move from place to place whenever they want. In a dash of humor used to identify themselves as different from settled people, the Bedouin say, “Our life is a tent-pole on a camel.”1 Since most of their migration takes place during the winter rainy season, the Bedouin insulate their tents against rainfall with a roof woven from the hair of the black goats that they have traditionally raised. Because goat hair swells when wet, the individual hairs in the roof widen, making for a secure surface impervious to rain, no matter how heavy. Seen from a distance, these roofs, after a shower, have an attractive sheen, which is reflected in the biblical simile of the beauty of no-

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Fig. 5. A single camel bearing a family’s tent. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

mads’ tents: “I am black and beautiful, O girls of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar” (Song of Songs 1:5). Such a roof is held up by tent poles often made from the branches of acacia trees, which are held in place by the tension of tent ropes that are fastened to the roof where the poles stand and are fixed firmly to the ground with wooden or metal pegs.

Fig. 6. A black Bedouin winter tent. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

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Bedouin have always cherished living in tents, since they are open to guests. In particular, they love the familiar atmosphere in which they were raised, with persons socializing every evening around the campfire. A Bedouin proverb observes, “A child in the men’s tent never wants to sleep,” rapt by the talk of the elders.2 Accordingly, Bedouin throughout history have been loath to change these dwellings for a closed fixed house with a door. In southern Sinai, in 1978, I heard a Bedouin poet chiding fellow tribesmen who married famously inhospitable Egyptian peasant women and moved into houses that they built for them: Those who wed fellaha-girls are bound to break convention: They keep their house-door locked with key—“a measure of prevention”; So if a guest arrives one day, they’ll hardly hear him call, Or maybe ask the guest, “Who’s there?”—the meanest words of all.3

Thus, although members of the Ayayda tribe of western Sinai settled as farmers along the Fresh-Water Canal in the Suez Canal Zone after it was dug in 1869, more than a hundred years passed before those whom I met in 1973 were willing to move into permanent houses.4 In the same way, black tents were also home to the purported Israelite forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom the book of Genesis depicts as nomads (see, for example, Gen. 12:8, 18:1, 18:10, 24:67, 35:21). The Bible also described such tents as having been (at least partially) the dwelling of Abraham’s nephew, Lot, near Sodom (Gen. 13:12) as well as the Children of Israel in Sinai (Num. 11:10, 19:14, 24:5; Deut. 1:27). That the ancient Israelites dwelled in tents is also endorsed by the books of Joshua and Chronicles (Josh. 22:6–8; 1 Chron. 4:10), which cite the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and one-half of Manasseh as living in them on the Transjordanian steppe; and in the book of Judges (4:17–21; 5:24–27) members of the northern tribes live in tents, especially Jael, the wife of a Kenite man, who killed the Canaanite leader Sisera by driving a tent peg into his temple.5 Even as late as the United Monarchy (1 Sam. 13:2; 2 Sam. 19:9, 20:1, 20:22) and the divided kingdoms (1 Kings 12:16, 12:24; 2 Kings 14:12), the Israelites, whenever homeward bound, are cited as “returning to their tents.” Although some biblical scholars claim that this expression is but a metaphor for any type of structure, it is hard to imagine such a metaphor arising out of a



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vacuum devoid of historical experience.6 Indeed, the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein found that the earliest Israelite stone settlements, of the twelfth century BCE, were modeled after former encampments of Bedouin tents.7 In the Sinai context, moreover, the Bible describes the roof of the Sacred Tabernacle as being made of goat hair (Exod. 25:4, 26:7, 35:26), like the roof of the Bedouin winter tent. Even if the tabernacle as described was a later priestly literary construct, drawing on Canaanite prototypes, as some modern scholars claim,8 the authors of the Bible must have known the inherent capacity of this cloth, when woven, to keep a holy sanctuary dry from the desert’s winter rains—whether their knowledge came through observation of Bedouin encampments in the nearby Judean Desert, for example, or from centuries-old collective memories of the goat-hair tent roofs of nomadic ancestors. In either case, although the Bible does not cite this preventive measure as the reason for the use of goat hair in the roof of the Israelite sanctuary, we might well conceive that the sanctuary’s roof in Exodus drew upon a Bedouin prototype—especially in light of the absence of any instructions concerning such roofs in nonbiblical ancient Near Eastern texts dealing with sanctuaries. In fact, the sole extrabiblical example discovered to date derives from the Bedouin Midianites, among whom the Bible

Fig. 7. Bedouin woman weaving the roof of a tent from goat hair. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

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presents the Moses group of Israelites as dwelling. The archaeologist Beno Rothenberg, excavating the Timna copper mines site in the Araba depression in the 1950s, found such goat-hair cloth near a space identified as a Midianite tented sanctuary.9 The biblical authors may also have retained from the memory of an ancestral nomadic experience the fact that the wood of desert acacia trees, ever present in Sinai,10 would be durable and suitable for the frame of such a sanctuary. Accordingly, just as hard-wearing acacia is the type of wood used by desert dwellers for making items they wish to preserve—such as bowls and camel saddles—so the Bible designates it for the fabrication of all the woodwork in the holy tabernacle (Exod. 25:10, 25:23, 26:37, 27:6, 27:11, 30:1, 30:4, 35:24, 36:20, 36:36, 37:1, 37:4, 37:10, 37:15, 37:25, 38:6). As with goat-hair tent roofs, one also finds no specific references to acacia wood being used for the construction of other sanctuaries in the ancient Near East. Other biblical remembrances of a nomadic tent-dwelling experience might be the Hebrew terms mezuzot and sha‘ar, upon which verses from Deuteronomy (6:9 and 11:18–21) enjoin the Israelites to inscribe God’s teachings. These terms are explained in Jewish tradition and Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible as referring, respectively, to the “door posts of a house” and “gates” (terms arguably current in the urban architecture of seventh-century-BCE Jerusalem, when and where Deuteronomy is thought to have been composed)—rather than to dwellings of the ancient desert. Still, if we conceive of these biblical Hebrew terms as vestiges of practices of a nomadic past, we might construe that the plural noun mezuzot, as used here, originally referred to the movable poles that hold a tent up, deriving from the transitive verb li-haziz (to move something).11 While the entire tent was moveable, we should not forget that the premodern Bedouin themselves designated the poles of a tent as the symbol of nomadic life, as in the aforementioned proverb describing their lifestyle, namely, “movement and encampment; tent poles on a camel.”12 Using the same linguistic approach, we might also understand the word sha‘ar to be derived from the Semitic root for “opening” (compare the Arabic cognate th-gh-r),13 and to have originally meant the tent’s wide and open entrance, always a matter



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of pride to nomads, signifying, as noted above, their readiness to receive guests. The relevance of these latter definitions of mezuzot and sha‘ar derives from what I personally witnessed on several occasions in the mid-­twentieth century, namely, that Bedouin who had slaughtered an animal as a religious sacrifice were wont to daub the blood of the victim on the things they wished to safeguard through God’s blessing, such as their children, their livestock, and their tent. In the case of the open tent, the blood was daubed at the edge of its roof, just above the front-center tent pole. Hence, we might reason that these terms (the poles and the opening of a tent), as erstwhile repositories of God’s blessing in the nomadic tradition, may have been adopted by the authors of Deuteronomy as metaphors for the places where the Israelites were to preserve God’s new blessing—that is, his Deuteronomistic teachings.14 Also relevant to our understanding of domicile in the Bible is that among Bedouin in Sinai, they do not live in tents in the late summer and early fall. It is a time of year characterized by extreme heat and dryness, a time when livestock, especially goats and sheep, must be watered every day from a sufficient supply of subterranean water rising up in wells and springs. This requires them to stay near these sources of “living waters” until the winter rains occur, and accounts for the Bedouin not migrating at this time and consequently not being in need of a mobile shelter. Most will thus fold up their tents and have the women repair the damage caused to them by the previous winter’s wear and tear. Still in need of shade from the summer sun, however, Bedouin construct a booth in which to reside, by collecting the prevailing sub-shrubs of the surrounding desert (in northern Sinai, Achillaea monosperma) and thatching them together. Until the recent past, anyone traveling between the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip during the summer and early fall found all the Bedouin along the way dwelling in such booths. Mirroring this seasonal practice, the Bible is quite precise in directing future generations of Israelites to dwell in booths (Heb. sukkot; that is, houses made of thatch, sakak) for seven days in the “seventh month” (i.e., October, since the biblical year began in April) so that they will know that “I [God] had the Children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of

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Fig. 8. A Bedouin thatched home in Sinai. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

the land of Egypt” (Lev. 23:42–44). The writer of Nehemiah (8:15) was also accurate when he authorized palm fronds as one sort of thatch to be used for the booths. In October, such fronds are no longer needed in the harvest of dates in Sinai, as noted in chapter 1. Thus, we find that the autumnal booths in the oases in the sand-dune area of northwestern Sinai and those of southern Sinai are constructed from fronds of local palms. Bread and Matzah One result of the frequent years of drought in the desert is that Bedouin have traditionally had a low material standard of living. This could be seen, among other things, in their meager diet. Since bread and other cereals traditionally account for 80 percent of a Bedouin’s food in most Middle Eastern deserts, Bedouin often refer to food in general as bread, calling it aysh, a homonym for life itself. Hence, their saying literally holds: “The hungry one dreams only of bread.”15 This equivalence of food and bread—though not confined to desert dwellers—is found in both Bedouin and biblical usage. Hence, the meal that Jacob prepared for Laban and his sons to signify his reconciliation with them (Gen. 31:54) is called “bread,” even though he is described as having slaughtered an animal for the occasion. And when Aaron and the Israelite



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elders came to meet Moses’s Midianite father-in-law, Jethro, they are said to have eaten bread with him, even though he, too, had just slaughtered animals, the meat of which they also most likely ate (Exod. 18:2). Similarly, the lunch that Joseph’s brothers ate after casting him into a cistern, preparatory to selling him off to itinerant merchants, is described as “bread” (Gen. 37:25); and Jethro (Exod. 2:20), after reprimanding his daughters for not having invited Moses, whom they had just met, to their camp, also instructs them: “Go call him and have him eat bread with us.” Later, in 1 Samuel (14:24), when King Saul seeks to keep his troops in pursuit of the Philistines at Michmas by commanding them to abstain from food, he cites only bread; but when he discovers that they desecrated their fast by eating honey and meat—i.e., not necessarily bread—he is enraged (1 Sam. 14:32–33). By the same token, when King David fasts in the hope of saving his and Bathsheba’s ailing first child, conceived in sin, his abstinence is from all food, which however is again termed “bread” (2 Sam. 12:16–17, 20–22). Perhaps the common memory of days when there was little else to eat in the desert but bread created this metaphor among the Bible’s authors, despite there having been but few Israelites then still living in the Negev, and none in Sinai. I have often noted the pride with which Bedouin women offered me a piece of freshly baked bread, as if the bread in itself sufficed to honor their duty to be hospitable. Other recollections of desert bread may have survived into biblical composition. For example, Bedouin bake bread in one of two ways. Although when migrating they cannot carry with them an earthen oven (Ar. tabbun), as is used in Middle Eastern villages, the Bedouin improvise by digging a pit in the sand and turning it into a natural oven. They light a fire in it, let the fire subside, place the dough on the hot embers of the fire, and cover it with other embers. A second method of Bedouin baking is to throw thinned dough on a heated metal sheet or disc, letting it bake on one side for a minute and then turning it over for another minute. In southern Sinai, the Bedouin call this type of bread raqiq, denoting that it is thin. These desert baking methods may have passed down through the oral tradition to the authors of Leviticus (2:4–5), who cited them as the ways to make bread for offerings in the Tabernacle: either “baked in an oven” (ma’afeh tannur, i.e., in a pit oven) or on a “metal plate” (makhavat). Indeed, we find in the Bible

Fig. 9. Baking bread in a sand oven. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

Fig. 10. Baking bread on a metal disc. Photo: Zoltan Matrahazi.



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that the bread baked on a metal plate bore the same name—raqiq—as it did among premodern Bedouin (Exod. 29:2, 29:23; Num. 6:15). Another resemblance between Bedouin culture and the Bible is their focus on unleavened bread and the common reasons for it. Because of both the shaking that beasts of burden cause the objects they bear during migrations and the lack of sufficiently cool spaces for storage, Bedouin have traditionally not cultivated yeast for baking their bread. As a result, Bedouin bread is unleavened. Although moist after baking (owing to the water with which the flour is mixed), unleavened bread quickly dries up and assumes a cracker-like texture within twelve hours. The Bedouin nevertheless adapted to, and even took pride in, their drier bread, despite its being arguably less tasty than the softer and fluffier leavened bread eaten by neighboring village-dwelling peasants. They viewed it as a badge of honor, one sign among others that they were able to endure the privations that their desert way of life entailed; and they flaunted it as a symbol of their difference from, and superiority over, settled people, whom they have traditionally despised. These attitudes may frequently be found, for example, in Bedouin poems composed over the past three hundred years. In a poem that Ayyad Ibn Adaysan, of the Azazma confederation, created in 1943 to castigate chiefs who were selling land in the Negev to the Jewish Agency, the concluding lines deride the dissolute uses to which the Bedouin sellers were putting their profits, including marriage to the daughters of peasants, who attempt to please them with “soft bread.”16 Seventy years earlier, this image of bread type as a factor differentiating Bedouin from settled people was used in the Negev. In the midst of a war that pitted tribes of the Tarabin and Tiyaha confederations against one another, the Tarabin poet Swaylim Abu Haddaf composed a menacing poem against the Huzayyil tribe, former allies who changed sides and joined the Tiyaha alliance, then led by a tribe called the Atowna. By way of demeaning the Huzayyil, Abu Haddaf alluded to the close relations that their new allies maintained with peasants from the village of Brayr, marrying their daughters and eating the “soft bread they bake in ovens” (i.e., unlike the Bedouin).17 This differentiation theme is also found a century earlier in a popular and widespread poetic exchange from the 1760s. The exchange involved a

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renowned Bedouin chief, Jidaya Ibn Hadhal, of the Amarat confederation in the Syrian Desert, and a merchant woman called Irgeiya. When Irgeiya, stricken with love for the chief, suggests that they marry, Ibn Hadhal declines her proposal, explaining, “While you are people used to a settled life / We Bedouin bake our dry bread in grey ashes.”18 Unbeknownst to the unlettered Bedouin poets of these three relatively recent compositions, the choice of bread type as the determinant of cultural difference was not new to their culture. Three thousand years earlier, in the Akkadian Poem of Erra, the urban god Erra was challenged by the seven demons (the Sibitti)—who appear as desert dwellers—with the boast: “The rich bread of the city cannot compare with bread baked in the embers.”19 Accordingly, although the explanation that we find in the Bible for the Israelites eating unleavened bread (Heb. matzah) when they fled from Egyptian bondage—that is, the haste with which they had to flee did not leave the dough enough time to rise (Exod. 12:34, 12:39; Deut. 16:3), this account either may be contrived or is perhaps a metaphor for the rapidity of the Israelites’ departure, introduced into the Exodus tradition long after the event. Even if we concede that dough prepared with yeast might indeed not rise if packed for a journey that entails its being shaken up, it would seem a marginal reason for actually naming the relevant holiday Feast of the Unleavened Bread (Heb. hag ha-matzot), as in Leviticus 23:6. This becomes especially clear when we compare it to the holiday’s other name, Passover, which derived from an event of great moment—God’s slaughter of all the Egyptian first-born sons, which was perpetrated while the Hebrew children were rendered exempt, their homes being “passed over”20 (Exod. 12:27). It is therefore more conceivable that the name “Feast of the Unleavened Bread” stems from the abiding nomadic attitude toward bread as a cultural determinant, as revealed in the poetry of nomads over at least three millennia. Thus, the Israelites who left Egypt might well have focused on bread for celebrating their perceived return to an ancestral way of life—or a new life experienced together with the nomadic Midianites—made possible by their release from the despised sedentary culture of Egypt, as symbolized in their eyes by the soft and fluffy bread that the Egyptians ate. Indeed, when God explains why the Israelites should abstain from leavened bread during the anticipated holiday, he says: “For I’ve taken your ranks out of Egypt”



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(Exod. 12:17; compare 13:6–8), that is, he removed them from Egyptian culture. Logically, however, commemorating this transition from a sedentary to a nomadic life would not entail “eating unleavened bread for seven days” (Exod. 13:6–8, 23:15, 34:18; Deut. 16:3) until the Israelites were already accustomed to eating a daily bread baked with yeast, which may have been hundreds of years later; that is, somewhere between the tenth and the seventh centuries BCE, during which latter period Deuteronomy is thought to have been written and the relevant sections of the book of Exodus rewrought.21 Yet we would argue that despite the time lapse between the Exodus as depicted and its commemoration, the Israelite authors who named this celebration did so in keeping with the traditional focus on unleavened bread for defining their ancestors as desert people different from settled folk such as the Egyptians.22 Even earlier, Genesis, in picturing its characters as nomads, describes the patriarch Abraham’s nephew, Lot, preparing unleavened bread for the guests who came to him in Sodom (Gen. 19:3, which describes him as already, or perhaps sporadically, living in a house). Place-Names The identification of desert places is another aspect of Bedouin material culture that is paralleled in the Bible. Although the origins of biblical toponyms may bear a resemblance to those found in several other ancient cultures—for example, in Greece we find the names of plants in placenames such as Marathon (fennel) and Sparta (broom, which mirrors, for example, the biblical venue Ritma [broom]; see Num. 33:19)—an examination of the reasons why Bedouin name places as they do reveals many very close similarities. When Bedouin, seeking to remember places that might seem indistinguishable to a non-Bedouin, give them names, they naturally use what they find most striking. Being a nomadic people ever aware of the relatively sparse vegetation in the desert, it is not surprising that plants and trees provide the names of most places.23 Sometimes the abundance of a specific tree or plant produces a name. We might imagine, for example, that the shepherdess in a Bedouin family newly arrived in, say, Sinai would have come home with her flock one evening and reported that in such-andsuch a wadi she found an abundance of nafal (Lat. Trigonella arabica) for

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the goats to graze on; thenceforth her family might have referred to that wadi as Wadi an-Nafal (i.e., Trigonella Valley). At other times, even the sole representative of a species might also lend its name to a place, owing to its prominent size, as in the case of a tree (e.g., Wadi Um Hamata, from the Ficus pseudosycomorus), or to its position at the entrance of a wadi, as in the case of a particularly flowery plant (e.g., Wadi Um Harjal, from the white-flowered Solenostemma argel). Conceivably, a Bedouin father, new to southern Sinai, would say to his daughter on several mornings: “Pasture the flock where the harjal shrub grows,” and after a while, the name Um Harjal stuck. Some places even carry the name of the fruit or sap of certain plants and trees. Um Bujma, the site of manganese mines in southwestern Sinai, was named after the fruit of the Tamarix aphylla tree, and the seaside oasis Nabik takes its name from the fruit of the Ziziphus spina-christi. The highway that presently runs along Sinai’s eastern coast passes through Wadi Samghi, named after the “gum Arabic” sap of the Acacia raddiana. Similarly, the essentialness of water to Bedouin living in the arid des­ ert accounts for a plethora of names that indicate the presence of a water source. In some cases, the name merely informs us that water is accessible. For example, along the nine-mile stretch from the Dahab oasis north to Naqb Shahin, astride the Gulf of Aqaba, there is but a single water source that enables fishermen to use that coast for fishing. The wadi in which the source is found is thus simply called Abu Ma (lit. Place of Water). Also the types of water sources lend themselves to place-names (Wadi al-Ayn, Spring Wadi, in southeastern Sinai), as does the quality of the water: Ayn Murra (murr = bitter), Wadi Malih (malih = salty), Wadi Jayfi (imjayyif = putrid), and Wadi Tayyiba (tayyib = good). Wadis that carry high floods after rains may record the fact in names such as Wadi Abu Sayla (Flood Wadi), near Mount Sinai, and Wadi Jirrafi (Wadi Sweeping-Torrent), which flows through east-central Sinai and the southern Negev. Bedouin knowledge of their natural surroundings finds expression, too, in the places that are named after features of the landscape. In some cases, these features are straightforwardly reflected in place-names. South of the oasis Nuwayba al-Muzayna, running parallel to Sinai’s eastern coast, for example, there is a wadi that rises steadily for almost seven miles, and is thus called Climbing Wadi (Wadi as-Sa‘ida). Jabal Maghara, a mountain in



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central Sinai, is so named because of the large cave (maghara) in its midst. Where Wadi el-Arish passes narrowly through Jabal Halal, it is simply called “al-Deiga”: “the Narrows.” Places are also named after the color of predominant stones or sands, or after phenomena that may be extrinsic to desert experience (such as the Valley of the Inscriptions—Wadi al-Makatib—­ containing ancient Greek and Nabatean graffiti; or Buildings Mountain— Jabal al-Buna—near which some old buildings are to be found), or the presence of a certain people, such as the Spring of the Gudayrat, an oasis once inhabited by the Tiyaha Gudayrat tribe. Perhaps the most interesting place-names are those that recall stirring events. For example, the previous chapter cited a number of places named for the discovery of water. Similarly, the Well of Munificence (Bir alHasana) in north-central Sinai takes its name from an “act of great munificence” (hasana) that once happened there. The oral tradition relates: “The aggressive Tarabin newcomers to Sinai, probably in the early sixteenth century, had just defeated the Tiyaha tribe in a bloody battle, when they discovered an old woman of the vanquished side lying over a large object which she had covered with a cloak. It was her son, a lad who had escaped the slaughter. Crying aloud, she begged the Tarabin to spare the boy, which they did; and their munificence was recorded for posterity in the name Bir al-Hasana.” There were also battles that the Tarabin lost. One is recalled at a place named the Graves of the Offspring of Ali (Gubur Awlad Ali), located twenty-five miles south of the Mediterranean coast, near the eastern bank of Wadi al-Arish. In the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, in which the Israelites are portrayed as dwelling in the Negev and Sinai Deserts, the names of places cited, where intelligible, indicate that the Bedouin placenames of today, though mainly not ancient in themselves, are nevertheless heirs to an ancient nomadic heritage that probably preceded the Bible. For example, in the Bible, as in Bedouin culture, we find place-names that emanate from topographical features, vegetation, and memorable events. In Genesis (12:9), “Negev” is a topographical term meaning “the dry land,” toward which Abraham migrated from the central mountainous area of Canaan to find winter pasture. The burial cave near Hebron that Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite was called the Doubled Cave (Heb.

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machpelah), reflecting a double-chambered or double-layered site (Gen. 23:9). The Bible also tells us that the large wadi near which Isaac grazed his flocks and planted winter grains was called Gerar (Gen. 26:17), meaning “the Flood-path that pulls things along” (from the verb li-gror). This image of “sweeping along” is also found in the Semitic root g-r-f, used both by the Bedouin for naming the large Wadi Jirrafi, which drains the southern Negev and much of central Sinai in the direction of Transjordan, and in the biblical verb garaf, which the “Song of Deborah” employs to describe the action of the Kishon brook in sweeping the defeated Canaanites along (Judg. 5:21). Vegetation, too, is cited in Genesis (50:10), as in the name the Threshing Floor of the Box-Thorn, where the sons of Jacob are reported to have held a memorial service for their dead father in the Transjordanian desert. Events are also recalled in place-names. Once the Canaanites reportedly witnessed the mourning of Jacob’s funeral cortege from Egypt, they changed the name of the location from the Threshing Floor of the Box-Thorn to the Grief of the Egyptians, shifting the derivation of the name from local vegetation to an event (Gen. 50:11). Similarly, Genesis records in place-names events surrounding new water sources. When Abraham gets permission from the tribal chief Abimelech to keep the well he has dug in Abimelech’s tribal territory, upon presenting him with a gift of seven sheep, Abraham calls it the Well of the Seven, or Beersheba (Gen. 21:31). When Isaac, in turn, is harassed by the tribesmen of Abimelech’s namesake for digging wells in contested territory, the names of two of these wells—Quarrel (Esek) and Hatred (Sitna)—reflect the conflicts that took place. The third well, not being contested, was accordingly named Spaciousness (Rehovot), to indicate that there was now space for Isaac to enlarge his flocks (Gen. 26:20–22). Also reflecting the Bedouin method of naming places, the books of Exodus and Numbers cite the names of several places in Sinai and Transjordan, among them the supposed stations of the wandering Hebrews. While it is difficult to identify the specific locations of these places today, an understanding of Bedouin place-naming shows that the method practiced in these biblical books was in the same tradition. For example, one of the first stations was called Bitter Water (Marrah), denoting the sort of water



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the Hebrews found there (Exod. 15:24; Num. 33:8). Similarly, types of desert vegetation lent themselves to Sinai place-names—such as the Acacia raddiana tree (Shitim: Num. 25:1, 33:49), the retama raetam, or genista (broom) bush (Ritma: Num. 33:19), and the Juniperus phoenicea shrub (Aro‘er: Num. 32:35; Deut. 2:36). And just as Bedouin named a place in northern Sinai “el-Arish” (“booths”), depicting the structures they either found or built there, so the Hebrews in Sinai, too, are depicted as naming one of their stations “Booths” (Sukkot: Exod. 13:20; Num. 33:5–6), and for the same reason: that is, the structures were both unusual in the open desert and easily recognizable. And just as Bedouin named the aforementioned burial place of the Tarabin who were decimated by the Tiyaha in a bloody battle in northern Sinai the Graves of the Awlad Ali, so the Israelites gave the name Graves of Gluttony to the place where many of their number died from overeating the migrating quail that they found on the ground along the Mediterranean coast, thereby memorializing the event (Num. 11:34). Owing to the cultural continuity discernable in the method of naming desert places both among the Bedouin and in the Bible, there is at least a slight probability of identifying the location of some places mentioned in the latter. For example, when entering Sinai, the first water sources the Israelites came upon—Bitter Water (Marrah) and the oasis Elim, the meaning of whose name is unknown, but which “contained twelve springs and some palm trees” (Exod. 15:23, 27)—greatly resemble what the Bedouin presently call Bir al-Murra, which contained twelve springs and a cluster of date palms when visited by the British scholar Henry Palmer in the 1860s.24 Later in their wanderings, the Israelites are said to have camped at places they called Laban, Hazerot and Di-Zahav, three names that are clustered together (Deut. 1:1). Judging by their names, this specific grouping may not be random. If one moves south along the eastern coast of Sinai, one comes to a dramatic hillock next to the sea, which the Bedouin—following the tradition of naming some places after predominant colors—call Ras Barga, the Cape of Wadi White and Black Sand, which is notable as a landmark owing to the towering, purely white sand dune that constitutes the eastern side of the cape. It would not be surprising if this were what the Israelites remembered as Laban (i.e., white). Farther down the coast, but a

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Fig. 11. Ras Barga, Sinai, marked by a white dune. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

few miles inland, one finds an oasis the Bedouin call Ayn Hadra, meaning the Spring of the Area Enclosed by a Mountain Wall—a precise description of the place. The Hebrew cognate for “Hadra” is the topographical term “Hazerot,” which derives from the same Semitic root denoting an area enclosed on at least three sides. Then, some thirty miles south of there, on the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, there is a sandy oasis that the Bedouin call Dahab—literally “gold,” as is the biblical “Zahav”—owing to the glistening fool’s gold in the sand there. The proximity of present-day Ras Barga, Ayn Hadra, and Dahab thus lends credibility to the biblical depiction of Laban, Hazerot, and Di-Zahav as a distinct geographical bloc of Israelite encampments. The definition of the southern desert border of the tribe of Judah in the Negev is convincingly similar in Numbers and Joshua if we determine the meanings of the place-names mentioned according to the Bedouin method. In Numbers 34:3–5, the border begins in the east at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. It runs west toward the Negev, first passing Scorpion Ascent (Heb. Ma‘aleh ‘Aqrabim), a path identifiable until today by its hairpin turns, which resemble the stingers of scorpions; then it bears westward through the barren badlands that the Bible calls the Place of Thorns (Zin);25 and on



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Fig. 12. Ayn Hadra, Sinai, encompassed by mountains. Photo: Zoltan Matrahazi.

to Qadesh Barnea, indicating a major camping ground of Moses and the Israelites (Num. 20:1), which is identified with two adjacent Bedouin oases in eastern Sinai, Ayn Qudays (bearing a cognate name) and Ayn Gudayrat (the most ample water source in the area). From there the border continues northwest to places called Hazar-Addar and Azmon. “Hazer,” as noted, is a topographical term indicating an enclosed area (as is “Hazerot,” above) and must be identified with the crater the Bedouin call Little Enclosure Surrounded by a Mountain (al-Hudayra; the diminutive of “Hadra,” as in the aforementioned “Ayn Hadra”), which is found in the midst of Jabal (Mount) Halal. Biblical Azmon was until recently an oasis that the Arabicspeaking Bedouin call by the structurally similar name Gusayma, called after the Achillea fragrantissima plant (Ar. gaysum), which is found there amply.26 From Azmon the border turns west again up to the “River Marking Egypt” (Nahal Mizrayim), today Wadi el-Arish, which drains most of central Sinai north to the Mediterranean Sea. Also delineating the southern border of Judah, the author of Joshua, perhaps basing himself on another oral tradition, adds a site between HazarAddar (Num. 34:4) and Azmon, thereby strengthening the identification

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of the biblical place-names for the southern border of Judah with those the premodern Bedouin have given. Joshua 15:3 calls this site Flatland (Heb. Qarqa‘), which brings to mind the Bedouin-named Flatland (Ar. Munbatah), a broad, agriculturally fertile area astride Wadi El-Arish that the biblical Israelites may have used for cultivation, just as it is presently cultivated by Bedouin of the Tiyaha confederation. Locusts, Quail, Plants, Stars, Flint Stone A further ramification of the Bedouins’ low standard of living, which results from the paucity of rain in the desert, is their use of what they find in the natural environment to augment their material culture. Aspects of this practice are mirrored in the Bible. In the realm of food, the most notable parallel is their use of locusts to supplement a meager diet. In the 1880s, Charles Doughty, who lived and traveled among Bedouin in the Arabian Peninsula, was on hand when a swarm of locusts descended near an encampment of the Wild Ali tribe. As he described the scene: “The locusts that fell about the camp were toasted presently at all watch-fires and eaten. The women on the morrow had gathered great heaps, and were busy singeing them in shallow pits, with a weak fire of herbs. . . . Thus cured and a little salt cast in, the locust meat is stived in leathern sacks, and will keep a good long while: they mingle this, brayed small, with their often only liquid diet of sour buttermilk.”27 Doughty also described the eating of the insects: “The nomads toast them upon the coals; and then plucking the scorched members, they break away the head, and the insect body which remains is good meat.”28 In the 1920s, the Czech explorer Alois Musil found the poorer people of the Rawala tribe in Syria eating locusts.29 It is thus worth considering whether the biblical authors who composed Leviticus found it natural, in light of the experience of their possible forefathers in the Sinai desert, to include locusts among the kosher foods that the Israelites were permitted to eat (Lev. 11:22). Another occasional airborne visitor seized upon by Bedouin for food in Sinai is the common quail (Coturnix coturnix), which migrates between Europe and Africa over Sinai annually. In September, hordes of quail on their southward winter migration land along the northern coast, exhausted after a long flight over the Mediterranean Sea. Wearily, they drop either directly



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Fig. 13. Bedouin nets for catching migrating quail. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

onto the ground or into nets that the Bedouin extend along the coast to facilitate their easy capture. In early spring—March and April—on their return from Africa over the Gulf of Suez, they again drop down wearily over areas of west-central Sinai, east of the Suez Canal, where Bedouin gather them. For many, it is a rare occasion to dine on meat. We find this use of quail in the Bible as well. The authors of Exodus and Numbers must have known of the phenomenon, for when they constructed the story of the Israelites’ hunger in the desert, they depicted God as providing for them by sending quail that they could gather off the ground (Exod. 16:13; Num. 11:31,32). Bedouin also use the sparse vegetation they encounter in the desert. In the 1970s, I carried out, together with the botanist Avinoam Danin, a study of the Bedouin use of plants in Sinai and the Negev. Out of 300 plants examined, the Bedouin used 70 species for food, 50 for medicinal purposes, and many others for their domestic manufactures.30 For example, the edible, salty leaves of one bush, which the Bedouin call the “pluck plant” (gataf; Class. Ar. qataf; Lat. Atriplex halimus) are plucked by the shepherds and shepherdesses and either eaten directly or made into a milk soup that forms a dip for the bread they bake for lunch. Hence, in the book of Job (30:4), whose characters appear to be desert dwellers, Job describes des-

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titute shepherds in the desert as “those who pluck (ha-qotfim, using the Hebrew cognate for the Arabic qataf ) the leaves of the saltwort bush” (Heb. maluah, the same Atriplex halimus), which are indeed salty (maluah). A further reference to the Bedouin use of desert vegetation for food is found in the same passage when Job describes the same needy people as those “whose bread is the roots of broom.” While the Bedouin may not eat the long root of the broom shrub (Lat. Retama raetam), they do eat the parasitic plant that lives off it, which they call tarthuth and is known in English as the broomrape (Lat. Orobanche cernua). After the winter rains, which furnish sufficient nutrition for the broom roots to be able to nourish the parasite, the Bedouin peel and eat the latter’s root, roasted or raw.31 It is thus logical to assume that whoever composed the book of Job must have enjoyed a direct and intimate knowledge of nomadic life—more than chance observation—to be able to depict the eating of these plants with such precise imagery. Another example of plant use found both among the Bedouin and in the

Fig. 14. A Bedouin holding broomrape roots. Photo: Clinton Bailey.



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Bible is the honey-dew-like excretion that some forms of vegetation in Sinai produce in the morning. Such plants are the Haloxylon salicornica, Tamarix nilotica, and Anabasis setifera. Bedouin children gather this white excretion, once it has crystallized and fallen to the ground.32 Again, it is quite apparent, as in the case of the quail, that the author of Exodus must have known of this botanical phenomenon, since he used it for manna—the substance that God provided as bread for the hungry Israelites—and described it as “a dew that, when it lifted, left a thin but coarse substance, like white frost, on the ground” (Exod. 16:13–14). Among the plants whose properties Bedouin use for medicinal purposes are a range of bitter ones, including artemisia, or wormwood, for gastrointestinal disorders, based on the proverbial supposition that “nothing takes away bitterness like something more bitter.”33 This may explain why the Bible adapted the bitterness of artemisia (Heb. la‘anah) as a metaphor for misery in the books of Deuteronomy, Amos, Proverbs and, especially, in

Fig. 15. Manna from a Haloxylon plant. Photo: Avinoam Danin.

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the parallelisms found in Jeremiah (9:14—“I will feed them, this nation, artemisia / And give them a bitter drink”) and Lamentations (3:15—“He sated me with bitters / And filled me with an artemisia drink”). Finally, Bedouin also use vegetation for manufactures, such as the wood of acacia trees, especially for durable articles, as seen in the above discussion of tents. In the same way, Bedouin in Sinai and the Negev, finding that wood from the desiccated or dead shrubs of broom made good charcoal, which they could barter for products from villages and towns near the desert, long supplied charcoal from broom to the blacksmiths of El-Arish and Gaza.34 It is thus likely that this apparently ancient commerce was also known to the author of Psalm 120:4, who, seeking a metaphor for an acerbic tongue, found it in the image of “a warrior’s arrows honed on embers of broom.” As they do with the plants found in their desert surroundings, the Bedouin also rely on the stars and constellations that they see in the clear desert sky. In particular, they use them for indications of the seasons and to forecast the winter rains, upon which their animal husbandry and agriculture depend. The most important constellation is the Pleiades. Appearing to the Bedouin on the eastern horizon in late October just after nightfall, they are taken as a sign that the winter rainy season is about to begin. As noted in the previous chapter, if sufficient precipitation occurs in November, it is considered the optimal month for planting winter grains, which can then be harvested after their five-month growing period and before the crop-damaging heat wave of April ensues. The Bedouin thus call the period following the appearance of the Pleiades “the sign of fortune” (Ar. wasm al-mal); and their agricultural maxim instructs, “If it rains during the sign, plant your children’s dinner.”35 For the growth of good pasture, too, the rains falling in this period are the most important. For truly tall grasses and vegetation to sprout on the hillsides as well as in the lowlands, it is necessary to have rain in early and mid-November. It takes this watery flushing of the hillsides to enable them to absorb any subsequent rains. Thus, the Pleiades (Ar. thurayya) have furnished Bedouin poets with pleasant imagery from pre-Islamic times until the present. One relatively recent poet, for example, striving to describe the



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fullness of his beloved’s hair could find its likeness only in the lush pasture afforded by the rains that fall under the Pleiades: Young girl, your separated forelocks are as grasses and flowers: Tall grasses on hilly slopes, as after Pleiades rains.

Even if winter rains are late and don’t fall in November, the Bedouin raisers of livestock look to the appearance of the constellation Orion (al-jawza) in mid-December as an augury of rains that might still fall and provide pasture in the wadis. This anticipation was echoed in a well ditty I heard sung by shepherds in southern Sinai while watering their herds: “Look Jada [the name of a she-camel] how your young calf prances / From grazing in the course of Orion’s flood.” Bedouin in Sinai also use the rising of the Pleiades and Orion just before dawn in mid-May and mid-July, respectively, to gauge the progress of their anticipated date crop. Their agricultural maxims remind them that “Under the Pleiades, the branch is heavy”—meaning that clusters of unripe green dates begin to develop—and that “Under Orion, the date darkens,” indicating that they will soon be ripe enough to pick. Bedouin are also aided by constellations and stars while navigating in the unmarked desert at night. This is especially so under the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), which shows them Polaris (Ar. al-jidi) and the north, just as the star Canopus (Ar. suhayl) points out the south. On one occasion, for example, a poet, traveling southeast, precisely described his direction by referring to these two stellar markers: “I put Polaris on the thigh of my mount / While shielding her throat from Canopus south.” Reliance on the Pleiades, Orion, the Big Dipper, and Polaris—the only stars cited in the Bible—was apparently not lost on the biblical authors. Although their importance in the lives of desert nomads is not spelled out there, it is nonetheless implicit. These four stellar bodies are cited as symbols of God’s achievement in creating the universe. The prophet Amos highlights the greatness of God as he who “made the Pleiades and Orion” (Amos 5:3); and the book of Job adds the Big Dipper to the other two constellations (Job 9:9, 38:31). While reprimanding Job for his insolence in challenging the world order, God rhetorically asks him (38:32) whether he is able “to lead the Big Dipper and her sons,” “sons” referring to the stars

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in the constellation. This familial reference, too, may be a reflection, with but a slight difference, of a Bedouin tradition concerning the Big Dipper, which the Bedouin call “Daughters of the Bier.” The four stars forming the cup constitute the bier of a man killed by Polaris, and the three stars of the handle are the man’s daughters, who drag the bier round and round, looking for their father’s killer in order to wreak vengeance on him. While their route takes them incessantly and fruitlessly around the North Star, or Polaris, they never seem to find their intended victim. Building on this tradition, for example, a Bedouin poet once incorporated the irony into a poem: “O Daughters of the Bier, going round all night long / Though Polaris was the killer, you keep searching for Canopus” (the remotest and southernmost star in the Negev-Sinai sky). Hence, God’s effort to discredit Job with his rhetorical question may simply mean, “Could you send the Big Dipper’s sons around Polaris, as I do?”—without any overt reference to a particular story. But the mention of sons (perhaps a transmissional corruption of “daughters,” or vice versa) implies that they should be led somewhere else, suggesting that we may be looking at an old story that was known, however incompletely, by the author of Job. Another feature of the natural environment in many of the Middle Eastern deserts, including central Sinai and the central Negev, is flint stone, which Bedouin find in abundance and use for cutting. Early one evening in 1975, for example, I noticed a Bedouin woman of my acquaintance, named Uz‘eina, squatting near the entrance to the clinic of the school where I taught and where I had made private arrangements for the Bedouin to receive treatment. When I asked what had brought her there, she told me that she had come to consult with the resident nurse. I explained that the nurse would not be back until the next day and invited the woman to spend the night at our home, since her own family was encamped in a canyon far away, and it was nearly nightfall. She agreed and slept at our house. At the break of dawn, she woke me and told me that she no longer needed the nurse and wanted to go home. I prepared some tea and breakfast and then escorted her to the edge of the canyon, which was nearby, and watched her deftly make her way down the steep slope and walk in the direction of her husband’s tent. About a week later, I was driving in the desert. Finding myself in the vi-



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cinity of their tent, I stopped by to say hello. While sitting with the couple, I suddenly heard the sound of an infant crying in the women’s section of the tent. Surprised, I asked Uz‘eina whose child it was. She proudly informed me that it was hers. I said, “When did you have a child?” She reminded me of the evening she had slept at my house—I had not noticed that she was pregnant—and of how I had walked her to the edge of the canyon. Calmly, she related how, after leaving me, she descended to the canyon floor and began to head for home, but then suddenly felt some birth pangs. She went into the thick undergrowth of the wadi’s dry watercourse for privacy, gave birth, and continued on her way. Struck by the fact that Uz‘eina was able to give birth alone—reminding me of the biblical story of how the midwives told Pharaoh that the Hebrew women had no need of them, because “they are like animals and give birth before a midwife comes” (Exod. 1:19)—I asked her how she had cut the umbilical cord, to which she replied matter-of-factly, “I saw a piece of flint stone, picked it up, and cut the cord.” The Bible tells a similar story about flint stone. Moses, when returning to Egypt to take up the mission of freeing his people, suddenly was struck by an apparent attack of ague in the desert. His desert-bred wife, the Midianite Zippora, took advantage of the occasion to bind her stranger-husband to her by circumcising both him and their son, thereby making them more Midianite, to her way of thinking.36 For cutting their foreskins, she did what Uz‘eina or any other Bedouin woman would do: she chose a piece of flint stone that she picked up off the desert floor37 (Exod. 4:24–26). Water Bags, Skins for Churning, Nose Rings When Bedouin shepherds and shepherdesses go to pasture, or when Bedouin are traveling and migrating, they must take along water to drink. A pottery jar would be impractical as a water container, being both cumbersome and easy to break. They solved the problem by making a bag (Ar. girba) from the skin of a goat, which has almost no weight and is more­ over porous, thus preserving the coolness of the water when the sun’s rays strike it. The bag is borne by a rope that lets it hang comfortably from the shoulder. Accordingly, it was natural for the biblical patriarch Abraham to place such a “skin of water” (Heb. hemet mayyim) on the shoulder of his

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Fig. 16. A Bedouin shepherd with a water bag over his shoulder. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

concubine Hagar when he sent her and their son Ishmael into the desert of Beersheba (Gen. 21:14). Bedouin produce butter and buttermilk from the milk of their flocks by using a churning bag also made from the skin of a goat or sheep. Like a water bag, it has the advantages of being light for conveyance, unbreakable, and obtainable from one’s livestock. Bedouin in Sinai and the Negev prepare the skin by stopping up the orifices (except the neck, which serves as the main opening) and tying it to a makeshift tripod for shaking. They then pour fresh milk into it and blow it up so that the milk can move easily when the woman, churning, shakes it back and forth. After a half hour of shaking, the fat globules in the milk coagulate, forming butter, which is then extracted, leaving the sour buttermilk inside. The porosity of the churning bag (Ar. si‘in, “place of fat”) allows for the leftover bits of butter and drops of buttermilk to remain after churning, thus creating bacteria that accumulate in the bag and accelerate the process of souring. Bedouin cherish the tartness of this buttermilk, their traditionally standard drink, but one



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Fig. 17. A Bedouin woman churning buttermilk. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

that they get only after the lambing seasons, when the goats and sheep are lactating. I recall how, one day in the spring of 1973, an old shepherd of the Azazma Sarahin tribe—on coming out of the heat into a tent where I was present—drank a draft of freshly churned buttermilk and ecstatically proclaimed how good it was “to taste the tartness” (Ar. dhog al-hadig). Thus, too, in the biblical book of Judges (4:19), when Jael poured Sisera milk to drink straight from the “milk bag” (Heb. nod halav), it must have been fresh buttermilk, which she knew would please—and disarm—him. Nose rings play a role in the modesty of women, about which the Bedouin are zealous. The source of this concerned attitude toward modesty stems from the mission that Bedouin society requires each family to perform, namely, raising its daughters to refrain from sexual contact. In this society, a woman’s prime role is to bear males for her husband’s clan, or kinship group: males upon whom all the clan will, one day, depend for protection when endangered—males who will help them seek revenge when they have been violated and, by contrast, who may cause their clansmen to suffer through their own violation of people outside the clan. Such far-­reaching obligations to, and burdens upon, clansmen are weighty—too weighty to be borne for people not of their blood. Thus, the possibility of an outsider implanting strange seed in their wives is

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Fig. 18. Veiled Bedouin shepherdesses. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

something that Bedouin are ardent to avoid. They seek to prevent women from fornicating by disciplining girls early. A Bedouin family is expected to keep a girl under close scrutiny all the years of her youth and to duly reprimand her for socializing with boys and for any other deviation from modest behavior. Social convention warns of the woes that result from a family’s lenience in moral matters. One Bedouin adage instructs, “A loose girth brings the gall.”38 Toward the same end, Bedouin women in Sinai and the Negev are veiled as a gesture of modesty. In their society, modesty primarily consists of covering the mouth, since the mouth is physiologically suggestive of the vagina. Hence, just as a Bedouin term for the vagina is fur‘a (lit. opening or ravine), so an unveiled woman, her mouth exposed, is called a far‘a, a word using the same radicals as the Arabic image. Indeed, further to draw attention away from her mouth, a Bedouin woman, though veiled, wears a nose ring above the mouth veil; and to highlight its diversionary purpose, it is deliberately termed an “embellishment” (shnaf ).



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Fig. 19. A Bedouin woman wearing a nose ring. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

In the Bible, therefore, it is not surprising that the patriarch Abraham’s servant, on his mission to find a bride for his master’s son Isaac, put a ring on Rebecca’s nose (Gen. 24:47) for her to wear and attract attention while keeping her mouth covered, out of consideration for her modesty. Veiling as a rule of feminine reserve was also apparently familiar to Rebecca, who, upon spotting Isaac after her long return journey to the Negev with his father’s servant, was careful to “put on her veil and cover herself” (Gen. 24:65).

Hospitality The long Bedouin experience in the desert has bred social values that proved necessary for the survival of their society and its individual members. One renowned and cherished social value in Bedouin society is the practice of hospitality. In addition to the goodwill that hospitality conveys, it is essential to the survival of Bedouin in the desert, enabling them to

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travel in its remote reaches under conditions of safety and relative comfort. Bedouin have always had to journey through unfamiliar stretches of the ­desert—on their way to a market, on a camel raid, on a distant visit, in search of camels pillaged or gone astray, in flight from revenge or enemies, or in search of fresh pasture. Such travel, however, would be impossible in the sparsely inhabited desert unless people could expect unconditional access to the tents of others. Bedouin have therefore understood that hospitality in the desert is indispensable for life and thus redounds to everyone’s mutual benefit. As they say, “Today’s host is tomorrow’s guest.” Hence, the reception of guests is automatic. One side of a Bedouin tent is always wide open to signify that all guests are welcome. Screening a guest by asking him about his tribal affiliation is frowned upon as base. Bedouin law even stipulates that a guest has the right to remain for three and a third days.39 In the Bedouin value system, which requires a tent owner to share with strangers what little he has, hospitality enjoys the same rank as bravery in battle. One popular definition of a man is he who “strikes with a sword and feeds a guest meat.” Owing to the generosity involved, therefore, a Bedouin derives honor from receiving a guest. Accordingly, the Bedouin ethos is to desire guests as if their appearance is a boon to the host, who therefore manifests a readiness to welcome them. Bedouin didactic poems counsel tent owners to remain home as much as possible for the purpose of “greeting and receiving guests.”40 One poem tells a potential host in a remote place that upon seeing travelers pass by, he must rise and “stand in front of the tent till they see you and turn.”41 In Bedouin encampments, moreover, tribe members traditionally argued over who was entitled to host a new guest, occasioning one of their number to act as a “judge of disputation,” who would settle the dispute according to stipulated legal rules.42 Once a Bedouin becomes a host, moreover, he must seek to make his guest comfortable, shaking out the carpets (to ensure that they are dustfree and rid of scorpions that may be resting in their shade) and providing cushions or some improvisation of textiles on which to recline with ease. When a guest enters a tent, the common instruction is to “elbow in” (kawwi), which in Bedouin parlance means to lean on one’s elbow, reclining on such a cushion.



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Fig. 20. Bedouin guests reclining on their elbows. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

On the assumption that guests have been traveling, water is traditionally provided for cleaning and cooling the feet, drink is offered to quench thirst and revive the guest from fatigue, and food is proffered for nourishment. If an animal is butchered for the guest’s meal, its cooking may take up to three hours, since it is boiled to soften the meat. Therefore, to appease a guest’s hunger during that time, the host will give him a snack, typically the innards of the butchered goat or sheep, which will be directly placed on the embers of the campfire and roasted, from which it derives its name shawaya: roasted bits. All this, moreover, must take place in an atmosphere of amity, engendered by the host being congenial. And the host will not share in the guest’s meal, but rather stand nearby in order to serve him. Finally, a host is obliged to protect anyone who enters his tent. This value is so ingrained in the Bedouin mentality that even an enemy must be received as a guest. Accordingly, we have the late nineteenth-century story from the Negev of Himayd Hamdan al-Sufi, whose brother’s murderer, Dahshan Muhammad Abu Sitta, appeared unwittingly at his tent one night. Upon seeing him in the light of the fire, which he then kindled to prepare coffee, Sufi, honoring the inviolability of a guest, immediately rose and darted for the women’s section of the tent, claiming that he had become a woman, unable to execute his revenge like a man. Abu Sitta thus had a chance to flee the tent unharmed.43 This extreme solicitude toward guests is reflected in the proverb “A guest is inviolable, though he’s a foe.”44 Preventing harm from befalling anyone who has entered a man’s tent, and thereby become his guest, is reflected in the legal directive “Defend a

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guest if he’s done good or done bad; keep a violator at bay or pay for his faults.”45 Defending a guest may mean stopping assailants from assaulting their intended victim through admonitions, especially if they are still outside the tent. Such was the means chosen, for example, in 1899 by a tent owner about whom the Czech scholar Alois Musil reported from the Syrian Desert. During a bloody raid by men of the Transjordanian Huwaytat on a camp of the Aneza Siba‘a, one of the attackers, having killed a lad of the encampment and seeing his retreat blocked, rode his horse close to the tents, leapt into one belonging to a man called Rushayd Ibn Masrab, and asked for protection. Since Ibn Masrab, at that moment, was away fighting off the attackers, his daughter shouted instantly to a group of pursuers: “Stand still! There is a tent before you. He is our protégé.” When her father finally arrived, he too posted himself in front of his tent, liberating the Huwayti from the enraged crowd. Even after the grandfather of the slain lad, learning that the killer was in Ibn Masrab’s tent, came and offered him twenty camels to turn the protégé over, the latter stood his ground, pleading: “Wouldst thou tarnish my tent, so that I should become an object of contempt?”46 He was putting his life at risk for the safety of his guest, in keeping with the legal directive “You will die in front of the one you’re protecting.”47 Moreover, this behavior came despite the fact that the protégé was not only an enemy, but also an enemy from a hostile tribal confederation, toward whom the normal niceties of Bedouin law need not apply. The Old Testament also presents stories of hospitality containing elements indicating that it was extended by desert-dwelling nomads or, at least, by heirs to their ethos. When the patriarch Abraham, for example, saw, through the open side of his tent, three men nearby, he “rose and ran to greet them and invited them to be his guests” (Gen. 18:2–8). To indicate the Bedouin desire for the honor gained from receiving guests, he not only rose and ran to them, manifesting submission through a sign of amity— that is, by bowing humbly and calling himself their servant (‘avdekha)—but also implored them to stay, in order to preserve his good reputation, saying, “If you have any regard for me, please don’t pass me by.” Then, to ensure their comfort, he offered them water for washing their feet and the chance to rest under a tree, using the verb “to lean” (li-hisha‘en), reminiscent of a Bedouin guest leaning on his elbow. Once the guests agree to stay, Abra-



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ham makes preparations to have the meat of a calf cooked for them (boiled, as is also later prescribed for Tabernacle sacrifices in Leviticus 8:31). But until that special and plentiful meal is ready, he gives them, as in Bedouin practice, a snack—this time of torn bread (Heb. patt; Ar. fatt) in soup, a usual Bedouin meal, to revive them after their presumably not having eaten while traveling. Then, presenting them with the main meal—the meat and bread soaked with curds and buttermilk (the traditional mansaf served by Bedouin)—Abraham desists from eating with them but, in Bedouin fashion, “stands beside them” to serve in the event of need. Finally, when the guests depart, Abraham walks with them a distance to confirm that they remain under his protection (Gen. 18:16). Another example of Bedouin hospitality, although less detailed than that of Abraham cited above, but stressing the principle of protection for a guest, is offered by his nephew Lot to the same guests when they visit him in Sodom (Gen. 19:1–10). Originally, Lot too was a nomad and had pitched his tents near that town (Gen. 13:12), even though we now find him occupying a house (probably temporary, since the locals consider him a stranger). In any case, he behaves like a Bedouin. When he sees the strangers, he immediately rises to show his eagerness to receive them, bows before them to show his readiness to serve them as guests, and invites them to his house, offering them water to bathe their tired feet, preparing for them a meal, and then baking unleavened bread as a snack to satisfy their hunger till the main feast was ready. Finally, with a nomad’s sense of responsibility for the safety of his guests, Lot, in an effort to avert delivering them over to the lust of the rowdy Sodomites who attacked his house and demanded the men, proves willing to sacrifice his honor and the virtue of his virgin daughters by offering them up instead. His admonition, as he confronted the assailants, affirms his concern: “Do nothing against these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof” (Gen. 19:8). A similar example of Bedouin-like protection extended to a guest is found in the book of Judges (19:22–24). A man of the tribe of Benjamin hosted for the night a Levite traveler, his concubine, and his servant in the settlement of Gibeah. As in the case of Lot, the man’s house was besieged by men demanding that the guest be given to them for homosexual abuse. Here, too, the host goes out and confronts the attackers, beseeching them

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not to perpetrate their planned outrage, “since the man has entered my house.” The Bible recalls other fragments of nomad hospitality. When Jethro, the Midianite Bedouin of Sinai, hears from his daughters about Moses, the stranger who has helped them at the well, he sends one of them to invite him for a meal, after scolding them for not having taken this initiative themselves (Exod. 2:20). In the book of Judges (4:18–19), Jael, the wife of another Midianite, and a tent dweller, upon seeing a man fleeing toward her tent, goes out to greet him and invite him in. She quickly realizes that her guest is Sisera, the enemy Canaanite leader. She ultimately kills him, in what seems a breach of normal Bedouin hospitality. But before finding the opportunity to kill him, by driving a tent peg into his head, Jael performs the obligations of hospitality expected of Bedouin, perhaps intending to disarm him. After inviting him in, she must have suggested that he recline to rest, for she covered him with a blanket, seemingly for his comfort. And when Sisera asks for water to drink, she ostensibly honors him by giving him something better: buttermilk straight from the churn (Judg. 4:18–19). If Jael’s betrayal of her guest was indeed in contravention of the otherwise hallowed precepts of hospitality, we should perhaps view it as an act of warfare against the military leader of a people who were an existential threat, as depicted in the “Song of Deborah”: “Caravans ceased and walkers had to go by roundabout paths. We were without protection” (Judg. 5:6–7).

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Desert Society

Kinship Groups Dwelling in dispersion and far from any governmental law enforcement agencies that could provide them security, nomadic desert dwellers needed ways to protect themselves from crimes such as murder, assault, insult, and theft. They achieved this security mainly by forming groups based on blood kin, or people of common descent, people whom they believed would honor claims of common loyalty and cooperation when problems with others arose. Each group they organized had a specific security function. The largest of the Bedouin social groups was the tribal confederation. In the recent premodern period, the major confederations in Sinai and the Negev, for example, were the Tarabin, Tiyaha, Azazma, Zullam, Suwarka, Aheiwat, Muzayna, Alaygat, and Sawalha, each of which served as the ultimate identity of its members: their nation. If a stranger asks a Bedouin who he is, he will reply by citing his confederation name, for example, Tihi for the Tiyaha, and Turbani for the Tarabin. A confederation protects its members from violations by tribesmen of other confederations, and is thus known as the “confrontational group” (Ar. gabila). This is especially so in regard to incursions by other confederations into the joint territory that ensures their access to water and pasture; hence, it is metaphorically known as “the trough and the grassy valley” (Ar. howdh u-rowdh). Indeed, preserving the integrity of this territory is what binds the

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Fig. 21. Bedouin tribal confederations in Sinai and the Negev. Map by Bill Nelson.



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component tribes together in membership. Whenever a group belonging to one confederation threatens the territory inhabited by any tribe of another confederation, it is the duty of all the other member tribes of the latter confederation to defend that land. In the spring of 1974, for example, I met a chief of the Hasablah tribe of the Tarabin confederation of Sinai on the main street in the small Mediterranean town of el-Arish. The chief, Sulayman Ibn Jazi, invited me to join him at the festivities to be held that day for members of another Tarabin tribe, the Nadayat, who had just returned from performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. We traveled by jeep to the lands of the Nadayat, some sixtythree miles to the south, just beyond a large mountain in northeastern Sinai called Jabal Halal. Indeed, the Nadayat were the only Tarabin Bedouin of northeastern Sinai that lived south of this mountain, all the others of that region living to its north. Hence, the neighbors of the Nadayat were a number of tribes belonging to a different confederation, the Tiyaha, whose lands stretched from there southward to central Sinai. The festivities consisted mainly of men sitting decorously along the length of the very long black guest tent, being served platters of mutton and rice. All the while we were there, I was anticipating the arrival of one particular guest, a venerable and respected elder of the Tiyaha, Muslih Salim Ibn ‘Amir, who camped just a few miles to the south and who I had known to enjoy close neighborly relations with the Nadayat. When I finally asked the hosts why he was not present, they diffidently replied that they did not know. When, therefore, the festivities ended without Ibn ‘Amir’s appearance, I suggested to my companion, Shaykh Ibn Jazi, that we stop off at Ibn ‘Amir’s encampment and visit him before returning to el-Arish. The chief at first demurred, claiming it was late and the road back was long, but in light of my urging, he finally agreed. When we arrived at Ibn ‘Amir’s tent and were shown in, the welcome was not as hearty as on previous visits, but coldly formal. Without Ibn Jazi and Ibn ‘Amir exchanging words other than the perfunctory greetings, we drank the coffee that the latter prepared for us, and left. On the road, I expressed my surprise over our chilly reception. How often I had heard Ibn ‘Amir express his affection for Ibn Jazi and praise his generosity. Only months before, he related how the chief had found him

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stranded in el-Arish after nightfall and had hired a car to take him to his distant desert encampment. Ibn Jazi, too, was always mindful to address Ibn ‘Amir respectfully as “maternal uncle” (khal), evoking the memory of the Jawaziya woman of a previous generation that was married to one of Ibn ‘Amir’s paternal forebears. Finally, the chief explained: “Our relations with the Tiyaha have been severed. They are claiming possession of some of the lands that the Nadayat cultivate, and I, as a Turbani, a member of the Tarabin, am forbidden to socialize with them. We are in a state of war. I have nothing personal against Muslih Ibn ‘Amir. To the contrary, I respect and love him; he is my maternal uncle. And for this reason, I deigned to drink his coffee, although, in truth, that was a great deviation from our norms, for which all the Tarabin would rebuke me.” “How extensive is the area under dispute?” I asked. “Less than a hundred acres,” he said. Noticing my wonder, he added, “But it is Tarabin land, and when it comes to land, we must all stick together.” I recalled that, although the Jawazi and the Nadayat tribes were both Tarabin, even belonging to the same subconfederation of tribes called the Naba‘at, their lineages must have split at least ten generations, or three hundred years, before: the Jawazi were the descendants of Hasballah, a son of Naba, and the Nadayat were descended from another son, Shibayth. Three hundred years and three hundred miles separated the two tribes, but all of that was as nothing when it came to confederation land—even a spot of land that was less than a hundred acres, out of a total confederal acreage of many millions.1 The Bedouin tribal confederation is thus a territorial group. It has no permanent chief, but often an ad hoc leader, who unifies the constituent tribes when a defense need arises. Each member tribe, on the other hand, has a chief. At the opposite end of the Bedouin social structure, the smallest grouping is the clan, which consists of related nuclear families that identify a common ancestor who lived four generations before the current youngest generation. The clan’s vital role is to protect any fellow member from violation by someone of a different clan, violations that are potentially frequent.



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They do this by retaliating after a violation has occurred or by flaunting the threat of retaliation as a standing deterrent. A clan operates on the basis of collective responsibility, obligating each male member to protect or avenge a threatened or violated clansman—and to face, as well, the consequences of violations perpetrated by fellow clansmen against people outside their clan—consequences such as death by revenge or the payment of fines and damages.2 Owing to these stringent obligations, the composition of a clan is limited to five generations, as will be seen below. Thus, it is in a state of perpetual growth and division, normally altering its composition with each successive generation. A confederation and all its component parts also grow and change, but they split less frequently than a clan, their mutual obligations being less exacting. Indeed, several confederations have survived for many generations; the Bili in the Negev and the Muzayna in Sinai can be traced back to their seventh-century-CE origins in the Arabian Peninsula.3 When these groups change, it is in the following way. When a clan grows and splits, its larger, previously component parts jointly become a subtribe within their tribe. Similarly, subtribes also grow and split, with their erstwhile parts eventually forming a new tribe. When a tribe grows and splits, the new groupings, in turn, will join an existing, or form a new, subconfederation; and each of these, in turn, may ultimately become a confederation. Accordingly, within each confederation, every member belongs simultaneously to a subconfederation, a tribe, a subtribe, and a clan, each group ensuring him protection against violations by the members of parallel groupings within the same confederation. For its part, the clan, on the basis of mandatory collective responsibility, protects its members from violations by others in their more immediate surroundings. Subtribes, consisting of member clans whose ancestors in recent generations belonged to a single clan be­­ fore it split, will show solidarity—although doing so is not obligatory— with any former fellow clansmen in conflicts between them and people in a subtribe that originated in a different clan. Tribes vie with others in their confederation for the most favored pastures in their common area. Subconfederations, like subtribes, tend to support their members in conflicts with the members of other subconfederations.4 The confederation deals with violations on the part of people from other confederations. This behavior

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is expressed in the Bedouin proverb that defines the essence of tribalism: “I and my brother will fight my cousin; and I and my cousin will fight the stranger.”5 The tribal structure of the Israelites as we find it randomly noted in the Bible bears considerable similarity to that of the Bedouin, even though the biblical groupings are less completely or consistently defined.6 Nevertheless, the same terms for most of these tribal groups largely persist through successive stages in the Bible’s development of Israelite history, despite the demographic changes that surely took place during the three hundred years between the age of the depicted patriarchs (the thirteenth century BCE; see chapter 7) and that of the monarchy (tenth century BCE). Indeed, some of the old clan and lineage divisions retained their integrity at least until the eighth century BCE, such as the Aviezer section of the tribe of Manasseh (to which the judge Gideon had belonged three hundred years earlier), as discovered in the Samaria ostraca (pottery shards with writing) by the biblical archaeologist Lawrence Stager;7 and Chronicles indicates that this tribal structure in the outlying tribes of Simeon and Reuben may have survived into the seventh century (1 Chron. 4:38, 5:6–7). The “twelve tribes of Israel,” although nominally family units in the patriarchal period, when each purportedly stemmed from one of the sons of Jacob (Gen. 35:22–26, 46:8–26), are later portrayed as large tribes in the Sinai episode, as we see in Numbers 1:2, when Yahweh instructs Moses to “count the whole Israelite community by clans and tribes” (see also Num. 1:5–16, 2:3–32, 7:12–83; Deut. 33:6–25) and into the depicted stage of settlement in the central hill country of Canaan (see, e.g., Judges 4, 5, 19). Once in Canaan, however, the tribes also became territorial units (Num. 34:13–29; Josh. 13:15–21:40), making each, except the landless tribes of Simeon and Levi, functionally similar to a Bedouin confederation, for which the main justification, as noted above, was to safeguard the jointly held territory of their member tribes. Thus we find Moses instructing the men of Manasseh that “the Israelites must stay bound each to the ancestral land of his tribe” (Num. 36:7). Nonetheless, I retain here the biblical term “tribes” (rather than “confederations”) for the main Israelite tribal units; that is, despite their territorial rationale, as manifested, for example, by men of the tribe of Manasseh



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Fig. 22. Israelite tribal areas. Map by Bill Nelson.

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trying to prevent land in their allotted territory from passing to another of the Israelite tribes through marriage (Num. 36). Instead, what I equate with a Bedouin confederation is the oft-mentioned biblical term “People of Israel” (Heb. am yisra’el) or “Community of Israel” (adat yisra’el), owing to its “God-given” possession of the land of Canaan in its entirety (Josh. 21:41), as well as its role as the ultimate group identity.8 In the Bible, as among the Bedouin, tribal organizations are often composite. When God tells Abraham to be circumcised in order to form a clan-like group together with God (see chapter 5), he adds: “As for the home-born slave and the one bought from an outsider who is not of your offspring, they [too] must be circumcised, home-born and purchased alike” (Gen. 17:12–13). If the appending of nonbiological members was practiced in regard to a biblical clan, we may expect that outsiders joined the larger tribal organizations, too, such as the encompassing People of Israel.9 Thus, God’s instruction to Moses—to exercise one rule in cultic practice for both the Israelite and the stranger in his midst (Num. 15:14–16)—implies that the possibility of adding members to the core group was operative among the biblical Israelites just as it was among Bedouin confederations. In regard to clans, however, it should be noted that despite the natural urge to add strength via numbers to their clan, Bedouin were nonetheless wary of appending new members precipitously, in light of the extreme commitments that clansmen owe one another. In the Bible, too, this caution is reflected in the Deuteronomistic proviso to wait three generations before appending neighboring outsiders (in this case, Edomites and Egyptians) to the clan and thus to the larger community called, here, “the community of Yahweh” (Deut. 23:8–9).10 Owing to these similarities, biblical terminology, when compared with that of the Bedouin, helps clarify facets of tribal experience. The Bedouin perspective that any tribal group’s basic concern is with defense and belligerence is reflected in the Hebrew Bible in the two terms used for a tribe: shevet and matteh. Both mean “a stick,” and remind us of a boastful Bedouin proverb that echoes this imagery: “We are a stick in its bark, which no one has managed to split.” Biblical terminology also sheds light on the role of tribal leaders. Just as Bedouin terms indicate that authority derives from age and experience,



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calling the head of a clan an “elder” (Ar. kabir, one of long tooth) and of a tribe “a bearded one” (Ar. shaykh), the Hebrew Bible occasionally refers to a tribal chief or head of a clan as a zakain, or “bearded one” (e.g., Exod. 23:8–9; Deut. 31:28). The Bible’s most frequent designation of a chieftain, however, is “bearer” (nasi’; e.g., Gen. 17:20, 25:16; Exod. 22:27; Num. 7:24, 25:14, 36:1), a term echoed in the Bedouin saying “A chief’s cloak is wide,” implying that his fellow tribesmen fill it with their demands, quarrels, and problems, which he must bear, just as Bedouin often wrap and carry products from the market by using their cloak as a sack.11 The biblical Moses employed this imagery when appointing Joshua Ben Nun as his deputy, telling his wandering Hebrew tribesmen, “How can I alone bear [Heb. esa’, from the same root as nasi’] your cumbrance, your burden, and your bickering?” (Deut. 1:12).12 This emphasis on the burdens of tribal leadership in the term nasi’ may also gain confirmation from a further, graphic Bedouin proverb: “A chief is but a rag on which all the tribesmen wipe their dirty hands.”

Tribal Behavior One of the likenesses between the behavior of Israelite tribes and tribal Bedouin is the considerable autonomy that each exercises toward the other tribes in their confederations. Ties between tribes, like loyalties inside them, are forged and undone on the basis of shifting interests. For Bedouin, this autonomy may have originated in their need, as livestock raisers depen­ dent on the sparse pasture of the desert, to pick up and exploit new grazing grounds as soon as the fickle winter rains produced them—and before other shepherds got to them with their own flocks. Thus, their survival instinct instilled in them an aversion to commitments that might obstruct this vital need. Bedouin tribes of the same confederation have been known to abandon each other in the hour of need, even waging internecine war when their interests clashed. One such premodern example of clashing interests occurred in the Syrian Desert in 1926. To preserve winter grazing grounds for themselves, three major sections of the Aneza confederation—the Fid‘an, the Sba, and the Amarat—blocked the entry of a fourth section, the Rawala, into their

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pastures when its own were blighted by drought. This belligerent action threatened to doom 35,000 members of the Rawala and their 350,000 camels to extinction.13 In the Bible, too, we find shifting interests as a factor in determining intraconfederation loyalties and alliances, as expressed by Judges 21:25. Each one did as he saw as right. In Judges 8, moreover, we have an account of a tribal conflict between Gideon the Aviezerite and one of the tribes that should normally have acknowledged his authority. As noted, Gideon, himself of the tribe of Manasseh, led the northern Israelite tribes to rout the Midianites, Amelekites, and Kedemites, nomadic invaders that had crossed the Jordan River to ravage the Israelites’ crops and livestock. After defeating the marauders, Gideon pursued two Midianite leaders, Zebah and Zalmunna, into their home territory, Transjordan. During his chase, he met members of the Israelite tribe of Gad, whose territory was also in Transjordan, but who, surprisingly, refused Gideon’s request for bread for his hungry troops. Their negative reply—“Are Zebah and Zalmunna already in your hands that we should give your troops bread?” (Judg. 8:6)— was not, however, made out of meanness. It stemmed from a Gadite dilemma: the fear that, since they dwelled deep inside Transjordan, they might become victims of retaliation by their Midianite neighbors if Gideon failed to defeat them completely. Their caution reflected the Bedouin political advice: “Don’t empty your water-bag just because you smell clouds.”14 We also find the interest-­oriented imperatives of tribesmen in the books of Exodus (32:25–27) and Numbers (16), where the Israelite tribes rebel against their leader, Moses, concerned that his having led them into the desert endangered their lives. Among Bedouin, interest orientation also manifests itself in cases where heretofore hostile tribes put their conflicts aside and band together to promote or defend a new common interest—and then, just as naturally, end their alliance when these interests are no longer shared. For example, in 1830, a northwestern Arabian tribe, the Bani Atiyya, suffering from prolonged drought in its area, searched for better pastures, which it found in the eastern Negev. But after the tribe tarried there past the end of the grazing season and took the liberty of planting summer crops, Salman Azzam of the Huzayyil section of the Tiyaha confederation in the Negev embarked



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on an initiative to expel it. This he did by assembling a motley coalition of other tribes and confederations, several of them hostile to each other, to fight the intruders. Apparently, fear that the Bani Atiyya incursion was an existential threat to their adjacent territories was sufficient to unite all these erstwhile enemies to join forces and drive them out. After that limited goal was achieved, however, they all felt free to resume their mutual hostilities.15 In the Bible, we likewise find cases of brief alliances between previously hostile parties, among both Israelite and non-Israelite tribes. The nomadic Midianites and the sedentary Moabites likely had little in common until they saw the Israelite tribes, as depicted, moving toward their adjacent territories from the south. This threat sufficed to impel them to join forces in order to block the Israelite advance (Num. 22:4, 7). The nomadic Amelekites and the peasant Canaanites are also portrayed as bonding against the Israelite tribes, lest these mount a direct, frontal attack on them from the west (Num. 14:25). Among the Israelites, too, changing interests could switch tribal groups from a state of hostility to one of friendship. Following the fatal rape perpetrated on a woman from Judah by men in the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, for example, almost all the Israelite tribes went to war against the tribe of Benjamin (Judg. 19–21). Then, having duly punished it by putting much of its population, including women, to death, the same belligerents became concerned that they might lose Benjamin as an effective fellow tribe, because of nonreproduction—specifically, owing to the oath that they had taken to withhold their daughters from marrying Benjamin’s men. Thus, in a reversal of position, they rallied to the survival of Benjamin by providing virgin girls from the Javesh-Gilead subtribe (which, not having joined the coalition, did not forswear marriage with Benjamin) and by allowing men of Benjamin to abduct and marry women of the Ephraim tribe living at Shiloh. These steps were taken to preserve Benjamin as a tribe, which was in the interest of all the Israelites, even though it meant circumventing the oath that the belligerents had taken in their moment of outrage over the Benjaminite rape. The corollary to the instinct of acting primarily on the basis of vital interests was autonomy. Thus, beyond the bounds of a person’s clan, in which membership is a fixed imperative for one’s day-by-day safety, Bedouin owe

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permanent loyalty to no group; they may even occasionally go so far as to change tribes and confederations when it suits their paramount needs. In 1894 in southern Transjordan, for example, when the chief of the Huwaytat tribe, Arar Ibn Jazi, agreed under duress to have his tribesmen pay taxes to the expanding Ottoman authority, the Taweiha section of his tribe, led by Harb Abu Tayah, broke away from Ibn Jazi, persisting in their nonpayment.16 Viewing a leader as only primus inter pares, Bedouin have traditionally felt no inherent obligation to be loyal when their interests clashed. The Bible, too, contains instances reflecting the autonomy that Bedouin demonstrate in regard to loyalty to their confederations. In the book of Judges, in particular, we find tribes refusing to rally with others in wars against outsider enemies, wars portrayed as being waged for the benefit of all the People of Israel. Most notable was the campaign against the Canaanites led by Deborah and Barak, in which the tribes of Reuben, Gilead, Dan, and Asher are explicitly castigated for their nonparticipation (Judg. 5:15–17).17 Likewise, we find the tribe of Ephraim ignoring the summons for support issued by Jephtah the Gileadite in his war against the Ammonites (Judg. 12:1–6); and in a reverse action—but one that also reflects fluctuating loyalties—Gideon the Aviezerite, of the tribe of Manasseh, when leading Israelite forces against the Midianites, deliberately excluded the rival Israelite tribe of Ephraim from his campaign (Judg. 8:1). Under exceptional circumstances, Bedouin tribes have manifested their autonomy by enlisting traditionally enemy confederations to help combat groups from within their own confederation. In the Negev, between 1842 and 1864, when tribesmen of the Huzayyil were warring with the Atowna tribe for leadership of the Tiyaha confederation, they ultimately triumphed by enlisting help from their greatest enemies, the Tarabin confederation. Then, after they settled their rivalry with the Atowna, the Huzayyil reestablished their original, mutual commitments to them, including the defense of their common confederal territory. Bedouin recall that when the Tarabin demanded parts of the land belonging to the vanquished Atowna as reward for their help in the warfare against them, their erstwhile ally, Fiheid al-­ Huzayyil, categorically refused.18 In the Bible, the phenomenon of joining the enemy against one’s own camp is seen in the example of David. Pursued by King Saul, he found ref-



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uge with Achish, the Philistine ruler of Gath, and pledged his readiness to join the Philistines in their planned offensive against Saul. Achish, finding this offer natural, acceded—only to be overruled by his generals, who resented David’s past victories over them (1 Sam. 28:1–2; 29:1–10). Similar to the tribal condition of autonomy between members of the same confederation, Bedouin leaders had often to contend with challenges to their authority and legitimacy by fellow tribesmen, mainly owing to the natural suspicion (based on the aforementioned saying “I and my brother will fight my cousin, and I and my cousin will fight the stranger”) that a leader was showing partiality toward his own clan or other clans closely related to him. In the mid-1970s, for example, a decline in loyalty to their tribal leader prevailed among the southernmost sections of the Azazma tribe, the Sarahin and Asiyat, in the central Negev. They not only harbored an enduring distrust of their chief, Owda Abu Mu‘ammar, for showing preference to his own section, the Mas‘udiyyin, in the performance of his functions, but also distanced themselves from him on learning that he was planning to help the Israeli authorities settle them in permanent towns.19 In the Bible, such distrust was similarly felt, for example, by the northern tribes of the United Monarchy when they saw men of the southern tribe of Judah, from which King David hailed, escorting him over the Jordan River from Transjordan, to where he had fled from the rebellion of his son Absalom. They therefore protested that they had been slighted in being excluded from his entourage: “We have ten shares in the king, even in David.” Although the Judahites supposedly dismissed this challenge by saying, “The king is our relative. Why should that upset you? Have we consumed any­ thing that belongs to the king? Has he given us any gifts?’’ their overt flaunting of a kinship bond between Judah and the king aggravated the suspicions of the northerners, who turned on their heels, contemplating rebellion (2 Sam. 19:42–20:22). Their suspicions were again aroused when David’s son Solomon became king and pressed these tribes, as opposed to Judah, into forced labor for his construction projects (1 Kings 11:27–28). Consequently, when Solomon died and his son and successor, Rehoboam, declined the demand of the northern tribes that he lighten the burdens that his father had imposed on them, they seceded from the United Monarchy in typical tribal fashion, once again demonstrating their view of the

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kingdom as basically a confederation of tribes that did not necessitate their loyalty (1 Kings 12). Rivalry for leadership and control of the group also leads Bedouin tribesmen, including whole or parts of tribes within a confederation, to challenge their leaders. As cited above, a twenty-two-year war, known as the War of Owda and Amir (1842–64), raged in the Negev when Salman Huzayyil, leader of the Huzayyil tribe, tried to wrest leadership of the entire Tiyaha confederation from his rival Owda al-Atowna, chief of the Atowna tribe.20 No sooner was this rivalry settled than another example of war for the sake of leadership broke out in the other major confederation in the Negev, the Tarabin, as the Abu Sitta section challenged the paramount leadership of Hammad al-Sufi during twelve years of hostilities (1875–87).21 These tribal wars for predominance resembled the tribal or sectional rivalries that prevailed among the Israelite tribes residing in the Canaanite highlands and Transjordanian steppes, especially between the southernmost tribe, Judah, and the other tribes to its north and east. As 2 Samuel 3:1 reports, for example, “The war between the House of Saul and the House of David was long”—a war that followed upon the death of King Saul and the declaration of David as king of Israel. This seven-and-a-half-year internecine war raged between Judah and Saul’s tribe, Benjamin, which headed a coalition of other northern tribes. While Judah hoped to gain predominance through the rule of David, the northern tribes put forward Eshbaal, Saul’s elder son, to restore the supremacy they had known during the reign of his father (2 Sam. 2:8–5:5). This rivalry continued throughout the reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Hence, when Solomon’s successor, King Rehoboam, refused to relieve the northern tribes of the onus of conscription for his father’s construction projects, from which the Judahites were exempt (1 Kings 5:27–28), they rebelled under their own leader, Jeroboam, splitting the United Monarchy formed by David into two: Israel in the north, and Judah in the south (1 Kings 12:3–24). To overcome these endemic jealousies and suspicions, tribal leaders of a typically motley group have needed a strong nucleus of closely related kin on which to rely if they hoped to maintain power. Bedouin awareness



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of this reality is expressed in their proverb “A chief without a sub-tribe will not control his tribe.”22 The Bible, in turn, provides successive confirmations of this truth, which is present from the time when the Israelite tribes inhabited the desert until they settled in Canaan, even into the early monarchic period. Thus, Moses, on seeing that the rebellious tribes who built the Golden Calf while he was on Mount Sinai were “out of control and a menace to any who might oppose them,” restored his authority by rallying fellow tribesmen from his own tribe of Levi, who dutifully went through the Israelite camp with sword in hand, slaying anyone who had rebelled, and “three thousand of the people fell that day” (Exod. 32:25–28). Again, during the period of the judges, the leader Barak used his tribe, Naphtali, as a power base for recruiting the Israelites against Canaan (Judg. 4:10); and Jephtah based his power on his subtribe, Gilead, in order to dispel challenges to his authority from Ephraim (Judg. 12:1–6). Later, Kings David and Solomon relied on Judah as their power base against the northern tribes (2 Sam. 2:4, 19:9, 16; 1 Kings 12:4, 14).

The Role of a Clan In the traditional absence of law enforcement agencies in the desert to protect people and safeguard their rights, it is primarily the clan that provides them with security. Accordingly, a widespread Bedouin maxim counsels, “If men violate you, turn to your clansmen,” and another warns, “A man without a clan is like a garment without sleeves,” that is, it won’t cover him from the cold.23 Inherent in a clan’s operation, as noted above, is the principle of mutual responsibility, which means that the members are obligated to one another in regard to what people outside the clan do to them and what they do to outsiders. As Bedouin describe it: “Clansmen hit and get hit together,” that is, under the same terms of commitment.24 This commitment to one another is total. Hence, a Bedouin proverb referring to the mutual liability for a fellow tribesman’s misdeeds depicts the extremity of this commitment: “What they’ve got on your clansman, they’ve got on you; there’s no way to evade it.”25 Accordingly, the Bedouin Arabic term for a clansman may have

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originally derived from the image of “binding,” namely, “someone bound” (‘amm; pl. a‘mam) to his clansmen by commitment—alternatively, “the son of someone bound,” ibn amm.26 As in Arabic, the Hebrew word for a clansman is ‘am (pl. ‘amm), as used in the phrase for a man’s lot after death, ve-ye’asef el ‘ammav—“he was gathered to his clansmen”—the destiny depicted in the cases of Abraham (Gen. 25:8), Ishmael (Gen. 25:17), Jacob (Gen. 49:33), Aaron (Num. 20:24), and Moses (Num. 31:2; Deut. 32:50).27 By the same token, the second daughter of Lot to conceive through him, incestuously, gave her son the euphemistic name ben ‘ammi, “son of my clansmen” (Gen. 19:38). Unlike the Bedouin, however, who know how to distinguish between a clansman and a brother—as in the aforementioned tribal proverb “I and my brother [Ar. akhuwi] will fight my cousin/clansman [ibn ammi], but I and my cousin/clansman will fight the stranger”28—the Bible, in discarding this distinction, accentuates the high degree of mutual commitment that it assigns to clansmen. Thus, to designate a clansman, it alternates the term ‘am with the normal term for “brother”—akh, which bears an image kindred to “bound,” namely, “inseparable” or “one and the same.”29 Accord­ ingly, Lot is sometimes referred to as Abraham’s nephew, that is, a normal clansman (Gen. 11:31; 12:5), and at others as his brother (Gen. 13:11; 14:13–14). Indeed, in desisting from a possible quarrel with Lot in order to preserve clan solidarity despite disagreements over pasture, Abraham defines their clan relationship as “brotherly people”—anashim akhim, that is, we are as close as brothers. Likewise, during the stay of Jacob with Laban and his family, they refer to each other as brothers (Gen. 29:12, 29:14, 31:23, 31:37, 31:54), even though they are distant clansmen. In the first citation, Jacob announces himself to Rachel as “your father’s brother,” although he is clearly Laban’s nephew, being the son of Rebecca, Laban’s sister. In the book of Ruth, when Boaz announces his projected marriage to Ruth in the hope of begetting a son in the name of her deceased husband, Mahlon, and explains that by so doing, the latter will not be cut off from his clansmen, he uses the term “his brothers” (ekhav) for the members of their clan (Ruth 4:3, 4:10).30 Moreover, once we understand this usage, the ruses of Abraham (then called Abram) and his son Isaac (Gen. 12:12, 12:19, 20:2, 26:6)—each re-



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portedly passing off his wife by calling her “my sister” (akhoti) in order to dispel the imagined threat to themselves if Abimelech (alternatively “Pharaoh”) were to learn that the women were actually their wives—seem less mendacious. In presenting Sarah (“Sarai”) and Rebecca as clanswomen, the patriarchs were stating at least a half-truth that would absolve them if found out, assuming, of course, that their interlocutors knew that nomadic marriage was often endogamous, or within the clan. Abraham even goes on to substantiate this likelihood by explaining, “She is indeed my clans­ woman, the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother, and is therefore my wife” (Gen. 20:12), by which he meant, “She is my wife because she is of my father’s clan (bayt abi), not of my mother’s.” He presumed, again, that Abimelech would know that membership in a clan passes through the male line only and that first-cousin marriage takes place within the clan of the fathers of both the groom and the bride. This interpretation is also commensurate with a common term understood to mean “clan” in the Bible, namely, “a father’s house” (bait ab; i.e., the family of the forefather)—though this term is often interchanged with mishpahah, “a group of common offspring” (Num. 1:2, 36:8, 36:12; Josh. 7:14).31 The main function of a biblical clan, as in the case of Bedouin, was to protect its members. We see this automatic defense of clansmen in the case of Abraham, who musters fighters and dashes off to rescue his brother’s son, Lot, directly upon hearing that the latter had been pillaged and abducted by raiders from distant lands (Gen. 14:14–16); Abraham did this despite the tension that then prevailed between the two men over their pastures. We also find this commitment to the protection of clansmen reflected in the trust that King Saul put in his clansmen to defend him loyally, resulting in the appointment of his first cousin and clansman Abner Ben Ner to be his military commander (1 Sam. 14: 50–51). Together with the commitment of clansmen to protect one another, events related in the Bible reflect the common liability to which Bedouin clansmen are exposed by the misdeeds of their fellows. For example, “David’s brothers and his clansmen,” understanding that they, no less than he, were subject to the wrath of King Saul for the misdeeds of which Saul accused him, fled together with the future king to take refuge in a cave at Adullam (1 Sam. 22:1). By contrast, when David, as king, was distressed by

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the murder of the late Saul’s military commander, Abner Ben Ner, by the head of his own army, Joab Ben Zeruiah, he deemed that the liability for revenge resided with “Joab and his clan” (2 Sam. 3:29). Although Zeruiah was David’s sister (1 Chron. 2:16), the undisclosed identity of her husband, Yoab’s father, leads us to think that Yoab was not a clansman of the king, thus not rendering David liable for Joab’s crime. Indicative of a Bedouin’s total dependence on his clan for security and protection is his abiding distaste for living apart from his clansmen, since they are his protective force. Bedouin stories from recent centuries testify to this aversion. In northwestern Arabia, for example, when Maniyya, an ancestor of the large Suwarka tribe, killed his cousin Nusayr in a squabble over honor and then fled to the Bili tribe, where he married and stayed for years, he relentlessly sent messengers to entreat other clansmen to arrange for his return.32 In the Bible, the clearest expression of this tendency to rejoin distant clansmen is when Jethro the Midianite (here called Hobab) was implored by his son-in-law Moses to stay on with the wandering Hebrews, for whom he had been serving as a guide in the desert, and he refused. His reason: “I wish to return to my land and my clan” (Num. 10:30).33 The essential importance of a man’s clan to his security can be seen in the story of Ishmael, which gives a precise depiction of what it means to lose this protection. Just as the Bedouin describe a person without a clan as “a stray camel” (Ar. jamal al-shatt), connoting that he is unbound,34 the Bible depicts Ishmael, living away from (Heb. ‘al pnai) his clan, as “a man unbound (pere’ adam), whose hand is against every man, and every man’s hand’s against him” (Gen. 16:12)—that is, he has only himself for protection, there being no clansmen bound to him who would otherwise help him. Indeed, the Hebrew adverb ‘al pnai specifically determines that Ishmael dwells “a distance from” his clansmen—in this passage as well as in Genesis 25:18, where the cited Ishmaelite locations indicated by ‘al pnai can reflect only a considerable distance. Another indication that Ishmael would live separated from his clan is found in the adjective pere’. Although we usually find it in Genesis 16:12 translated as “wild” (with the animal imagery of a wild ass or a wild colt) in reference to Ishmael,35 we can more precisely understand “wild” to mean “unbound”—again, the state of living separated from his clan. The adjective pere’ may originally have derived



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from the ancient two-radical Hebrew root (p-r), which conveys the image of “separating,” as the Semiticist Joshua Blau has explained.36 Ishmael’s consequent vulnerability to violation is also reflected in the case of Cain. Presumably devoid of a clansman after killing Abel, his only brother, Cain implores God to protect him, explaining, “Anyone who meets me may kill me,” to which God accedes by putting a mark on him as a warning that there was someone to avenge him—God himself (Gen. 4:14– 15). The defenselessness of people far from their clan is a sentiment that seems to have remained in the consciousness of the Israelites for centuries, finding expression in later legislation, as in Numbers (35:15, 18), where strangers, alongside Israelites, are offered protection in the cities of refuge against revenge for accidental murder. Bedouin determinations of the size of a clan and the extent of its members’ mutual responsibility also find close parallels in the Bible. Bedouin call their clan a khamsa, or “fiver,” indicating that each member and the clan forefather are within the same “five” generations, which include that of a member of the most recent generation, and those of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, who is the clan forebear. This also means that the current last generation of members is four generations removed from the forefather.37 In deterring violations in Bedouin society, these dimensions have proved practicable. On the one hand, in keeping with the principle of mutual responsibility, clans are normally large enough that persons likely to violate someone from another clan will be deterred by the thought that it may provoke a conflict involving all the clansmen of his victim and all of his own. On the other hand, clan members constitute a number of persons sufficient for dissuading a fellow clansman from violating an outsider and thereby exposing them all to reprisal. In the Bible, although the clan is often called “a father’s house” (bait ab), without allusion to size, it may have comprised the same five generations of membership as the Bedouin khamsa. We see an example of this in Joshua (7:18, 24), in which Zerah is the forefather from whom descend the four generations of Zabdi, Carmi, Achan, and the sons of Achan. This may also be reflected in the limit of punishment with which God threatens the Israelites for one individual’s misdoings, namely, “a wrongdoer’s sons and offspring down to the third or fourth generation” (Exod. 34:7). This means that the outer limit

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of responsibility for violations committed by a clansman extends only three or four generations. Four generations removed is identical to what one finds among Bedouin. The specified number three is also akin to Bedouin law, according to which, blood avengers may voluntarily reprieve a killer’s clansmen who are three generations removed from a common forefather.38 In a Bedouin clan, membership passes from a father to his son; that is, it runs in the male, or paternal, line, resulting in children belonging both to their father and to his clan. As related by Hazza al-Majali (a prime minister in Jordan in the 1950s), he was raised by his divorced mother’s parents from infancy. One day in the 1920s, at the age of ten, he was both surprised and shocked when his Bedouin father, whom he had never seen, appeared on horseback at his former in-laws’ encampment to “take his son home.” The maternal grandparents had to soothe the stunned child by telling him that his father was only exercising his right, since the boy really belonged to him.39 By the same token, we find in the Bible that the patriarch Jacob’s sons are enumerated, basically, as his (Gen. 35:22). Mention of their mothers— Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Zilpah and Bilhah—was but secondary (Gen. 33:2, 33:6–7, 35:23–26), since they were irrelevant: the sons all belonged primarily to their father and his clan. When Ishmael, Abraham’s son by the banished concubine Hagar, dies, the Bible depicts him as “gathered to his dead clansmen” (va-ye’asef el ‘ammav; Gen. 25:17); among other evidence that Ishmael was considered a member of his father’s clan is the fact that Esau married his daughter, thinking that a clanswoman wife would endear him to his father, Isaac, Ishmael’s paternal half-brother (Gen. 28:9). Another example of the significance of patrilineal descent is Abimelech, the son of the Israelite judge Gideon and his non-Israelite concubine from the town of Shechem. After his father’s death, Abimelech, on the basis of his mother’s origins, proposed to the Shechemites to be their leader. They, however, rejected the offer, deeming him Israelite, owing to his father (Judg. 9:28).

The Importance of Sons Although sons are preferred to daughters in many of the world’s cultures, this phenomenon among Bedouin has its own justifications. While



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Bedouin women and girls are considered members of their father’s clan, in keeping with the patrilineal determination of a clan, only males, once they have attained maturity, are full and active members, able to contribute to its main role, providing daily security to its members. Among Bedouin, men are defined as those who “can wield a sword and slaughter an animal for a guest’s meal; who can rescue a violated girl and take revenge for spilt blood,” functions requiring more physical strength than is normally found among females.40 We also meet this qualification in the Bible, where a lad is an active member of his bait ab when he reaches the age of twenty (Exod. 38:26) and is able to bear arms (lit. “has had military experience”; Num. 1:3, 26:1). This is confirmed by Psalm 127:3–5. After citing sons as one of God’s greatest gifts to a man, their benefit is explained: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are sons born to a man in his youth. Happy is the man who fills his quiver with them. They will dispel shame as they destroy their enemy” (italics added).41 Weapons (“sword and bow”) as a metaphor for sons is also found in Genesis 48:22, in Jacob’s reference to his sons, who had captured Shechem from the Amorites.42 And when the members of Rebecca’s family see her off to marry Isaac, their blessing is “May your offspring capture the tents of their haters” (Gen. 24:60).43 Thus, since fully grown males are those who perform the role of protectors —not only of the weak within the clan, but of one another—the more grown males a clan includes, the greater its strength and deterrent capability. The Bedouin summarize this need in sayings such as “Count your clansmen before going to battle” and “The many overcome the brave.” Their happiness when a son is born is reflected in their congratulatory greeting “God willing, he’ll be a horseman.”44 Indeed, fathering more male children is a main impetus for Bedouin men to engage in polygamy; hence, the proverb “Marriage is for making men.”45 I have known—in the late twentieth century—Bedouin men whose efforts to have sons have brought the number of their children, male and female, to nineteen, twenty-nine, and fifty-one, from a variety of wives. The Bible is replete with signs of this obsession with male children as a source of power. When Reuben, the first of Jacob’s sons, is born, he is named “Look, it’s a boy!”—“Reu-ben” (Gen. 29:32); Jacob later confirms

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that Reuben, as his firstborn son, “was the beginning of my might” (Gen. 49:3). Jacob is described as going on to father eleven more sons—presumably to increase his might—and Gideon, the father of Abimelech, is said to have begat seventy sons, very likely for the same reason (Judg. 8:30). Abdon the judge had forty sons, and his predecessor, Ibsan, the judge from Bethlehem, is cited as begetting thirty (Judg. 12:8, 14). Both among the Bedouin and in the Bible, women are aware of the importance of sons to their men and of the value of bearing male children for their status as wives. In 2006, in the Negev, the desperation of Sabrin al-Turi, of the Tiyaha confederation, over her failure to bear sons, while her fellow wives had brought their common husband seventeen, drove her to murder one of these boys, age three, by slitting his throat.46 In the Bible, Abraham’s barren wife, Sarai (not yet “Sarah”), took the extreme measure (reportedly practiced in ancient Babylon)47 of offering him her maidservant, Hagar, so that he might father a son by her, thinking that “through her I will be built up” (Gen. 16:2). Hagar, for her part, aware that bearing Abraham a son might gain her an advantage over Sarai in his eyes, was quick to behave disdainfully toward her mistress, once she felt heavy with child (Gen. 16:4). And the story of the competition between Jacob’s wives, Leah, the less loved, and her sister Rachel, to provide their husband with sons also highlights the importance of son bearing to nomadic women (Gen. 29:31–30:24)—even if the overall biblical account was a later fabrication, as many scholars aver. When Leah gives birth to her first son, Reuben, she says: “Now my man will love me,” and after the birth of Levi, she asserts: “Now my man will stick to me, for I have borne him three sons.” Meanwhile, childless and envious Rachel implores Jacob to “give me sons; otherwise I will die,” and presents him her handmaiden Bilhah as a surrogate mother (Gen. 30:1, 4). When Rachel finally gives birth to Joseph, she exclaims, “God has removed my shame” (Gen. 30:23). Even years later, when she brings forth Benjamin, the midwife reassures her with, “Have no fear; this too is a son” (Gen. 35:17). The conviction that a woman is loved, or at least appreciated, in accordance with the number of sons she bears for her husband is also present when the biblical Elkanah of Ramatayim makes a pilgrimage to Shiloh with his wives—Peninah, who has sons, and Hannah, who is barren and



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weeps bitterly in prayer, asking God for a male child (1 Sam. 1:11). Indeed, Elkanah, in trying to console her, declares that his love for her, even in her barrenness, is so great that it could not be more if she had “ten sons” (1 Sam. 1:8).48 The barren Hannah’s misery was of course inconsolable, because the sine qua non of a woman’s happiness, as Psalm 113:9 affirms, is “sitting among sons.” Thus too, when God wishes to reward the Egyptian midwives for foiling Pharaoh’s plan to kill all the newborn Hebrew males, he enables them to conceive sons (lit. “build families”; Exod. 1:21).49 And when David wished to punish his first wife, Michal, for insulting him, he withheld himself from her so that she could “not bear a son till the day she died” (2 Sam. 6:20–23). So important are sons to a clan and its martial prowess that the lack of them is considered a calamity. Among Bedouin, an impotent man is termed “useless” (mish nafi), and his standing within the clan is low. Also, a tent without sons is dubbed “a dry dwelling,” dryness in the desert denoting need and hopelessness. By the same token, one of the strongest curses a Bedouin can voice is that his opponent will lose his sons, uttered, for example, as a warning lest the latter swear a false oath: “One by one, may your clansmen and male offspring be cut down!”—and you be rendered defenseless.50 Accordingly, when the biblical patriarch Abraham wished to obligate his servant to bring a bride for Isaac from Aram-Naharaim, he had him touch his thigh—the standard biblical euphemism for the male sexual organ— and swear his commitment. The significance of the act was to threaten him with a lack of male offspring in the event he reneged (Gen. 24:2).51 Similarly, Jacob demanded that his son Joseph perform the same symbolic act when having him swear to bury him in Canaan rather than Egypt (Gen. 47:29). Likewise, when Esau came to his brother Jacob in a dream, north of the Jabbok River in Transjordan, he repeatedly hit him “in the upper thigh,” thereby imperiling his potency unless he restored to him the blessing he had stolen from their father, Isaac (Gen. 32:26–27).52 In the same vein, the book of Leviticus (20:20–21) rules that the appropriate punishment for a man fornicating with the wife of his brother or paternal uncle is that he and the woman were to die “without sons.” Joshua, after destroying Jericho,

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cursed anyone who would rebuild the city: “He shall lay its foundations at the cost of his first-born son and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest” (Josh. 6:26). Among Bedouin and in the Bible, both, the fear of having few males in a clan is revealed in attitudes toward warfare. Traditionally, most Bedouin warfare consisted of raids and ambushes, which, owing to the element of surprise, saved clansmen from exposure to danger and death. Ambushes generally took the form of feigned attacks followed by flight supposedly prompted by initial failure; finally, there was an ambush of the pursuing enemy force. Since pre-Islamic times, Bedouin have named this method “assault and flight” (karr u-farr). An oral tradition in the Negev from about 1799 relates that when the Ramadin tribe sought revenge upon the chief of the dominant Wuheidat tribe for having molested one of their shepherdesses, they staged such an attack on his camp, fled, and finally killed the pursuing chief in an ambush. Bedouin remember this event because it precipitated the invasion and conquest of the Negev by the henceforth dominant confederations, the Tiyaha and the Tarabin.53 Before the twentieth century, raids for pillage, the most common form of combat, were also performed in a manner to prevent losses among the assailants as well as the killing of the assailed and any consequent acts of revenge. Bedouin sayings informed such assaults, for example, by counseling “an attack as the stars are setting,” that is, when the enemy is still sleeping and when the early dawn enables the raiding party to discern persons from other objects. If an attack isn’t successful, proverbs advise flight: “On camels’ backs to the mountaintops!” and “From frightful events, one can flee.” All this, the Bedouin metaphorically explain, is because “short ears [men] are a total loss; for long ears [livestock] there’s recompense.”54 In the Bible, raids for plunder and ambushes are also in evidence. In distant Sinai, the Amelekites of the Negev made a surprise raid on the Israelites, who were newly out of Egypt and still unfamiliar with the desert (Exod. 17:8–13). They later raided them, together with the Midianites and other peoples from the east, during the time of Israelite settlement in the heart of Canaan (Judg. 6:3–5; 1 Sam. 30:14). They also raided the Philistines and the Cherethites, plundering them. The Israelites raided Midian, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Bashan, the Philistines, the Amelekites, the Geshurites and



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the Gizrites, among others (see, e.g., Num. 21:33, 22:1, 25:16–17; 1 Sam. 14:47–48, 27:8)—taking “the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs and whatever was of value” (1 Sam. 15:9). Indeed, in keeping with Bedouin methods of attack to prevent loss of life, and in keeping with the proverbial counsel cited above, David began his raid on the Amelekites “just before daybreak” (1 Sam. 30:17). Although Bedouin-like ambushes are not often reflected in the Bible, Joshua used the ploy to take the city of Ai. By feigning an assault on the city and then having his troops pretend to flee, Joshua took advantage of the pursuit by the army of Ai to command his men, who had been lying in ambush, to attack the pursuers and set fire to their city (Josh. 8:4–8, 8:9–22). In the book of Judges (20:29–47), too, a united force of Israelites resorted to an ambush against the tribe of Benjamin after the latter, whom they sought to punish for the rape of a Bethlehemite woman in its territory, proved too steadfast to defeat by outward attack. The importance of a clan’s ability to ensure its members’ security by increasing its size through sons is also manifest in the clan’s efforts to attract outside members. If a premodern Bedouin khamsa, or clan, decided to accept a person for membership, the successful aspirant had to go through a ceremony of affiliation witnessed in three tents, a way of ensuring that the mutual responsibility created by the joining would gain widespread notice. In each tent, the joiner and the elder of his new clan would, in the presence of the notable tent owner, bury some pebble-sized stones in the ground to symbolize the permanence of the new affiliation. This was called “burying the gravel.” The elder of the recipient clan thereupon recited the traditional formula for admitting a new member: “You are leaving a khamsa and coming to a khamsa: we are completely of one blood.” The joiner then donned a new garment and burned an old one to symbolize that he was exchanging the protection, or cover, of his former clan for that of the new one. He enumerated his obligations to the latter by pronouncing a formulaic oath of allegiance:55 I hereby burn my dress and join with you In problems of blood and others. I’ll pursue when you pursue and flee when you flee.56 My son will suffice like your son;

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My daughter will suffice like your daughter; My camel-mare will suffice like your camel-mare.

This donning of the cloak of the new clan symbolized the premodern Bedouin joiner’s assuming of all the responsibilities of a clan, and the Bible has symbolism for the same commitment. Here, the joining or forming of a clan “with God” was symbolized by circumcision, “marked in your flesh,” which God demanded of Abraham “as an everlasting pact.”57 Future generations of clansmen were to reaffirm this pact by undergoing circumcision, as were external joiners—“the home-born slave and the one bought from an outsider” (Gen. 17:13). Accordingly, when the sons of Jacob suggested that all the Shechemite men undergo circumcision (Gen. 34:15–16), it was an offer to merge their clans—“we will be ‘one clan’ ” (Heb. ‘am ehad)—through which, among other things, each party’s daughters would be available for marriage to men of the other party, in keeping with the endogamous ibn amm marriage of Bedouin. For providing security to a clan’s members, secondary in importance to increased membership is the solidarity that should prevail among clansmen themselves. W. Robertson Smith, the late nineteenth-century British Orientalist and Bible scholar, defined standing by one’s clan (“ultimate group”) as a Bedouin’s “paramount obligation . . . before which all other considerations disappeared.”58 A clan’s solidarity ensures that outsiders will likely respect the potential for might indicated by its size. The Bedouin underscore the weakness of a discordant clan in their metaphorical saying “A spear with no one to raise it is worthless,” and they counsel cohesion: “There’s no gain in a clan whose rights get lost through dissension.”59 To maintain cohesion, Bedouin are cautioned to contain their internal conflicts and be solicitous of clansmen, as in the lines of a poem, “Be careful to suffer your clansman’s mistake / Don’t hold him a foe in your heart though it ache / Any shame on your clansman hurts you in its wake,” and in the maxim “When one turns to his clansman, even if he’s wrong, he’s not.” Another adage, “The greatest concern is one’s killing one’s clansman,” while reminding Bedouin that their mutual security stems largely from their numbers, also warns that internecine conflict may get out of hand and weaken the group.60



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Awareness of the importance of clan solidarity is also found in the Bible. When Lot and Abraham and their shepherds quarreled because of the paucity of pasture in Canaan, Abraham said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are clansmen,” and they went so far as to part company in order to prevent further hostility (Gen. 13:8). In later legislation, Leviticus (19:16–18) and Deuteronomy (23:20) forbid taking interest from a clansman, hating him, gossiping about him, or holding a grudge or taking revenge against him.61 DeuteroIsaiah, too, highlights this extreme regard for solidarity by including “Don’t ignore your clansmen [when they’re in trouble]” among the items of ethical behavior that God most desired of his people (Is. 58:7). King David, too, appreciated the value of clan solidarity. When confronted with the story fabricated by the woman of Tekoa, concerning a clan that sought to take revenge on a member who had killed his own brother, David deemed it wrong (2 Sam. 14:6–11). His judgment revealed that a pervasive instinct of solidarity, while originally vital to the security of a nomadic clan, continued to exist even when clans had grown into tribes. This was manifest when the fellow tribes of Israel were scandalized by the rape that men of the tribe of Benjamin had perpetrated upon the concubine of a man of the tribe of Ephraim. They demanded that the Benjaminites turn the rapists over for punishment, but the latter refused to break ranks, preferring to risk a ruinous war instead (Judg. 19:13). The major exception, perhaps introduced into the Bible to advocate loyalty to God over loyalty to clan and tribe, was the case of the Levites, who, carrying out Moses’s orders, slaughtered fellow clansmen for worshipping the Golden Calf in Sinai (Exod. 32:27–28).62

Women in the Clan Among Bedouin and in the Bible, the diminutive status of women in the clan, as compared to that of males, is amply evident. To begin with, the birth of a Bedouin daughter is seen as contributing nothing to the clan or to the standing of her father. The Bedouin proverb “A man who begets will not die, unless his offspring are daughters” expresses this clearly.63 In the Bible, this attitude is reflected in the way that Jacob’s daughter

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Dinah is ignored. Her birth is recorded without the joyous commentary that accompanies her brothers’ births (Gen. 30:21). Later, upon leaving Aram for Canaan, Jacob is cited as seating his sons and wives on camels, implying his concern for their comfort, but there is no indication of Dinah’s form of conveyance (Gen. 31:17). When her father comments on the status of his sons near the end of his life, Dinah is not mentioned at all (Gen. 49:1–27). The biblical Israelite preference for male over female children was institutionalized in the laws of purity. Whereas a postnatal woman’s impurity is fixed at only seven days following the birth of a boy, it lasts for two weeks when a girl is born. Whereas the postnatal mother of a son is forbidden to touch anything sacred for a further thirty-three days after the first period of impurity, the same prohibition lasts sixty-six days following the birth of a daughter (Lev. 12:2–5). This inferior status of a woman in her clan, whether Bedouin or biblical, originates, like so much else, in the overriding concern for safety. Although a Bedouin woman belongs to her father’s clan throughout her life, her membership is only partial. Primarily, this is because her children may not belong to her clan at all, which happens if she marries a non-clansman. A Bedouin legal maxim says, “You can command the son of your son, but not the son of your daughter,” indicating that the son of one’s daughter belongs to the clan of her husband. Indeed, her father’s clan may, one day, find itself in conflict with that of her husband. As if to confirm the likelihood of such conflict, a Bedouin proverb blatantly states: “A sister’s son is his maternal uncle’s foe.”64 This principle explains why a woman does not inherit from her father’s legacy, as asserted by two Bedouin legal maxims: “Whatever the condition of a daughter, she doesn’t inherit” and, specifically, “Land is bequeathed to the men-folk.”65 Both sayings reflect every clan’s fear that a daughter or widow will marry a non-clansman and bequeath any property she would otherwise have inherited to her non-clan children, thereby enabling a potentially hostile group to dwell in their midst.66 Thus, when Salim al-Uwaywi, of the Azazma Asiyat in the central Negev, died in the 1950s, his land went to a distant clansman, Subhi al-Uwaywi, rather than to his daughter, Uz‘eina.67 At most, Bedouin law entitles a widow with minor children to maintain her late husband’s land in trust for their support, on the condition that she not remarry.



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Such low-key hostility toward the non-clan sons of one’s daughter is evident in the Bible, too. There, for instance, a widowed or divorced woman born into a priestly clan, but married outside it, can return to her father’s tent to live only if she did not bear male children to her non-clan husband (Lev. 22:12–13). Even if this injunction was introduced into Leviticus primarily to prevent unauthorized persons from partaking of the sacred food of a priest’s home, as the Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom held, it partially, at least, confirms that a woman’s sons from a non-clansman are strangers to her father’s clan.68 The perceived necessity of clansmen to dwell apart from other clans— and its impact on inheritance by women—is also reflected in the biblical story of Zelophehad’s daughters. Men of the subtribe or clan of Machir in the tribe of Manasseh went to Moses (Num. 36:1–10) to express their concern in case the five daughters of their deceased clansman Zelophehad should inherit land in their tribal territory, which would have been in keeping with what Moses had previously determined (Num. 27:1–11) when apportioning future landholdings among the twelve tribes of Israel (Num. 26:52–56). Zelophe­had’s clansmen, not unlike the Bedouin, feared that their female cousins would marry non-tribesmen69 and that the latter, in turn, would bequeath the land to their own sons and remove it from the joint holdings of the Manasseh tribe. Ultimately, Moses amended his earlier ruling in the men’s favor, stipulating that each of Zelophehad’s daughters—and all daughters who inherit property—had to marry “a clansman in her father’s tribe” (l-ehad mimishpahat mateh aviha—Num. 36:8), which the girls in question in fact did by marrying men of the same clan (“sons of their uncles”; Num. 36:11–12). The story, ending with this emphasis, thereby reaffirmed the original clan dimension of the concern for territorial integrity. Another biblical case reflecting the prohibition on women inheriting land lest they marry non-clansmen was that of Caleb Ben Jephunnah, of the tribe of Judah. His ability to make a gift of land to his daughter Achsah may have been possible only once she married her clansman Othniel (Josh. 15:16–19). Again, in the case of the biblical Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth, her ability to offer for sale the property that had belonged to her late husband, Elimelekh (Ruth 4:3), may have been conditional on Ruth’s eventually marrying one of Elimelekh’s clansmen (Ruth 3:2–4).

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A similar practice for preventing the incursion of non-clansmen is found among Bedouin and in the Bible. It grants male clansmen preemption in the purchase of land owned by a fellow tribesman.70 In the Bible, this is reflected in Leviticus 25:25–28, which stipulates the redemption of land that a man in economic straits plans to sell or mortgage to a non-clansman; if he has already done so, such land can be released either by being bought back by a clansman or by its mandatory release in a jubilee year. We find such preemption practiced in two biblical stories. One is in the book of Ruth, which illustrates how a clan’s wish to prevent part of its joint landholdings from passing to outsiders (Ruth 4:3–5) underlies the practice. Boaz offers to buy the field of his deceased clansman Elimelekh from his indigent widow, Naomi, presumably to forestall her from selling it to a non-clansman. Boaz describes his action as “restoring” (lig’ol, i.e., to the clan) “the plot of our clansman Elimelekh” and thereby establishing “the deceased clansman’s name on his holding.” The second story, from Jeremiah 32:7–8, relates another act of preemption. The prophet is approached by Hanamel, the son of his uncle Shallum, who says to him, “Buy my land in Anathoth, for you are next in succession to restore it by purchase.” In place of the full membership that Bedouin women are denied in their father’s clan, they enjoy the status of protected persons. One aspect of this status is that her clansmen are responsible for her physical and moral welfare even after she is married. The Bedouin legal instruction is that “the good of a woman is for her husband; the bad is for her clansmen,” “bad” comprising acts perpetrated against her as well as her own misdeeds, moral or physical.71 In Bedouin law, therefore, both rape and fornication are problems to be dealt with by her clansmen, not her husband.72 In the Bible, too, we find that the legal responsibility for a woman’s behavior resides with her clan. Leviticus 21:9, for example, decrees that the harlotry of a woman “desecrates her [priestly] father”—his clansmen having appointed him to raise her to moral probity.73 Accordingly, if a newly married woman is shown not to have come to her nuptials a virgin (Deut. 22:20), it signifies that her father failed in his societal responsibility and must bear the shame for her misdeed. To draw attention to his negligence, therefore, his daughter’s mandated execution by stoning would take place specifically “at the entrance to her father’s house” (Deut. 22:21).74



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Since Bedouin are responsible for their women’s welfare, they are reluctant to marry them off to non-clansmen who might take her to a place too distant for them to effectively protect her. Such vulnerability was affirmed by the bards who sang the well-known Bedouin saga of Abu Zayd, the semilegendary leader of the Bani Hilal tribe, which emigrated from central Arabia to North Africa in the tenth century CE.75 The narrative poem relates that before the grand departure: Abu Zayd convened his tribe and said: “On Thursday and Friday we move! He whose wife is a girl of his clan will bring forth his camel and pack. He who has two wives, one an outsider, should ask her choice between family and spouse.”76

While these lines take for granted that a wife married to a clansman may safely go anywhere with him, under his presumed protection, they imply that a wife from a different clan cannot be arbitrarily removed from their proximity and shelter without her consent. If she agrees to the separation, her clansmen must also concur; if she objects, they, as her legal protectors, have a right and duty to prevent it. To highlight the opprobrium associated with marrying girls off to distant non-clansmen, Bedouin in Sinai relate the story of a man of the Huwaytat Dubur tribe in southern Jordan who married his daughter off to an unrelated friend from the Aheiwat Safeiha confederation in remote western Sinai. As described at a trial that her visiting brother convoked against a clansman of her husband who had been making stubborn advances toward her, she, as a stranger, had no one to whom to complain until her brother came along. This was carved into the common memory with a multirhyme phrase used by the brother to rebut the claim made by his contestants that his sister should have complained to her husband within three and a third days of the assault. It went: She is a woman whose complaint and weeping Were concealed in her bosom, till her clansmen came.

That is, she could not rely on her husband to look after her rights, certainly not against his own clansmen. This degree of protection is conveyed in the Bible, too. When Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban, willingly leave their father’s household to

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immigrate to distant Canaan with their husband, Jacob, Laban makes him swear that he will not mistreat his daughters (Gen. 31:48–50). Although Jacob is a member of Laban’s clan (three generations removed from the forefather, Terah), the girls’ father felt justified in having him take this oath, since Jacob was of only remote kinship to his wives (who were four generations removed from the common ancestor) and openly in conflict with their father. A generation earlier, by contrast, when Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac from among the same fellow clansmen in northern Syria, the father and brother of the chosen bride, Rebecca, agreed to the distant marriage unconditionally (Gen. 24:50–53). Still, in the manner of Abu Zayd’s reservations, they asked Rebecca’s consent, owing to the great distance between Haran, her family’s home, and Canaan, her own future home (Gen. 24:58). Also, like the Bedouin custom of a bride going back to her family for one or two weeks following the consummation of the marriage, in order to digest the change in her life,77 the request of biblical Rebecca’s family to let her tarry with them “some ten days” may have been meant as compensation for the distance that would deprive her of frequent visits (Gen. 24:55). The importance to a woman’s welfare of living near her clansmen is also demonstrated in the biblical story of the Shunemite woman who prepared a shelter in her home for the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 4:13). Thinking that her kindness stemmed from some need for assistance, he asked her, “What can we do for you? Can we speak on your behalf to the king or army commander?” Her reply was to dismiss his offer as superfluous; as she curtly explained, “I dwell among my clansmen (‘ammi)”—who, as implied, would look after her. By the same token, Naomi, deprived of the protection of her late husband, Elimelekh, and their two deceased sons while she lived in the foreign land of Moab, decided to return to her clansmen—ammayk, as termed by her daughters-in-law (Ruth 1:10). The above affirms that in the Bible as well as among Bedouin, the perceived weakness of women is one explanation for their clansmen’s obligation to protect them—an obligation that affects the males’ honor just as it reflects their professed superiority. To maintain these roles, however, it is incumbent on women to preserve the image of their inferiority. In particular, they must remain aloof from the offensive and defensive activ-



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ities of the clan, as asserted in the Bedouin proverb “Men don’t count on women to defend their rights.”78 In keeping with this constraint, for example, Bedouin law holds that a woman who participates in any clash with men forfeits her legal award for any harm caused her, which is normally compounded in order to deter men from violating her as a weak creature. In the 1930s, for example, the wife of a man called al-Atrash, of the Muzayna Sakhana tribe in southeast Sinai, tried to stop men of the Tarabin Hasablah tribe from cutting dates from her absent husband’s palm trees. She began pushing the Tarabin men away from the trees, whereupon one of their number, Ateiwi Imsallam al-Alowna, drew his sword and slapped her backside hard with the flat of it. When the date-palm problem finally came to litigation before the Muzayna judge, Jum‘a Hamdan Abu Sabha, he assessed the woman’s injury as a single violation rather than the normal twofold, because she had dared to assail the invaders.79 Although this judgment came from a judge who belonged to the same tribe as the woman, it was severe, seeking to highlight the importance with which Bedouin regard the difference between the roles of men and women. In the Bible, the exclusion of women from hostilities also exists. In Deuteronomy 25:11–12, we read: “If two men get into a fight with each other, and the wife of one comes up to save her husband from his antagonist and puts out her hand and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show no pity.” It is quite obvious that preservation of the social order accounts for the severity of this biblical provision.

Matrimony Given the importance of sons in Bedouin society, it is not surprising that the main function of a married woman is to bear them. As cited, Bedouin men say, “Matrimony is for sons,” and when they practice polygamy, they assert: “He who collects more wives begets more men.”80 Although levirate marriage—by which a man marries the widow of his deceased brother or clansman in order to enable her to bear a son in the latter’s name—is not a Bedouin practice, its incidence in the Bible, in the practice of khalitsa (Deut. 25:5–10; Ruth 4:1–10), indicates that marriage was essentially a contract for hiring the body of a woman to bear sons to her husband’s family

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and clan. In Genesis 38:6–30, therefore, when Er, the eldest son of Judah, dies, leaving his wife, Tamar, childless, his father urges Er’s brother Onan to marry her, even if to no avail. Thereafter, seeing Judah remiss in having his third son, Shelah, perform the task, Tamar takes the initiative and tricks her father-in-law into making her pregnant, and she gets to bear twins for his clan. In the book of Ruth, Boaz—in addition to securing control of ­Elimelekh’s land for their clan—marries the childless Ruth, declaredly so that she can bear a son in the name of her late husband, Mahlon (Ruth 4:10), a son, therefore, who would strengthen their common clan. Although marriage among the Bedouin and in the Bible is ultimately for the benefit of the clan, marital arrangements are, first and foremost, the preserve of the couple’s immediate families. The father of the groom, for example, is zealous about his exclusive role in the matrimony of his son; that is, he wishes to ensure that the latter’s male offspring from the marriage will represent a contribution on his part to the power of their clan and thereby strengthen his position in it. For example, since Bedouin believe that children inherit their essential qualities from their mother’s clan (“Two-thirds of a son come from his maternal uncle”), the father of an aspiring groom is said to “scout out a maternal uncle for his son,” that is, to find a woman whose brothers are men possessed of virtues that her son will carry and that will enable him, when a man, to be an asset to his clan.81 As mentioned, producing such a man will also enhance the relative influence of the groom’s lineage in clan councils. In addition to the above considerations, a groom’s family may seek a bride from a family that can offer them economic benefits such as the use of their cisterns when the rainy season is done or cooperation in herding or smuggling.82 While traveling with a Bedouin from east to west in southern Sinai in 1972, I visited the sisters of his companion, whom the latter had married off to men of three tribes, each inhabiting places along his smuggling routes. To ensure the consideration of such interests, therefore, the responsibility for choosing the mate for a Bedouin son or daughter does not reside with the prospective couple but rather with the father (or uncles and mature brothers, in the absence of a competent father) of the groom. Evidence that the norm in the biblical milieu was also for fathers to choose wives for their sons may be witnessed from the cases cited in Gen-



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esis, such as Abraham, the father of Isaac (24:2); Isaac, the father of Jacob (28:1–2); Hamor, the father of Shechem (34:4); and Judah, the father of Er and Onan (38:6–8). In the absence of a father, we find Hagar, the (single) mother of Ishmael (21:21), fulfilling the role. In this regard, it is also relevant that it was the attributed immediate family of Moses—his brother Aaron and sister Miriam—who reprimanded him for taking a Midianite (“Cushite”) wife (Num. 12:1). The immediate family of a Bedouin girl is no less zealous to maintain their prerogative to marry her off than they are in the case of a boy. Her marriage, too, is an opportunity for them to gain, in exchange for authorizing their daughter to bear sons who will strengthen the groom’s clan (in an exogamous marriage) or a different lineage within their joint clan (if the marriage is endogamous). Plus, they are losing a shepherdess for their own flocks. Their gain usually comes in the form of a bride-price, which they retain, and a gift of jewelry for the bride’s mother.83 The Bedouin legal maxim stressing the absolute exclusivity of a father in this capacity says, “A father has no partner in his daughter’s betrothal, not even his brother.”84 Only the death or incapacity of the girl’s father transfers the role to her brothers, as noted above. If she has no brothers, her next-closest clansman assumes it. In Bedouin law, any attempt to bind a couple in matrimony without the consent of the woman’s family leaves the latter with a legal claim against the validity of the marriage and against the groom and his clan. In 1967, for example, among the Azazma Sarahin in eastern Sinai, Owda Salman al-­ Owraydi, an Azazma chief and head of the Owraydat clan, took upon himself to marry off, in her father’s absence, the daughter of his clansman Owda Sulayman al-Hadobe to a member of the Iz‘aylat clan as partial compensation for the murder of one of their women. Hadobe protested that no one had the right to usurp his paternal right. Thus, with the dissolution of the border between Israel and Egypt after the Six-Day War, in June of that year, Hadobe betook himself to the Negev, where he received the protection of Owda Abu Mu‘ammar, the paramount chief of the Azazma, who legally succeeded in extricating Hadobe’s daughter from this attempt to circumvent the law.85 Often, if a father persists in his refusal, a suitor may resort to abducting the girl, which is illegal, even if addressed by the law through mediation.86

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In the Bible, too, it is the father who marries off his daughter as well as his son. This is clearly seen in Deuteronomy 22:13–21. There, in the hypothetical case of a bride being accused of having come to her nuptials not a virgin, her father, in taking her defense, declares to the elders of the town: “I gave this man my daughter to wive.” We also find in Genesis 24:50 that it is Rebecca’s father and brother, Betuel and Laban, who decide to marry her off to Isaac. Laban, not unlike a Bedouin girl’s family, is attracted by the potential material benefits they stand to reap, judging from the gifts that Abraham’s emissary gave Rebecca (Gen. 24:53), which suggested the gifts that he and her mother might receive.87 It is also Laban who afterward determines that his daughters, Leah and Rachel, will be Jacob’s wives, in exchange for Jacob’s fourteen years of shepherding his flocks (Gen. 29:15– 19). In subsequent biblical narratives, we witness the father’s prerogative in this area, as when Caleb gives his daughter Achsah in marriage to Othniel (Josh. 15:16–17) and King Saul designates his daughter Merab as the bride of David (1 Sam. 18:20–21). In the book of Judges (21:21), the right of a girl’s immediate family not to marry her off had to be overcome by abducting her. The other tribes of Israel counseled members of the outcast tribe of Benjamin to do just that after they themselves had decimated the Benjaminites, including their women, in war. Again, as regards both Benjaminites and Bedouin, the rules for legalizing the abduction of a bride exist, including mediation.88 Accordingly, the tribes counseling Benjamin to resort to abduction took upon themselves to mediate, saying: “If their fathers or brothers come to us to complain, we shall say to them: Be generous with [Benjamin] for our sake” (Judg. 21:22). As in many other cultures around the world where endogamous marriage is prominent, we find among Bedouin and in the Bible both endogamous and exogamous marriages—marriage within a clan and marriage to outsiders. On the one hand, hoping to keep the unity and peace of their clans intact, Bedouin harbor a prevalent sentiment favoring marriage within the clan. A well-known line of didactic poetry heard in Sinai goes, “Marry only a paternal cousin, she’ll put your mind to rest / She’ll be patient when you’re away and welcome your return.”89 Owing to the strength of clan loyalties and interclan rivalries, Bedouin often view the presence of



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an outsider woman, perhaps still loyal to her father’s clan, as a potential fifth column in their midst. Indeed, to strengthen the tendency to practice endogamous marriage, every newborn Bedouin girl is immediately engaged to a male clansman roughly her age; if her father wishes to break that engagement when she is marriageable, he must obtain the designated male cousin’s consent and compensate him so that he can pay a bride-price for a non-clan bride.90 The above notwithstanding, Bedouin recognize the reality implicit in the adage “Girls of the west go east, and girls of the east go west,” conscious, as noted, that a girl’s father may have economic or social reasons for marrying his daughter into a close family with whom a relationship can provide for particular needs.91 For example, Frayj Himayd al-Saddan, of the Azazma Sarahin tribe in the central Negev, refused, in 1995, to marry his daughter to her designated cousin, Sulayman Swaylim Abu Bilayya, arranging instead to give her in marriage to the son of a close non-clan friend, Labbad al-­ Tassan. For his part, Abu Bilayya, insisting on his “closest cousin right” to marry the girl, could do so only by absconding with her.92 In the Bible, too, we have examples of marriage both within and outside the clan. In the first case, the sentiment favoring endogamous marriage was strongly expressed by Abraham, who not only ordered his servant to journey to Aram-Naharaim, from where he had come, telling him: “Go to my clan and my family and get a wife for my son [Isaac]” (Gen. 24:36), but also made him swear that he would not take a wife for his son from the “daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell” (Gen. 24:3). Isaac, Jacob’s father, sent him to Paddan-Aram to find a wife from their clan (Gen. 28:2), especially after his own wife, Rebecca, bemoaned the fact that Esau, their other son, had embittered her life by marrying outsider, Hittite women, saying, “If Jacob marries women like these, what good will my life be to me?” (Gen. 27:46). On the other hand, circumstances often induced biblical figures to marry outside the clan. Such, for example, may have been the case of Esau, cut off in Canaan from his clansmen in Paddan-Aram93 (Gen. 26:34). It may also explain the cases of Judah, the son of Jacob, who married Bat-shua, a ­Canaanite woman (Gen. 38:2; 1 Chron. 2:3); Simeon, who also married a Canaanite (Gen. 46:10); and their brother Joseph, who, living away from his

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family in Egypt, married a woman from there, Osnat (Gen. 46:20). In the book of Ruth (1:4), the Israelite Naomi’s sons, Mahlon and ­Chilion, living in Moab, married local women, one of them Ruth. Among the judges, Ibsan of Bethlehem took particular pride in the fact that he had married his thirty sons and thirty daughters to outsiders (Judg. 12:8–9; see also 3:6). Then there was King David, who had eight non-clan wives (1 Sam. 25; 1 Chron. 3:1–5), and Solomon, whose wives numbered seven hundred (1 Kings 11:3), many of whom were presumably “outsider” women, too. Naturally, political interests gave rise to exogamous marriages in the Bible, as they do among Bedouin. Thus, King Saul, who hailed from the tribe of Benjamin, was not deterred from offering his daughter Merab in marriage to David, the young hero from the tribe of Judah, saying clearly: “Here is my older daughter, Merab. I will give her to you in marriage; in return you be my warrior and fight the battles of the Lord” (1 Sam. 18:17). Similarly, King Solomon may have married the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh in order to gain from him the Canaanite city of Gezer as her dowry (1 Kings 9:16). Perhaps these examples of exogamous marriages during the periods of the judges and the monarchy also reflect the accelerating dynamic of absorbing more of the residents of Canaan into the Israelite population and religion.

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Desert Laws

Laws without Government Down to the mid-twentieth century CE, the deserts of the Middle East were a wilderness too daunting for governments to penetrate enough to make their rule pervasive. As far back in recorded history as the ninth-­ century-BCE Assyrian period in Mesopotamia, governments confined their presence to imperial or provincial capitals located at the desert’s edge,1 which made them scarcely available for protecting the widely scattered, ­desert-dwelling Bedouin and their rights to life, limb, honor, and property. Thus, something more nebulous, “Bedouin society,” had to provide this protection through a conventionalized legal system that included, in particular, one’s right to use private might to deter and rectify violations perpetrated against one or one’s clan, whether homicide, the violation of women, or many lesser offenses.2 Given the biblical portrayal of the earliest Israelites as desert-dwelling nomads, some of the laws ascribed to them are consistent with the laws of the nomadic Bedouin. Although such laws are dispersed throughout the Bible, they are nonetheless identifiable, especially insofar as they reflect the same absence of governmental law enforcement that always forced Middle Eastern nomads to fend for themselves. By contrast, the biblical commandments purportedly given in Sinai—“Thou shall not kill” and “Thou shall not steal”—seem not to have Bedouin roots. They would have been hollow

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admonitions in the absence of governmental mechanisms to punish their violation—mechanisms unlikely to have existed among the depicted Israelite nomads, either when they first came to Canaan or even after they began to settle down, in the twelfth century BCE.3 The most obvious biblical parallels to Bedouin law appear in narratives of vengeance. They highlight its necessity for protecting people, even as late as the tenth-century kingdom of David, when governmental law enforcement agencies were still not in place. It explains, for example, the murder of Abner Ben Ner by King David’s military commander Joab Ben Zeruiah in retaliation for the former’s having killed Joab’s brother, Asahel, affirming that the desert law of blood revenge was still being observed (2 Sam. 3:27). Subtler similarities to Bedouin law surface in scattered passages throughout the Bible, such as the metaphor “Fathers eat sour grapes and the teeth of their sons become numb” (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2) that reflects the Bedouin legal principle of collective responsibility, which implicates several generations.4 This responsibility, which Bedouin devised to prevent the evasion of justice in a mobile, nomadic society, allowed revenge to be taken not just against a violator but against any member of his clan. Biblical laws with similarities in Bedouin culture are also found in the “Covenant Code” (Exod. 21–24) on matters as diverse as treachery, fornication, respect, fines, weak members of society, oaths, testimony, and the dispensation of justice—laws that point to a pre-urban origin and that might be suitable, for example, to the exodus experience in Sinai, which was the code’s biblically depicted desert provenance.5 Several of the Bedouin-type laws in the Covenant Code can be identified in the Babylonian Laws of Hammurabi (LH), of the sixteenth century BCE, even though those laws have largely been seen as pertaining to a sedentary, rather than nomadic, society. Two recent scholars, however—Abraham Malamat and Samuel Greengus—have pointed out that the nomadic Amorites, who dominated Babylon for centuries before Hammurabi, also had an influence on his laws.6 This helps explain their resemblance to those of the Bedouin in matters such as ordeal (LH2), trials (LH4), theft (LH8, 9, 10, 112), guests (LH 23), damages from negligence (LH55), and oaths (LH103, 106, 117).



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The above notwithstanding, we should bear in mind that many legal elements in the Hebrew Bible bear no resemblance to Bedouin law, having originated in a later, sedentary, perhaps urban Israelite society where—as opposed to the desert environment—governmental law-enforcement agencies existed to punish transgressions. As these agencies increasingly developed following the establishment of the Israelite monarchy, they may have become so normal a facet of life that the authors of the Bible retrojected their own laws and legal institutions backward into what they portrayed as the earlier stages of Israelite history—such as the lives of the patriarchs, the Exodus, the wanderings in Sinai and Transjordan, and the settlement in Canaan—when the Israelites are portrayed as having lived in the desert or to have only recently emerged from it. One example pertains to the police, an institution that does not exist in Bedouin law, which treats any governmental force like a potentially hostile clan. After the Golden Calf incident in Sinai, for instance, although Moses, acting like a Bedouin in the biblical presentation, enlisted his own clansmen, the Levites, to reestablish his authority, the biblical authors portrayed them as a neutral police force. They are described as going back and forth through the Israelite camp with drawn swords and slaughtering a reported three thousand men, including their own clansmen (“brothers and sons”) (Exod. 32:26–29; Deut. 33:9). A similar retrojection tells us that Moses was also possessed of police for suppressing the debauchery of the Israelites at Baal Pe’or (Num. 25:5).7 By the same token, the empowerment of judges to dispense physical punishments, such as whipping, contradicts Bedouin law, where physical punishment can be inflicted only by the clansmen of a violated party, and never as part of a judicial sentence.8 A Bedouin judge who issued such a sentence would become a party to the conflict—all the more so if he personally took part in its execution. Thus, the prescriptions in Deuteronomy 25:2 (“If the guilty one is to be flogged, the judge shall have him lie down and be given lashes in his presence”) and 22:18, instructing the elders of a town to flog a man who has falsely dishonored his wife, or the public stoning prescribed for sons and daughters who shame their parents (Deut. 21:18–21, 22:21) are patently not of Bedouin origin. More likely, such laws stem from societal and religious materials deriving from the practices and

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values of neighboring ancient civilizations such as the Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, and Egyptian.9 Another example of a non-Bedouin ruling is found in Deuteronomy 24:16 (“Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents: a person will be put to death only for his own crime”), which negates the Bedouin rules of collective responsibility. This responsibility, which Bedouin, as stated, devised to prevent the evasion of justice in a mobile, nomadic society, allows for revenge against any member of a violator’s clan, as intimated in the aforementioned reverse maxim, “Fathers eat sour grapes and the teeth of their sons become numb.” To better appreciate what might be Bedouin similarities to biblical injunctions in the realm of law, let us explore the institutions of vengeance, protection, and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

Vengeance Deterrence Among Bedouin, who have to establish their own security, the aim of retaliation is not to punish violators but rather to promote deterrence among other potential offenders. Deterrence derives from a reputation for not tolerating any violation against oneself and for being able to make a violator suffer. This idea, that such a reputation ensures a person’s security from major violations, is further reinforced by the view that one must rectify all violations, even minor ones. Bedouin say, “If you beat the dog, the panther will learn to stay away.”10 Metaphorically, Bedouin liken a violated person to a camel that cannot go on walking in the desert, because the load it bears is unbalanced and tilting. Accordingly, they express both “out of balance” and “violated” by the same Arabic adjective, “tilted” (mayil); while “restored balance” and “a rectified right” are both expressed by the same noun, adl, which contains the image of “straight.” Thus, adl, balance, as in the balancing of a camel’s load, also became a Bedouin’s term for justice, because justice, in his eyes, meant the restoration of his reputation for strength and resolve after it had been challenged by someone’s violation of his rights. It is only when a Bedouin has rectified a wrong committed against him that he has obtained justice. This



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enables him to go on living in the desert, just as the balancing of a camel’s tilting load enables it to go on walking there. A Bedouin father who managed, after great difficulty, to avenge the murder of his son captured this image of justice in the lines of a poem that he composed the day following his act of vengeance as he watched, from a nearby mountain hiding place, the burial of his victim: I retired encumbered, but arose feeling light; My side-heavy saddlebags have now been put right.11

Behind this legal imagery for revenge lies the importance of deterrence, which keeps one safe, first and foremost, by showing one’s determination to regain violated rights. To illustrate this concept, Bedouin tell the following story, which highlights their view that a man who has been violated but has not rectified the violation will be viewed as easy prey and will not be able to go on living in the desert. An aging man heard that eating turkey meat could restore his virility. The man thus bought a turkey chick in the market and eagerly watched it grow, feeding around his tent. Then, one day, the turkey disappeared, apparently stolen. Directly, the man convoked a meeting of his sons, all young men, and told them to drop everything and find his turkey. Outwardly they agreed but scoffed in their hearts, saying, “Why does he need that turkey, anyway? It is just vanity. Does he think he can start a new family by wedding a younger woman? Vanity! Let’s not waste our time looking for a turkey!” And they ignored his order. A short time later, returning from pasture, the shepherdesses reported that two goats were mysteriously missing. The sons said, “What shall we do?” The father said, “Find my turkey!” The sons scoffed, “Vanity! And two goats, too, are not worth our time.” Some days later, a camel went missing, and in the evening conclave, the father again counseled, “Find my turkey!” but was again ignored. Finally, one day, the sons came back to the tent in alarm, reporting that their sister had been abducted while away with the flock at pasture, and asked, “What can we do?” Their father glared at them bitterly and said, “It is too late to do anything. You thought that my turkey was a trifle, but others saw it as a sign that we lacked the will to defend our rights. It began with my turkey, but it led to your sister. Now, our reputation is in ruins.”12

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As stated, a reputation for determination in restoring justice must also contain proof that one is able to make one’s violator suffer—primarily through the use of violence. Although Bedouin law also provides non­ violent methods for rehabilitating a victim’s rights—such as mediation and litigation—the successful wielding of might leaves no room for doubt that it is dangerous to violate the party that wields it, thus reinforcing his deterrence capability. The relevant Bedouin maxim holds, “He who takes revenge dispels disdain.”13 In the Bible, too, the rightness of revenge in general is a prominent theme, attributed to God as well as to persons. Thus, to deter people from murdering Cain, God threatened to avenge him seven times over (Gen. 4:15). As a sign of his relentless determination, he ordered revenge on the Amelekites a century after they plundered the exhausted Hebrew escapees in Sinai (1 Sam. 15:2–3; see also Exod. 17:8, Deut. 25:17–18). The prophets and the book of Psalms explicitly depict him as a God of vengeance. Nahum (1:2) says: “The Lord is a passionate, avenging God; the Lord is vengeful and fierce in his wrath; the Lord takes vengeance on his enemies.” In Psalms 94:1, he is dubbed “a God with many acts of revenge.” These are words of praise for an anthropomorphic deity that knows the ways of the world. Like Bedouin and other peoples who must defend themselves in the absence of centralized law enforcement, biblical persons, too, are not lacking in general vengefulness. The Hebrew women on the eve of the Exodus deceitfully make off with the jewelry of their Egyptian neighbors as a form of vengeful retribution for their years of bondage (Exod. 3:22, 12:35–36). In Judges 8:15–17, Gideon avenges himself on the inhabitants of Sukkot and Penuel, punishing them brutally for disdaining his might. They had refused his request to provide bread for his famished troops, who were then pursuing the kings of Midian. Also in Judges, we read of Samson taking violent revenge for a wide range of slights—being deceived by his first Philistine wife, being bereft of her by her father, her being murdered by the Philistines, and his being blinded by them (Judg. 14:19, 15:3–5, 15:7–8, 16:28). In like manner, King Saul, incensed at the priest Ahimelech for ­having—though unwittingly—aided David, whom the king was pursuing, had him murdered, together with all the residents of his village, Nob (1 Sam. 22:18–19).



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Since a main intention behind taking revenge and wielding might is to establish a reputation for resolve in the pursuit of justice, it is not surprising to find those who have met success in that endeavor celebrating it with a boast, among Bedouin and in the Bible alike. Bedouin of the Tarabin confederation of southeastern Sinai, for example, repeated for at least three hundred years the boastful words of their seventeenth-century forebears whose revenge against the Ayayda confederation drove the latter out of the southern part of the peninsula. In the 1970s, at their nighttime dances, I heard them celebrating their might by singing, “O she-camel, go tread on the Ijma heights, for the gown of al-Rahhei [the Ayayda leader] lies over his grave.”14 In the Bible, we also find such boasting. There, Lamech, a purported descendant of Cain, composed a poem in which he blustered, “I have killed a man for [only] wounding me / and a [mere] boy for [only] bruising me / If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:23–24). In other words, Lamech, in order to establish a reputation that would instill fear in the hearts of potential violators, bragged about taking wanton revenge in disregard of the rules of parity (see below and Exod. 21:23–24), even going so far as to strike down a child. Blood Revenge As we have seen, we find among the Bedouin the “right” to retaliation (Lat. lex talionis), especially in the wake of murder. Their law, authorizing blood revenge as a right, says: “A man for the blood of a man”—right and law (Ar. hagg) among them being synonymous.15 As noted above, the biblical historian Samuel Greengus traced talion, in general, back to Amorite tribal life in the desert, wherefrom it may have spread to both Hammurabi and the Israelites.16 But talion did not have to originate with the Amorites; every desert nomad, regardless of location, knows he must practice retaliation if he wants to survive. In the Old Testament, too, we find revenge for bloodshed specifically spelled out and endorsed through the legal maxim “He who sheds the blood of a man, by a man his blood will be shed” (Gen. 9:6), warning that a murderer will be exposed to blood revenge for his act. Very much in the style of Bedouin legal maxims, this was an existing, original, and indepen­

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dent statement defining blood revenge that a biblical author chose to integrate into the Bible. As among Bedouin, it was seen as a natural antidote to the endemic absence of governmental law-enforcement, thereby reflecting a prevailing practice. We also find the Bible endorsing blood revenge in other ways. For example, the culture of the desert acknowledges that the urge to blood revenge is particularly strong in the days immediately after a murder—Bedouin graphically and metaphorically term these days “the boiling of the blood.” In the same way, we find in Deuteronomy 19:6 that they are designated “the burning of the heart.”17 Moreover, by way of stressing the gravity of bloodshed, both the Bedouin and the Bible condone revenge even for a murder committed in self-defense. In 1816 in southern Sinai, for example, when Bedouin of the Owlad Sa‘id tribe, escorting the Swiss explorer J. L. Burckhardt, fought back nighttime attackers of the Umran tribe, killing one of them, they knew that they were then liable to blood revenge, and greatly feared the fact.18 A similar situation occurred in the Bible when Joab Ben Zeruiah deemed Abner Ben Ner subject to the revenge he took upon him for killing his brother Asahel, even though the latter was at the time pursuing Abner with the intent to murder (2 Sam. 3:19–23). By the same token, no intentional killer among Bedouin is exempt from revenge, even if the victim is his brother. Their law does not exempt the murderer in this case, even though he is ipso facto also the victim’s clansman and therefore legally considered one of the victims himself. In the Negev in 1954, this principle was upheld when Owda Salama Abu Rubay‘a, of the Zullam confederation, sought revenge for his brother Sulayman’s murder by his cousin and clansman Subayh Abu Rubay‘a.19 This principle is conveyed in the Bible, too. The woman of Tekoa (2 Sam. 14:7) ostensibly beseeches King David to intervene against the clansmen of her son, who are seeking revenge against him for having killed his own brother. Although the woman’s claim was a hoax (intended to obtain pardon from the king for his rebel son, Absalom), the Bedouin principle deeming a man liable for the blood he sheds of a fellow clansman, whether brother or cousin, served as sound grounds for her ploy. In addition to the biblical episodes of blood revenge cited above, traces of the desert-oriented legal attitudes that helped people guarantee their



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security through revenge are manifest among the later laws of the Old Testament. Some of these laws serve to bolster blood revenge, while others mitigate its effects. On the severe side, just as a Bedouin legal maxim holds that “nothing absolves murder but murder,” the Old Testament disallows the payment of blood money for a deliberate murder, deeming revenge the only proper penalty (Num. 35:31). The payment of blood money for a homicide is acceptable among the Bedouin if the victim’s clan agrees, but revenge remains their prerogative, as asserted in the Bedouin maxim cited just above.20 On the lenient side, by contrast, although the laws of the desert condone the use of private violence for restoring justice through revenge, desert dwellers understand that their society can survive only if its use is restrained. In blood feuds, therefore, they stipulate numerical parity. The Bedouin legal maxim “The murder of a man for a man,” while authorizing the right to take vengeance, also stipulates that any person killed in revenge beyond parity opens a new feud. The Bible, too, acknowledges this danger. Therefore, it states the principle of parity unequivocally (Exod. 21:23–25; Lev. 24:19–20, Deut. 19:16–21), with Exodus expressing it most fully: “A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a leg for a leg, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a blow for a blow.” The Bible’s intention, like that of the Bedouin, therefore, was to set the outer limit of revenge. In addition to stipulating parity, Bedouin law makes yet a further attempt to curb its otherwise ruthless writ of blood revenge, in order to preserve the integrity of society. In particular, it differentiates between deliberate and accidental murder. For Bedouin, deliberate murder, however spontaneous, implies a willingness to kill and an underlying disdain for the victim-clan’s strength and ability to retaliate. This spells a challenge to the clan’s deterrence capability and future security, and thus requires revenge to dispel the implied disdain. By contrast, accidental murder is viewed as an act devoid of ill will. If a lack of intentionality is clear, the unwitting perpetrator may be exempt from revenge. In north-central Sinai in 1977, for example, when a Bedouin named Abu Bilhan of the Suwarka came to another member of his confederation to collect an overdue debt and was about to shoot him with a rifle

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in a fit of anger, a chance visitor in the tent, a man of the neighboring Bili confederation, jumped up to stop him, only to be hit and killed by the discharged bullet. Owing to the circumstances, an on-the-spot inquiry immediately established that Abu Bilhan had no intention to shoot the Bili man. This released him from revenge, even though his shedding of blood was nonetheless subject to the payment of twenty camels, one-half the blood price for an intentionally murdered man then current in Sinai. Imposition of this penalty confirmed that the blood of innocent people is sacrosanct under any circumstances. Biblical laws, too, differentiate between deliberate and accidental murder and go so far as to define the former. They posit three criteria: the murderer is one who hates his victim or is known to have felt enmity for him; the murderer killed with his bare hands, a stone, or an implement of iron or wood (Num. 35:16–21); or he laid in premeditated ambush to kill him (Deut. 19:11). Such a murderer is subject to blood revenge, and upon him, as Deuteronomy 19:13 tells us, “You must have no mercy.” Accidental killing, by contrast, takes place against no background of enmity between the parties and is unintentional (Num. 35:22–24), as when “a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; [but] as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies” (Deut. 19:5; Josh. 20:5). Among the Bedouin, if the intentionality of the murder is unclear, the condition for a killer’s exoneration from deliberate murder is that he must swear an oath, usually at a holy tomb, disavowing any ill intent. In the Negev in the 1960s, for example, Chief Kayid al-Atowna, of the Tiyaha al-Nutush, fired shots of joy at a wedding celebration, and one of the bullets accidentally hit a guest, Salim al-Ubra, killing him. To absolve himself, the chief was constrained to swear an oath at the holy tomb of al-Mu‘afat (in Wadi as-Sayyal), avowing that his shooting of Ubra was not intentional.21 In the Bible, the swearing of an oath to exonerate a killer of deliberate murder is also recorded. Biblical law, while not specifically prescribing an oath, instructs that a purportedly accidental killer, hoping to free himself from revenge, must make his case before the elders of one of the cities of refuge, which were specially designated to ensure safety for those who committed unintentional murder (Num. 35:24–25). It is likely, however,



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that part of such a killer’s testimony involved swearing an oath—in keeping with the specific biblical stipulation of swearing an oath to absolve from guilt the residents of a settlement near which the body of a murdered person was found (Deut. 21:7–8). Similarly, the Bible, like the Bedouin, although stressing the primacy of blood revenge, permits blood payments for accidental murder. But while Bedouin law upholds the inviolability of life by imposing on the killers a payment of one-half the blood price paid for an intentional murder, the Bible fails to stipulate explicitly whether such a murder may be absolved by a payment. Indeed, Numbers 35:27 seems to reaffirm the primacy of blood vengeance by specifying that aspiring avengers of an accidentally murdered victim retain their right to revenge if the killer leaves the precincts of a city of refuge. Still, as the Bible scholar Shalom Paul has argued, blood payments were possible in some cases of bloodshed. Such a payment, in particular, is owed to the father of an aborted fetus whose mother miscarried after being toppled by a man—accidentally or not (Exod. 21:22–23).22 This understanding is endorsed by the fact that while the Bible specifically forbids blood payment in the case of a deliberate murder (Num. 35:31), the absence of such a stipulation in cases of accidental murder seems to imply that it was either acceptable or required in these cases, just as in Bedouin law. Revenge for the Violation of Women Just as both Bedouin law and the Bible condone the use of private might for taking blood revenge upon a murderer, they also authorize its use for certain violations of a “woman’s honor,” especially rape. Bedouin law is aware that if rape were common, women could not go alone to pasture and men would then have to stay close to home. This would obstruct the Bedouins’ economic activity as well as the maintenance of their security interests, which often necessitate the presence of a woman’s menfolk elsewhere. They thus deem death by revenge as essential for deterring potential rapists. Accordingly, Bedouin law is severe, allowing for the clansmen of a victim to carry out both murder and pillage against not only the rapist but also his whole clan. Bedouin cite the authority for this harshness in a thricerhymed threat issued to a rapist’s group by an anonymous avenger in the

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distant past: “Within three and a third days / We shall kill your men and take your wealth / And whatever falls in that time is lost.”23 In some ways, then, the punishment for rape is more severe than revenge for murder. First, although killing is limited to three and a third days, the law waives parity and allows for killing, with impunity, as many men of the rapist’s clan as circumstances permit. Second, the law allows what in some tribes is forbidden in vengeance for murder—namely, the pillage of livestock and movable property. Moreover, although the killing of a rapist’s clansmen is limited in time, pillaging them may continue beyond the three and a third days so long as they have not requested a truce and agreed to sit for trial. Further, these spoils “are lost”—that is, they are not deducted from the final indemnity, as are items pillaged during blood vengeance if looting takes place. For any violation of a woman’s honor, as in rape, a further rationale for harsh retaliation is that the inviolability of a Bedouin man’s women is the touchstone of his strength and deterrence in the desert. Since the temptation and occasions for violating the honor of an isolated woman are great, all that deters a potential rapist from doing so is the fear of her menfolk; specifically, he fears them even in their absence, as indicated by the Bedouin proverb “If a man’s back won’t protect him, neither will his face.”24 Hence, the “violation of a woman’s honor” really means the devastation of her menfolk’s deterrence. Accordingly, “women’s honor” is best understood as “a man’s honor, or strength, in regard to the inviolability of his women.” The violation of women thus necessitates the resort to violent redress on the part of their menfolk. The gravity with which Bedouin address rape is apparent in the Bible as well. A man found to have raped a woman could legally be killed (Deut. 22:25); such was the understanding of King David’s son Absalom when he killed Amnon, his half brother, for the rape of Tamar, his full sister (2 Sam. 13:28–29). In biblical cases of rape, moreover, the parity that pertains in revenge for murder in the laws of the desert is blatantly ignored. When Jacob’s daughter Dinah was raped by the son of Hamor, the chief man in the area of Shechem, her brothers, as the Bible describes, “took their swords and killed all the men in the town . . . and pillaged it, taking its small-stock, cattle, and donkeys; and they took what was in the field, as well as their servants, their children and their wives” (Gen. 34:25–29).25 The brothers,



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with a Bedouin’s instinct, sensed that more than carnal lust lay behind the rape. The Israelites being newly arrived in the land, it was reasonable to suspect that the rape was also a way to test their strength and mettle. Therefore, when Dinah’s full brothers, Simeon and Levi, were called to account by their father, Jacob, for the wantonness of their vengeance, they replied with a rhetorical question: “Should we have let them make a whore of our sister?” (Gen. 34:31), again affirming that the demonstration of might in the protection of one’s rights is essential to survival. In other words, rather than follow the cautious approach of the elderly Jacob, who sought to become established in the promised land by cultivating friendly relations with the natives, the sons took the tribal view, namely, that every violation against them must be met with counterviolence in order for them to remain secure and free from assault. As with Bedouin, such an extreme reaction is intended to serve notice to all other groups in the area that it is perilous to violate the victim’s group, an approach affirmed by the Bible. Thus, although we are told that the Canaanites whom Jacob’s group later passed on their way to Beth El were “so under the fear of God that they did not harass them” (Gen. 35:5), we may assume that it was the fear of Jacob’s sons that really restrained them, having heard of their revenge on the men of Shechem. Another biblical narrative conveys the repugnance that the tribal Israelites felt about rape. Upon learning of the concubine of the Levite from Ephraim who was raped to death by the young men of Gibeah, Israelites of all the tribes were horrified: “Nothing like this has ever happened or was seen” (Judg. 19:30). They were so appalled by the act that they combined their forces and waged a gory war against the tribe of Benjamin, to which the rapists belonged (Judg. 19). Indeed, so heinous was the wanton rape in their eyes that they refused to wed their daughters to the men of Benjamin who survived the assault. In keeping with the Bedouin sentiment that a child’s qualities come from its mother, they were loath to reward Gibeah with good offspring after what its men had done. A further biblical indication of the disgrace that results from rape was the enormous sum—one thousand pieces of silver—that Abimelech paid Abraham, as if admitting to having raped Sarah. This was a notable and noble gesture designed to restore her reputation for moral virtue, especially in light of the fact that it was Abraham who had put her at Abimelech’s disposal (Gen. 20:16).

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Along with rape, fornication is a violation of a woman’s honor that warrants physical retaliation. Bedouin ascribe prime importance to the moral probity of their women, in the hope of ensuring that the children a woman bears belong biologically to her husband and his clan. Clansmen want to believe that the severe sacrifices they make for one another—protection, revenge, payment of fines, flight from vengeance—are warranted by blood affiliation. Since these far-reaching obligations upon clansmen are grave, they do not want to bear them for people not of their blood. So the attempt by someone to seduce a woman to whom he is not married is understood as an outright challenge to the might of her menfolk and is discouraged by the threat of vengeance, in particular by legally authorizing his murder with impunity if the pair is found in flagrante delicto.26 Thus, a Bedouin legal maxim disallowing blood revenge against such an avenger says of a murdered fornicator, “It was his own act that killed him.”27 Through the twentieth century, the threat of death for fornication was still operative among Bedouin, and examples of its execution are rife. In the Negev, within the Tiyaha confederation, for instance, a man of the Abul-Gi‘an tribe killed a man of the Asad tribe, in the 1930s, for seducing his wife. In 1983, a member of the Ramadin tribe murdered a member of the Ugbi for seducing his sister. In southeastern Sinai in 1979, a man of the Aheiwat Karadma tribe killed Fiheid Slaym Ibn Jazi, of the Tarabin Hasablah, whom he claimed to have found lying with a girl of his clan. Among the Tarabin Hasablah themselves, Salman Zaydan, of the Munasra clan, killed Ayid Ateiwi, of the Alowna clan, in 1997 for impregnating his sister out of wedlock. In keeping with the above stories, biblical law also specifically authorizes the killing of a man for seducing a married or engaged woman. Deuteronomy 22:22 stipulates that “the man and the woman with whom he lay shall die.” A further parallel between Bedouin and biblical laws relevant to fornication pertains to the honor killing of a woman by members of her family if they suspect that she has morally strayed. Bedouin society, to ensure women’s chastity, charges each family to begin the moral education of their girls at an early age, expecting that persistent proper guidance will make them into chaste wives. Hence, if a girl or woman behaves in any immoral way, great shame adheres to the clansmen of her father for having betrayed



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their societal trust. This is especially true if she commits consensual fornication; and to restore their good reputation, they may dispatch the girl in question. In this way, they can lessen the opprobrium by ensuring that the girl will no longer be a bad example to others, in keeping with their metaphor “One scabby goat infects the whole flock.” The Bedouin rationale for honor killings is found in their oft-heard legal maxim “Punishing a girl educates the girls and teaches the boys to keep away.” This practice has continued down to the time of this writing.28 In 1985, the family of a woman of the Azazma Mas‘udiyyin tribe in the Negev immolated her after she was surprised by her husband while lying with another man. In 2008, an unmarried girl of the Abu Ghanim clan of the Tarabin Jarawin tribe was killed on suspicion of immoral behavior, the ninth honor killing in that clan since 2000.29 The Bible, also authorizes honor killings for consensual fornication, stipulating them for married and engaged women found in compromising circumstances—namely, in venues where they could have shouted for help if the encounter was not consensual (Deut. 22:25–27)—as well as for an unattached girl “for shaming her father’s house with indecency,” even if discovered only in due course (Deut. 22:20–21). Although Exodus 22:15 ostensibly provides a seduced virgin with marriage as an alternative to an honor killing (compare the Bedouin maxim “A girl’s cover [ for exposing her father’s clan to shame] is marriage or death”), she may nonetheless be liable to punishment by death, which reflects the graver Bedouin view of consensual fornication—namely, “A girl’s cover is her death.” Exodus 22:16 indicates that the marriage option exists— “If her father refuses to give her to him, he shall weigh out silver as the bride-price of virgins”—but since this passage neglects to provide reasons for such a refusal, we may assume that the father’s main reason for rejecting a proffered marriage was to murder his daughter in order to restore the honor of his family. Since shame similarly adheres to the family of a discovered Bedouin adulteress, they prefer to keep the matter quiet, especially if they choose not to subject her to an honor killing. Hence, in the event that her husband decides to divorce her, they (and she) are loath to demand any compensation, alimony, the return of her bride-price, or even her accumulated property and belongings; this is in contrast to what happens when a “virtuous woman” (Ar. mufaddala) is divorced. Accordingly, a betrayed husband

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need only send his wife to her prenuptial home with the curt phrase “Go to your clansmen” (ruhi li-zlamki), as did Himayd Salman al-Saddan, of the Azazma Sarahin, in the Negev, in 1972 upon learning that Hilayyil al-Wajj, of the Zullam Janabib, had visited his wife in his tent when he was away.30 The Bible, too, permits the husband of a woman whom he has “found to be indecent” to divorce her and send her away, with no further obligations on his part required (Deut. 24:1). In Bedouin law and the Bible alike, however, the father of such a banished woman need not concur in her husband’s judgment or divorce. For example: Within the Azazma Sarahin tribe of the Negev, in May 1974, when Husayn Swaylim al-Khiraynig summarily divorced his wife, implying immoral behavior on her part, her case was directly taken up by her uncle, Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, as her father was dead and her brother was living in Jordan, then inaccessible to Israeli Bedouin. Abu Bilayya was skeptical of her husband’s slur, knowing his niece to have been a faithful and efficient wife who had increased Khiraynig’s livestock greatly through her diligence and who was generous in providing from their considerable bounty for the guests who visited their tent. He was also aware of Khiraynig’s displeasure over his wife’s hospitality. Thus, after interrogating her, Abu Bilayya, convinced that the accusation was but slander against her reputation, summoned Khiraynig to an honor trial before Sulayman al-Ugbi, the leading honor judge in the Negev. Hearing the pleas of both Khiraynig and his wife—her plea as presented by Abu Bilayya—the judge ruled that the woman was “pure and noble.” He therefore ordered Khiraynig to take her back (on condition that she was willing to return to him), to give her a “conciliation gift” consisting of one herd of ten camels and two flocks of twenty goats each, and to cover the tent of Abu Bilayya with white cloth so that people would know that the woman’s honor was “white” and that Abu Bilayya had gained her her rights.31

The Bible posits a similar situation: namely, a man who slanders his newly wed wife as not having come to him a virgin (Deut. 22:13–19). It states that if the girl’s father senses that the groom has invented this claim, having taken a dislike to her for other reasons, the father may reject it and bring evidence (her blood-stained nuptial bedclothes) to show to the elders. Such proof being sufficient to absolve the girl of guilt, the husband shall



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be “made to suffer,” at least by giving a gift to her father for the shame he caused him and by being obligated to keep the girl as his wife.

Protection Another consequence of the absence of law-enforcement agencies in the desert is that people in a weaker position than their enemies or potential violators need someone strong to protect them. Traditionally, Bedouin protection was compulsory whenever a supplicant passed between the tent ropes of the protector, which is reflected in the saying “Tent ropes save the oppressed one and the fugitive.”32 Among the Bedouin, therefore, the image of the tent lies behind the terms used for people who are protected. One term is “enterer” (dakhil), indicating someone who has entered another’s tent and requested protection. Another is tanib, or “person of the tent-rope (tanab)”—that is, someone who has touched one of the ropes of a tent, which act ensures his protection.33 Alternatively, tanib also connotes one who has pitched his tent near the prospective protector so that their tent ropes intertwine. An additional, similar Bedouin term is “neighbor” (jar), also referring to the pitching of a tent near a protector, lending itself to the imagery behind one of the Bedouin words for protection: jira. We find a similar imperative of protection in the Bible, where it is rooted in two Hebrew terms. One is ger, a cognate noun for the Arabic jar, which often refers to a stranger or alien that lives (gar) with you, usually one from a distant land (Exod. 22:20; Jer. 14:8). Allusions to this term mainly instruct the Israelites to deal with a ger who lives among them according to the same rules by which they treat themselves (even ritual rules; see, e.g., Num. 15:15–16, 29). The Bible justifies this equal treatment by recalling that since the Israelites had suffered as aliens in Egypt, an alien needs protection by those among whom he lives (Exod. 22:20, 23:9).34 A ger is thus a protégé (a protected person), as reflected in the verse “Want for the protégé who dwells with you what you want for yourself!” (ha-ger ha-gar itkhem viahavta lo kamokha: Lev. 19:34), that is, treat him with the same concern for security that you feel for your family.35 The focus on security is further confirmed by the allowance made to a ger who accidentally kills someone,

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granting him access to the same asylum that Israelites were to enjoy in the Bible’s anticipated cities of refuge (Num. 35:15). From the Bedouin imagery of shepherds comes the second biblical term that means a protected person, rea‘, a passive form of ro‘eh (shepherd), which may be understood literally as “someone shepherded or guarded.”36 Leviticus 19:16, for example, uses this term in admonishing a protector “not to stand aside when your protégé is attacked” (lo’ ta‘mod ‘al dam re‘akha), which reflects the Bedouin maxim “You will die in front of the one you’re protecting.”37 Similarly, the famous line from Leviticus 19:18, “Want for your protégé what you want for yourself” (ve-ahavta l-re‘acha kamocha) almost echoes the Bedouin “Do more for a ward, not less.” Although the term rea‘ is often understood and translated to mean one’s neighbor (e.g., the King James Version, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; Revised Standard Version, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”), that rendition would implicitly include one’s neighbors who are also clansmen, people obviously not in need of protection, which they would properly receive from the clan. Among Bedouin, the protection afforded by a tent pertains even to a man’s non-clan wife, who becomes his protected person by dint of her living in his tent, whereby he (in addition to her clansmen) becomes known as one of the “shepherds” that look after her inviolability, as expressed in the saying “Every woman has a shepherd behind her.”38 In the Bible, this is evident in the case of Samson. Although vengefulness in general was not uncharacteristic of this biblical hero, the specific revenge he took for the murder of his first Philistine wife (clearly not a clanswoman) may likely have stemmed from his perceived role as her protector, she being part of his household (Judg. 15:6–8). Even the Levite from Ephraim, although he had clearly treated his Judahite concubine meanly, felt sufficiently responsible for her to initiate her revenge after the residents of Gibeah raped her to death (Judg. 19:27–20:7). Protection in the desert is mainly needed for one of three reasons. The first is to guard one’s rights. In 1967, when clansmen of the aforementioned Owda Sulayman al-Hadobe of the Azazma Sarahin offered his daughter in bondage marriage to the brother of a woman whom they had killed, thus depriving Hadobe of his natural right to betroth his daughter to a man of



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his choice, he sought and received the protection of the paramount chief of the Azazma, Owda Abu Mu‘ammar.39 The second reason is to defend against blood revenge. Since murder in desert culture is a violation of an individual’s right to life rather than a crime against the community, murderers may be protected by neutral parties. Among the Zullam Janabib in the central Negev, Miz‘an al-Wajj, of the Wujuj clan, killed a Bedouin named Ibn Imtayr of the Kishkhar clan. One section of the Wujuj, the Abu Daya lineage, came to the tent of Himayd alSaddan, of the Azazma Sarahin, asking for his protection.40 Third, protection may also be needed for safety from enemies in general. In the early twentieth century, in the Negev, the chief of the Tarabin Wuheidat tribe, Faris Isa al-Wuheidi tried to keep Turkish troops, coming from Beersheba, from remanding an escaped Bedouin prisoner who had sought shelter in his tent.41 Protection offered for these three reasons renders the conduct of normal life in the desert possible despite the absence of governmental protection. Bedouin thus view the extension of protection as natural (“Against oppression there’s protection / Like there’s a thatch wall built against cold wind”) and imperative (“Protection is obligatory”).42 The theme of protection as something essential is present in the Old Testament, too, extended by God as well as man. God promised to protect the Bible’s first murderer, Cain, threatening to take revenge sevenfold on anyone who killed him (Gen. 4:15). God is also called on, in the blessing of Moses (Deut. 33:11), to protect the tribe of Levi, “crushing the groins of its violators and enemies so that they are unable to recover.” The tribe of Levi, deemed in need of protection after being denied tribal territory, was vulnerable to the violation of its rights by the other, landed Israelite tribes, among whom it lived.43 Protection remained an active Israelite institution as late as the United Monarchy. David, when pursued by King Saul, sought it for his parents from the king of Moab, who acceded despite contemporaneous Moabite-­ Israelite enmity, owing perhaps to the Moabite origins of David’s great-­ grandmother (the biblical) Ruth (1 Sam. 22:3–4).44 David himself extended it to Eviatar, son of the priest Ahimelech, whom Saul had killed, suspecting that the latter had betrayed him in David’s favor (1 Sam. 22:20–23).

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Exodus 21:13, in recognition of the absence of law-enforcement agencies in the desert, acknowledges the need to provide “a place where [an accidental manslayer] can flee.” Such a place was perhaps spelled out as one of the projected “cities of refuge” (Num. 35:25; Deut. 19:3). On the other hand, this passage may have anticipated the tent sanctuary where a person could enjoy at least a reprieve until his innocence or guilt was established.45 Thus, the “horns of the altar” in the original Sanctuary tent, if grasped—similar to Bedouin tent ropes—afforded protection to the innocent, as King David’s son Adonijah and military commander Joab sought to gain, despite their having opposed the succession of Solomon to the kingship after David died (Exod. 21:14; 1 Kings 1:50, 2:28). In the culture of the desert, the obligation to extend protection might entail physical danger. Bedouin law, for example, orders a protector to try to prevent harm from afflicting a ward. This injunction is reflected in the legal directives “Defend a guest if he’s done good or done bad; keep the violator at bay or pay for his faults”46 and “You will die in front of the one you’re protecting,” as cited above. Bedouin stories of the exposure of protectors to danger are many. One account, from the eighteenth century, tells of a protector who went to war for his protégé. A Bedouin and his sister from Arabia received protection from a man, called Da’ud of the Arabian Bani Ugba tribe, who was then migrating with his tribesmen and those of the Masa‘id tribe, under its leader Sa‘ud, searching for pasture along the eastern border of the Negev. One day, when Sa‘ud was playing a game with Da’ud’s slave near the well of Ayn Husub, Da‘ud’s ward and his beautiful sister came there to water their camels. Aroused by the young woman’s beauty, Sa‘ud decided that he must have her and announced his intention. Da‘ud, the girl’s protector, thereupon declared war on his erstwhile companion—a war that decimated both tribes.47

A similar defense took place in the Negev in the late Ottoman period. The chief of the Tarabin Wuheidat tribe, Faris Isa al-Wuheidi, as cited above, tried to keep Turkish troops, coming from Beersheba, from remanding an escaped Bedouin prisoner who sought shelter in his tent. The Turks demanded that he yield the fugitive, but he refused. The troops then dis-



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mounted, intending to enter his tent, whereupon the chief lifted his rifle and shot. When the din and dust settled, everyone was startled to see the beloved filly of the chief lying dead where she’d been tethered near the tent’s opening. The officer asked, “What’s the meaning of this?” and was answered by an old man who said, “The chief has just killed what was most dear to him and has nothing more to lose. Look out!” Hearing that, the troops reportedly left without their man.48

These are examples of how a protector may risk his life for a ward or even a passing guest. In the Bible, the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the safety of either a protégé or a guest is also apparent. For example, in extending protection to Eviatar, David assumed the Bedouin position about dying for one’s ward, saying, “Fear not; for whoever seeks your life must seek my life, too, for I am duty bound to guard you” (1 Sam. 22:23). As cited in chapter 2, the Bible also tells of Lot (Gen. 19:8) and a Benjaminite (Judg. 19:22–24) taking up positions before the entrances to their dwellings in an effort to protect their guests from threatened violation. Lot is visited in Sodom by two angels in the guise of men, and his house is besieged by local men demanding that he hand his guests over for homosexual exploitation. He resorts to a desperate measure to ensure the guests’ safety: he offers the rabble his virgin daughters instead, thereby compromising the esteemed zeal of a man of the desert, Bedouin or biblical, to safeguard the chastity of his womenfolk. A similar scenario occurs in Judges: a Levite traveler stops for the night with his concubine and servant in the settlement of Gibeah. As happened to Lot, homosexual men, demanding that the guest be given to them for their pleasure, besiege the house of the traveler’s host, a man of Benjamin. Here, too, the latter, concerned primarily for his guest’s well-being and safety, offers them his virgin daughter to do with her “whatever they please.”

Mediation and Litigation Nonviolent Resolution of Conflict To prevent the fabric of their society from tearing apart, desert-dwelling nomads occasionally relinquish their right to use private might in revenge

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and instead attempt to resolve conflicts by peaceful means. The two methods for accomplishing this are mediation and litigation. Although mediation is found in many cultures, Bedouin have a unique impetus for resorting to it: fear that conflicts permitted to fester too long may ignite a larger conflagration. Proverbially, they perceive that “the evil of conflict is like a spark.”49 Owing to the tribal relationships that prevail among Bedouin, which oblige them to show solidarity with others in the several groups to which they simultaneously belong, a conflict is rarely between individuals alone. As a result, the probability of a conflict spreading and involving many people of different groups is ever present; if that happens, the normal progress of society will be disrupted, to the detriment of all. In the nineteenth-century Negev, for example, a squabble between brothers belonging to the Tiyaha confederation led to the renowned War of Owda and Amir, which came to involve at least twenty tribes over a period of twenty-two years (1842–64).50 To avert such disruption, other persons in the broader Bedouin society customarily make voluntary efforts to reconcile adversaries and contain a conflict, whatever its origin, before it spreads. Hardly a conflict erupts among Bedouin without an attempt at mediation by people not directly involved. For example: I heard from Bedouin in southeast Sinai about an early twentieth-century case of mediation undertaken by a Nasir Ibn Usban of the Arabian Umran confederation, which followed upon the murder of a young and yet uncircumcised shepherd of the Aheiwat Ghurayganiyyin tribe of east-central Sinai that was perpetrated by camel raiders from the Ma‘aza tribal confederation of northwest Arabia. For the next two years, the Ghurayganiyyin raided the Ma‘aza, taking many of their camels. Finally, Nasir Ibn Usban, whose confederation was neighbor to both groups, told the Ma‘aza, “This is revenge. There is no safety from it. The Ghurayganiyyin feel they must slaughter us [that is, you].” He added, “Let me go and ask for a truce.” They said, “Fine.” So Ibn Usban went to the Ghurayganiyyin and paid them for a camel-truce. They told him, “The truce payment is accepted, and the evil is killed”; and they agreed to meet with the Ma‘aza in Ibn Usban’s tent, on condition that Ibn Usban guarantee that the resolution would take account of their claim to three payments of blood-money, their residual due for the murder of a yet uncircumcised boy. The Ma‘aza came, bringing two unmarried girls with them. When they met, the Ghurayganiyyin said to the Ma‘aza, “Our man was an uncircum-



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cised boy. We are entitled to take ‘the lives of four men.’ ” The Ma‘aza said, “You’ve already killed one.” They replied, “That leaves three.” The Ma‘aza said, “Here’s payment for one life, and here is a ‘bondage-wife’ for one of your men to marry without bride-price.” The Ghurayganiyyin said, “That leaves one.” Ibn Usban said, “I, the master of this tent, concede that one to the Ma‘aza.” Thereupon, the problem was resolved.51

Such is Bedouin mediation, which is similar to what the Bible presents in the case of Abraham, who takes the initiative in trying to prevent God’s decision to destroy Sodom (Gen. 18:23–32), and of Jonathan, the son of King Saul, who volunteers to mediate the conflict between his father and David, his friend (1 Sam. 19:4–5). Bedouin mediators are not always voluntary, but may be deliberately sent as a delegation to one of the parties in a dispute. In the Bible, such a delegation was sent by Jacob to his brother, Esau, in order to mollify him after having cheated him out of their father’s blessing years before (Gen. 32:4–6). Among Bedouin, when the aim of the delegation is to get a violator to give his victim justice, one delegation after another—up to three—are dispatched, each in turn trying to get the violator to relent before his victim becomes legally justified in wielding force against him, in keeping with the legal directive “Outlaw him with three delegations!” The first of these delegations is normally limited to only a few members, in order not to be mistaken for a war party, as in the observation “Is this a delegation (Ar. badwa) or an attack (adwa)?”),52 whereas the two subsequent delegations are of increased size and prestige. In the Bible, this fear of an adversary sending a raiding party rather than a friendly delegation explains the stunned reaction of Isaac to the sudden visit by the Philistine leader Abimelech with a delegation comprising his councilor, the commander of his forces, and, presumably, some troops: “Why have you come to me like this, being my enemies . . .?” (Gen. 26:27). Having been previously driven by Abimelech from the borderlands of the Philistine area, Isaac, like any Bedouin in his place, was struck by the fear that this visit might be an attack. Another biblical resemblance to the Bedouin practice of initially sending a small delegation, followed by a larger one in the event of its failure, concerns those that the Moabite king Balaq dispatched to the seer Balaam,

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asking him to go forth and curse the invading Israelites. After hearing of Balaam’s initial refusal, the king sent another delegation, “larger and more notable than the previous one” (Num. 22:7, 15). As noted, the role of Bedouin mediation is to get the antagonists in a conflict to agree to resolve it peaceably, usually by way of litigation. In the Bible, too, we find aspects of Bedouin litigation: judges, witnesses, oaths, sentences, and reconciliation. Although much of the biblical material on these subjects is not exclusively Bedouin—being also influenced by legal thinking and practice in the ancient world of Mesopotamia, Hitti, and Egypt—references to the similarities between Bedouin and biblical practice should help explain some relevant passages in the Bible. Judges When parties to a conflict in Bedouin society agree to resolve their differences through a trial, they must decide on a judge to hear their case. Most often, people who serve as judges are the elders of a group, whether clan, subtribe, tribe, or subconfederation. Such an elder, by dint of his experience and the numerous trials he has most likely witnessed and judged throughout his life, is acquainted with the different branches of Bedouin law. For example, if he agrees to try a case of camel theft, he will declare that he is sitting in the capacity of a ziyadi, the designation for a judge who specializes in cases of theft. This would be the practice of persons judging in any area of litigation, such as honor violations, bloodshed, physical assault, or property loss. If a party to a conflict rejects the decision of the judge of first instance, he may turn to a procedure of appeals.53 The account of the Israelites in the Sinai desert as portrayed in Exodus 18:21–22, gives us a picture similar to what prevails among the Bedouin. New to the desert after generations of assimilation in Egypt, the Hebrews took their problems to Moses, the leader who had led them into their new circumstances. Moses, largely unschooled in the ways of the desert, initially put himself on constant call to solve the problems and conflicts that his people brought before him. This was the case until his nomadic fatherin-law, Jethro the Midianite, advised him to adopt desert legal practices, namely, to have notable men judge at the various levels of adjudication and appeal, and to reserve his participation to being a specialist judge of last ap-



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peal in difficult cases—presumably, conflicts between prominent persons or cases with particular significance for the community as a whole. In anticipation of Moses’s demise, the Bible designated the Levites in the Sanctuary as appeals and specialist judges “in cases of murder, civil conflicts, and assault” (Deut 17:8–9). Moses’s and the priests’ position at the pinnacle of the judicial order imbued it with particular prestige, not unlike judges from certain Bedouin families or confederations in Sinai and the Negev who are viewed as the quintessence of expertise in their specific domains of justice. In Sinai, for example, the ultimate manshad, or judge of honor, resides within a particular confederation, the Masa‘id, who dwell in the extreme northwest of the peninsula. All the Bedouin of Sinai look upon them as severe guardians of honor, whether pertaining to that of men or women. Indeed, owing to the fact that Bedouin view questions of honor as the most important, the ­Masa‘id call themselves “the ultimate terminal” (magarr) of judgment, label­ ing all other manshad judges in rhyme as merely “the passage” (mamarr), that is, to them. For their part, all other judges that rule as manshad are expected to issue harsh judgments and punishments, purportedly in keeping with those passed down by the Masa‘id during what the Bedouin imagine as untold generations.54 In the Bible, as noted, Moses, apparently accustomed to a sedentary life in Egypt during his early manhood, is accurately portrayed as initially unfamiliar with the principles of desert law, just as he is with the procedural aspects of which his father-in-law, Jethro, apprised him. This is revealed in the single authentic narrative of outright litigation in the Old Testament. As noted in the previous chapter, Moses judged between the daughters of Zelophehad and their father’s clansmen, in two sections of the book of Numbers. In the first (Num. 27:8–11), the girls, of the Machir Manasseh tribe, ask to inherit landholdings in the tribal area, since their dead father left no sons. According to Bedouin law, a woman does not inherit land, lest she marry a man from a different clan and leave her portion to her sons, who will belong to their father’s clan. But despite this logic, Moses defers to their request, awarding each of them holdings. The girls’ clansmen, however, knowing tribal law and logic, set Moses straight. Appealing the decision (Num. 36:1–13), they argued, “If [the girls]

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marry persons from another Israelite tribe, their share will be cut off from our ancestral portion and be added to the portion of the tribe into which they marry.” Ultimately, Moses amended his earlier ruling and stipulated that Zelophehad’s daughters could inherit only if they married clansmen in their father’s tribe. Witnesses and Oaths In the culture of the desert, as elsewhere, there is concern about the honesty of persons who provide evidence—such as witnesses and those who swear oaths—that may affect the determination of innocence and guilt. Bedouin law, therefore, aware that evidence gained from declared witnesses might be false, views it with some reserve. First of all, the law deems the ev­ roblems—those idence of witnesses in the most serious of Bedouin legal p dealing with murder or the violation of a woman’s honor—as unacceptable in court. Hence, judges follow the legal maxim “No informers for fornication, nor witnesses for murder.”55 Second, in cases in which evidence gained from witnesses is admitted, it must be firsthand, not hearsay or rumor. Thus, Bedouin law says: “There is no evidence based on other evidence.”56 Also, when the law does allow for witnesses, as in cases of camel theft, it is fastidious about details. In one early twentieth-century case in the Negev, for example, a Bedouin of the Tarabin who had spotted a confederate in the desert with a camel bearing the Azazma brand offered himself as a witness to the camel’s owner, upon hearing of its theft. But the judge invalidated his testimony that the suspected person was indeed the thief, since he, personally, had never seen the camel before encountering it in the desert and had thus never seen it in a herd at its owner’s encampment before it was stolen.57 Finally, Bedouin law deters false witness by making it grounds for the offended party to demand an honor trial against the slanderer, which is supposed to restore the reputation of the person maligned.58 Among biblical laws, the nomad’s concern over false testimony is also evident. It is condemned as a violation against God: in the Ten Commandments, the ninth commandment states, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17). Likewise, in the section of Exodus prescribing rules of ethical behavior, perjury appears as the very



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first rule, with God admonishing, “Don’t conspire with an evildoer by being a false witness” (Exod. 23:1). Thus, the effort to keep testimony honest made God and his threatened retribution a part of it. The Bible also highlights its reservations concerning witnesses by stipulating that “a single witness may not testify against a person for any crime or transgression,” that is, for any offense that may be committed (Deut. 19:15). Moreover, a case involving capital punishment specifically requires the testimony of “two witnesses or three” (Deut. 17:6). The penalty set by the Bible for proven false witness—namely, having the liar bear the punishment that he would have caused the victim of his falsehood, as determined by a court (Deut. 19:19)—is no less harsh than the fearsome Bedouin rule that brings a false witness to trial before a judge of honor. To a desert dweller, whether Bedouin or biblical, swearing a false oath is of even greater concern than false testimony. In Bedouin law, which traditionally relies on the piety of the members of society, oaths can exonerate defendants from accusations and guilt. Bedouin maxims state, “He who swears is safe; he who fears to swear is fined” and “The right belongs to him who swears.”59 After one swears, the case is closed. Thus, in the northern Negev in the 1950s, when a man of the Talalga section of the Tiyaha al-Nutush tribe accused his neighbor Husayn of helping marauders from the West Bank steal his livestock, he insisted that he take an oath, denying the accusation. Husayn thus swore: “In the name of our great God, the merciful and compassionate, I declare that all through life, from my first days until today—O Talalga—I never guided nor aided thieves or treacherous people, neither against you nor against anyone else in the world. Your words to this effect are lies and a plot, invented only by yourself and the devil.” Following the oath, pronounced in a crowded tent, Talalga dropped the case against Husayn for good.60 Thus, in Bedouin litigation, when a confession, unequivocal evidence, or witnesses are lacking, an oath becomes the main instrument for facilitating a decision about innocence or guilt. Usually, it is the defendant in a court case who takes an oath, as requested by the claimant. In 1983, for example, Himayd Salman al-Saddan, of the Azazma Sarahin, whose daughter had been abducted, delegated Muhammad Abu Jaddua, a tribal elder of the Azazma, to arrange the return of the girl. Learning, however, that Abu Jad-

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dua had agreed, supposedly in Saddan’s name, to let the couple marry, the latter charged him with exceeding his mission. He could only substantiate this charge, however, by getting Abu Jaddua to swear an oath stating that he had been given authority to betroth the girl.61 Other defendants that must take an oath are those accused of deliberate murder but who claim that the killing was accidental. Such oaths were taken, for example, when a man named Abu Jabr accidentally killed Salim Hasan Abu Rubay‘a in the 1940s while playing with the rifle of the victim’s father, Hasan; when Faysal Dirdah Salman al-Huzayyil, while trying to lock his revolver, killed his friend and fellow policeman Salim Sulayman Abu Hani, in the 1950s; and when the chief, Kayid al-Atowna, celebrating a wedding by shooting into the air, killed Salim al-Ubra, in the 1960s, as mentioned above.62 A non-Bedouin might suspect that the Bedouin reliance on oaths for evidence constitutes a major loophole in the law. If the utterance of an oath is all it takes for a defendant to exonerate himself, one could imagine violators and criminals availing themselves of it whenever they wished to perpetrate their violations with impunity. The Bedouin are aware of this criminal escape hatch, and their law combines with their culture to curb such infractions. First, oaths may be deemed inadmissible or be rejected if the person swearing is not considered morally suitable. As with the unsuitability of a witness, a person’s oath may be unacceptable if he is suspected of godlessness, mainly owing to his lack of the things he would not want to endanger through a false oath—in particular, livestock and male children. Second, if someone is suspected of readiness to lie under oath to avert a legal judgment against him, his contestant can insist on others adding their oaths as affirmation of what the suspected person has sworn. This is called “an oath and five more in train,” and the fear of God is believed to deter them from risking his anger by endorsing someone else’s false oath. Indeed, the ultimate safeguard against lying under oath comes from traditional Bedouin religiosity and the belief that both God and the saints at whose graves swearing often takes place are involved in oaths as the forces that confirm them. It thus follows that they will be indignant over a false oath (as compromising their holiness) and punish anyone who gives it. This dread is reflected in sayings such as “A false oath will be visited on



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seven men, one in each of seven generations” and “An oath won’t leave a home to him who swears it,” “home” being a reference to children and clansmen. To underpin the connection between the deity and an oath, most oaths begin with a reference to God. Sometimes this reference is direct, by uttering his name (Allah) three times: for example, “By the great God, by the great God, by the great God: I killed him only between her legs,” which was demanded of members of the Aheiwat Karadma, in southeastern Sinai, whose tribesmen were accused, in 1979, of killing a purported fornicator of the Tarabin Hasablah in his sleep, near one of their women.63 The Israelites, like Bedouin, were also accustomed to swearing oaths to absolve themselves of accusations. Assuming that the fear of God would deter people from mendacity, the Bible, too, stipulated that an accused person should swear an oath—which it calls “coming to God” (Exod. 22:8)—in order to disavow committing or having knowledge of a deliberate murder (Deut. 21:7–8), outright theft (Exod. 22:8), or the theft or damage of something left in safekeeping (Exod. 22:9–10), and perhaps to avow an accidental killing (Deut. 21:7–8). The connection of God to an oath (termed an “oath of the Lord,” shevu‘at Yahweh) is highlighted early in the Ten Commandments. The third commandment cautions the believer not “to misuse [in a false oath] the name of the Lord your God,” and warns that a false oath is an act that may not be absolved (Exod. 20:7; Deut. 5:11). Leviticus 19:12 augments the admonition not to “lie by oath, using my name,” by describing it as “desecration.” The biblical authors, then, like Bedouin, saw enlisting the fear of God as a necessary device for keeping a widespread use of oaths from distorting justice. Sentences The sentences delivered by nomadic judges reflect conditions in the des­ ert. Particularly, a people on the move cannot detain or jail violators, having no mobile installations for that purpose. Second, judges cannot issue sentences of physical punishment without their becoming a party to the conflict and thus subject to revenge. Only clansmen of the victims of murder, assault, or violations of a woman’s honor have the right to respond by inflicting physical harm, let alone blood revenge; such punishments are their right as a first resort and need no sanction from a judge.

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Still, realizing that violations that come before a judge must be punished, Bedouin law uses material penalties, mainly in the form of fines, as the chief instrument for deterring violators and for setting proper standards of legal behavior. There are fines for theft, animal damage to crops, and the mistreatment of wives. In the case of theft, for example, the fines are compound, often four times the worth of the item stolen. Compound fines are also imposed to set standards of behavior, such as deterring physical assault on the defenseless (women, children, and cripples) or upholding the sanctity of a person’s natural security (for example, that of a host, a guest, a traveling companion, or someone asleep)—violations of which are ignominiously termed attacks of treachery.64 The Bible, too, contains punishments that suit the nomadic experience. In particular, we find almost no preexilic examples of incarceration in Israel until the ninth century BCE, when the Israelites are quite settled (1 Kings 22:27; 2 Chron. 16:10, 18:26; Jer. 37:15–16). The main form of biblical punishment is the fine. Often these are compound fines, especially those imposed for theft (Exod. 21:37; 22:1, 22:3, 22:6, 22:8; 2 Sam. 12:6). We also find heavy fines inflicted for fornicating with an unattached girl (Exod. 22:15–16; Deut. 22:29), slandering one’s wife (Deut. 22:13–19), and damaging sown crops (Exod. 22:4). Another category of compounded punishments accounted for in Bed­ ouin law, as noted, is for treacherous actions. While the Bible provides no specific examples of similar punishments, the many references to ignominy that attached to treachery in general (Exod. 21:14), to the violation of the helpless (widows, orphans, and strangers; Exod. 22:22–30), and to the demeaning of persons, such as by binding them (Exod. 21:16) or overpenalizing them (Deut. 25:3), indicate that the punishments for such offenses, though omitted in the verses mentioned, were probably great. Compound fines are specified for another standard of behavior that arose from the condition of poverty and hunger in the arid desert, namely, mercy for hungry thieves, which Bedouin law and the Bible both mention. In the former, a hungry person coming upon someone else’s date palm is allowed to take with impunity enough dates to sate himself, on condition that he leaves the pits on the ground nearby and his tribal brand scratched alongside them. This is in contrast to a person’s cutting off a cluster of



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dates, which the law deems to be theft. Indeed, the treachery behind pillaging the fruit of someone else’s isolated palm tree is so heinous in Bedouin eyes that the punishment for it is greater than the compound fines imposed for other kinds of theft. For pillaging dates, the thief is subject to an honor trial, as if he had violated the honor of a girl, with all the attendant harsh fines that the latter offense incurs. Indeed, one Bedouin legal maxim states, “Denuding a palm tree is like denuding a girl.”65 The Bible also reflects this attitude, albeit without specifying a fine for pillage. In keeping with Bedouin law, however, it allows the hungry and needy to eat their fill of another’s grapes, but not to take any away with them, and to pluck his stalks of wheat by hand, but not with a sickle (Deut. 23:25–26). Reconciliation In the desert, mediation and litigation, when successful, should be followed by reconciliation. Bedouin, for their part, realizing that violations are to be expected in a society such as theirs, which lives on the edge of survival, are not wont to bear grudges against violators so long as they have received justice from them. This attitude is rooted in sayings such as “A man is angry when he’s in conflict, but when he’s appeased, he’s friendly.”66 Consequently, when justice has been meted out by a judge, a mediator, or a delegation, and its terms have been discharged, erstwhile enemies often reconcile and become friends, believing that justice should restore peace to society, which is accomplished when both sides are content. Hence, they say, “A verdict satisfies one, but reconciliation satisfies two.” Indeed, the expression “Reconciliation is the lord of all laws,” as we have seen, highlights it as a main aspiration of the Bedouin legal system.67 Since most Bedouin until the late twentieth century were unlettered, they needed symbols rather than documents to confirm reconciliations and alliances. Therefore, in an area where food is always scarce, it is little wonder that food became symbolic for marking the state of relations between people. Specifically, when people are in conflict, they desist from eating together, since “bread and salt” indicate a bond; by contrast, when they reconcile, they symbolize it by partaking of a joint meal. After reconciliation in cases of murder, for example, the clan of the killer prepares a meal for the victim’s clan, including the slaughter of the animal that they bring with

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them to the latter’s camp, as a sign of gratitude for having pardoned them from vengeance and flight. The injured party’s participation in the meal is thus seen as a gesture of pardon, in keeping with the expression “He who likes you will eat your food.”68 Even in cases less serious than murder, condemned violators may prepare a meal for their victims. In 1974, for example, I witnessed among the Azazma Sarahin of the central Negev, the Owdat clan, which had wounded a man of the Zanun clan, serve them meat and coffee once the sides had reconciled. In 1977, I was present when the Ameitil clan of the Azazma Asiyat, who had caused the aforementioned Owdat many losses, prepared a meal for the latter immediately after a reconciliation between the two groups.69 In the experience of the biblical forefathers, food was also a major symbol of amity and enmity. Thus, when Isaac and Abimelech, after considerable conflict, reconciled and formed a coexistence alliance, Isaac made his enemies a feast (Gen. 26:29). To signify an end to another conflict, Isaac’s son Jacob, as cited above, slaughtered an animal and invited his uncle Laban and other clansmen to partake in the meal (Gen. 31:54).

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scholars continually find materials that shed new light on the development of Israelite religion as the Hebrew Bible portrays it. These mainly highlight the contributions made by Mesopotamian, Canaanite, Hittite, Egyptian, and Aramaic cultures and civilizations.1 Alongside these influences, Bedouin religious practices that survived from the time before Bedouin became Muslims (in the seventh century CE) and continued to exist down to the twentieth century show similarities with several Israelite practices that we find in the Bible.2 Although almost all Bedouin have followed Islam since early in its history, deriving from it many of their religious beliefs, practices, and attitudes, those who remained nomadic in the deserts of the Middle East down to the premodern period, found the religion barely accessible to them as a daily spiritual and psychological support, owing to their distance from Islamic religious instruction and institutions. For such support, these Bedouin relied instead on primordial, often animistic practices that had not changed much from the religious behavior of their pre-Islamic ancestors. Similar conclusions regarding the Bible were drawn by the late-­nineteenthcentury British Orientalist and Bible scholar W. Robertson Smith after studying pre-Islamic Arabic literature in which the dominant culture was Bedouin. “The Pentateuch,” he said, “only reshaped and remodeled institutions of an older type that were common to the Hebrews and their heathen neighbors,” explaining further that “a new scheme of faith must

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appeal to the religious instincts and susceptibilities that already exist, and must speak a language that men accustomed to these old forms can understand.”3 By observing the premodern Bedouin, as Smith studied the behavior of their ancient forebears, I have identified several similarities between Bedouin religious life and that of the ancient Israelites, as the Bible describes it, especially in attitudes toward sacrifice, the sacredness of blood, taboos, oaths, vows, and ethics. Although these biblical attitudes may have also been present in the religions of other cultures the world over, their scrutiny in the light of a neighboring culture—that of the Bedouin—should shed new light on their role and significance in the ancient biblical milieu.

Sacrifice Sacrifice among the Bedouin The most sacred practice of Bedouin from their recorded pre-Islamic history down to the present has been the sacrifice of their livestock as an accessory to an important event or undertaking. Although some of these ancient sacrifices were subsequently stipulated by Islam—especially in marking the main Muslim holidays—most premodern sacrificial rites practiced by Bedouin were not. Rather, they were performed for a number of immediate reasons, such as to highlight significant agreements (betrothals, reconciliations after conflict, affiliations with a new clan) and to show gratitude, as after the birth of a son. The traditional Bedouin uses of sacrifice were ever present and multipurpose. Whatever the immediate occasion, it appears that the main impetus for Bedouin to sacrifice their valuable livestock was to predispose the deity to deal favorably with them in their efforts to cope with the hardships and unpredictability of desert life: the frequent years of drought, when they watched their goats, ewes, and camels become barren from lack of pasture, and the lambs and calves die for lack of milk; flash floods in desert wadis that took their toll on flocks and herds; traditionally high infant mortality, along with illnesses that found no accessible cure; and encounters with wolves, snakes, and scorpions that often proved fatal to both the Bedouin and their livestock. Living in constant fear of these recurring afflictions over which he had no control, a Bedouin tried to propitiate the deity he



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knew by sacrificing to him his most cherished possessions—the animals he raised—in order to gain some peace of mind and to feel that he wielded at least a potential degree of control. This intention may be discerned from the word “ransom” (Ar. fadawi), by which he called a sacrifice made either directly to God or indirectly to a sacred, deceased intermediary. By presenting a gift to Allah, he hoped to ransom from danger or ensure the well-being of things dear to him, such as his children, his livestock, or his tent. Upon slitting the victim’s throat in a direct sacrifice to God, the person sacrificing uttered, for example—“O honorable and bountiful God, this victim has come from you and is returning to you”—thereby both acknowledging God’s role as the author of goodness and expressing gratitude for his bounty. In this way, he hoped to influence God in his favor. The nineteenth-century English traveler Charles Doughty related that a Bedouin host once sent him the meat of a goat he had sacrificed for the health of a sick camel, claiming, “Now the camel will certainly begin to amend (sic).”4 Sacrifices that Bedouin offered as thanksgiving after a specific danger had been averted were also called “ransom,” the intention then being to ransom from future danger the object that had just experienced relief. Moreover, to specify what he was ransoming, a Bedouin smeared the object with the victim’s blood. Bedouin also gave sacrificial gifts to intermediaries long deceased but revered. Until the late twentieth century CE, when emergent Islamism forbade private or communal pilgrimages to the graves of such intermediaries, these journeys constituted the main Bedouin religious ritual, and were still being performed at the time of this writing, though to a lesser extent. The most highly considered intermediaries were the ulya (sing. wali), deceased saints believed to be close (adj. wali) to God. To qualify as a saint after one’s death, there had to be evidence of having enjoyed God’s special blessing (baraka), which, among Bedouin, may be manifest even in secular success, including the attainment of wealth through raiding or smuggling. In the 1920s, the Czech explorer Alois Musil told of a wali in the Syrian Des­ert whose claim to holiness was that he “undertook countless raids and returned from them all.”5 In 1973, I witnessed another saint in the making in southeastern Sinai. The chief of the Tarabin al-Saraya had been a renowned smuggler who provided employment for many Bedouin in his smuggling

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networks. After his death, therefore, his tribesmen began constructing a domed tomb over his grave, at Nuwayba al-Tarabin, which they anticipated would serve as a place of pilgrimage. Since any material success achieved under desert conditions was deemed extraordinary, we often find that a saint was a tribal ancestor who was presumably wealthy enough to practice polygamy, beget numerous children, and set the basis thereby for a large clan that ultimately formed the nucleus of a tribe. Among the saints who are considered tribal forefathers in Sinai and the Negev, one could name Salman Abu Sakhna of the Azazma Sawakhna in the central Negev; Shaykh Faranja, of the Muzayna confederation in southern Sinai; Shaykh Atiyya of the Tarabin confederation in Wadi Watir; and Sa‘ud of the Ayayda confederation on the Ijma plateau. Other saints are reported to have had unusually spiritual personalities or to have performed supernatural deeds. Shaykh Zuwayd, whose tomb is in northeastern Sinai, could fill a food bowl by merely looking at it, an event that occurred when guests appearing at his tent one day found him with no food for honoring them. Shaykh al-Asam at Asluj in the Negev could walk great distances in a short time although he was lame. At the head of Wadi al-Akheidir in Jabal Ya‘laq (in western Sinai) is the shrine of the forefather of the Aheiwat Safeiha tribe, Sulayman al-Mijrib, who died under miraculous circumstances. He and his people were migrating from southern Sinai, where they had quarreled with the Muzayna. It was summer, and when he suddenly died, there was no accessible water with which to wash his corpse. Suddenly, a single cloud appeared in the sky and released rain on the spot where the little group sat fretting. Then, as they washed Sulayman’s body, a strong wind blew his shroud from the wadi where they were sitting, up to the surrounding heights, a place safe from the winter floods and hence more suitable for his grave. Two distinct signs were thus given that Mijrib’s grave should become a shrine. Some shrines contain no more than the spirit of a deceased holy man, such as that of Ali Abu Talib in Wadi Sulaf in southern Sinai. Long ago, when attacked by raiders, the ancestors of the Owlad Sa‘id tribe are said to have prayed to Ali Abu Talib, the Muslim Prophet’s son in-law, to help them. When their camels turned into white stones, which the raiders ignored,



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they realized that their prayers had been answered. They therefore built at that spot a shrine to which the Owlad Sa‘id make an annual ­pilgrimage. Bedouin describe a pilgrimage to a holy tomb and the sacrifice offered as actions meant to demonstrate “deference to the saint,” in order to curry his favor. The prayer the Bedouin utter upon slaughtering an animal indicates their overall aim, which is to ask for intercession. On a pilgrimage with the Azazma to Salman Abu Sakhna, in the Negev, I heard it pronounced thus: O Abu Sakhna, this sacrificial victim is yours. We are placing her under your protection; You, who enjoy the protection of your Lord.

Thereupon, the Bedouin sacrificer would slit the animal’s throat, letting the aortal blood spurt out on the tomb or on the ground nearby as a sign to the saint that he had performed the slaughter. If, however, he wished to slaughter the animal elsewhere, he would suffice by amputating the animal’s ear and dripping the blood on the tomb. Bedouin also offered sacrifices to their departed kin, who, while not as near to Allah as the saints, were nonetheless presumed to be nearer to him than the sacrificer himself, if only by dint of having died. A Bedouin hoped that his deceased kin, like the saints, would intercede on his behalf. Thus, he saw the sacrifice as enabling him to “engage the services of his ancestor” (yistajir fi mayyitah), according to the dictum: “Two morsels in the dead person’s hungry stomach will raise you when you fall,” based upon the Bedouin belief that the designated ancestor shared in the sacrificial meal. The first such sacrifice to an ancestor was offered the day any immediate kinsman died. Bedouin did not just sacrifice to their own, however—that is, not only to their family forefathers or to their deceased tribesmen possessed of God’s baraka. Pluralism is common where baraka is concerned, even if it belonged to deceased persons whom other groups deemed holy. I have seen Bedouin with whom I traveled deep in the desert recite a prayer—the Muslim fatiha—when passing the grave of a saint from another tribe. Likewise, in southern Sinai, people from all sections of the Tawara superconfederation, without distinction, still sacrifice at the tomb of Nabi Salih, a

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man of unknown origin who is believed to have lived in that area before the current tribes arrived there in the fifteenth century CE. Likewise in northern Sinai, people of both the Suwarka and Rumaylat confederations (as well as the Tarabin confederation, their enemies) sacrificed at the tomb of the aforementioned Shaykh Zuwayd (until it was destroyed in 2014 by local Muslim fundamentalist followers of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham [the Levant]). Similarly in the Negev, people of the Tarabin confederation sacrificed at the tomb of Abu Hurayra, whom members of the Malalha confederation deemed their ancestor; and the Azazma sacrifice at the tomb of al-Asam, who was from the Tiyaha Gudayrat. By the same token, people from all twelve tribes of the Azazma confederation made family pilgrimages to sacrifice at the tomb of Abu Sakhna, the ancestor of only one of the twelve, the Sawakhna. In addition to their appeal to bygone saints, Bedouin are also careful, when encamping in new and unfamiliar grounds, to sacrifice to the “spirits of the ground,” which they call malayka. Perhaps confusing the Muslim concept of angels (mala’ika; sing. malak, from the root l-’-k, meaning the messengers who accompany a person during his lifetime and record his good and bad deeds in anticipation of Judgment Day), the Bedouin changed their function. Since their term malak derives from the root m-l-k, which means “possessing” or “ruling,” they apparently conceived of the malayka as “rulers or owners of the ground” (muluk al-ard), believing that “every span of the ground is possessed or under custody.” Although the malayka were not necessarily deemed evil, they, not unlike the Bedouin themselves, were zealous about their territory. Accordingly, if a Bedouin encroached on the domain of some malayka by lying down or pitching a tent without their leave, they might retaliate by striking him with an infirmity such as rheumatism or madness while asleep. Hence, a prudent Bedouin, when camping at an unfamiliar place—during a search for fresh pasture, for ­example—would sacrifice a goat or sheep to the malayka, saying: “O Rulers of the ground, we seek refuge in your honor.” Sacrifice in the Bible Judging from the Bible itself, sacrifices appear to have been the main religious ritual of the Israelites during the hundreds of years that transpired



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between their establishment in the Holy Land and the Babylonian exile.6 When individuals wanted to commune with their God, we hardly hear of their doing it merely in prayer, but rather through an offering. All the major figures in the Bible sacrificed livestock: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Balaq, Joshua, Gideon, the Benjaminites, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Jeroboam, Ahab, and Elijah are each cited as building altars and sacrificing. Moreover, sacrifice was not exclusively the practice of the Bible’s leading figures, but was also the predominant religious ritual of the rank and file. The Bible reports God as prescribing this practice: “Make for me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your sacrifices. . . . In every place where you invoke my name, I will come to you and bless you” (Exod. 20:24). Moses depicted the prevalence of ubiquitous sacrifice as characteristic in Sinai, where a man sacrificed “as he pleases” (Deut. 12:8). Moreover, although Moses purportedly admonished the Israelites that once they got settled in their own land, they could sacrifice only at the Temple in Jerusalem (Deut. 12:13, 14), the Israelite tribes were never able to forgo performing this major religious ritual close to their habitations, whether they were nomadic or settled. It was so prevalent that the Deuteronomistic literature of the seventh century BCE derided it proverbially as occurring “on every high hill and under every green tree” (Deut. 12:2; 1 Kings 14:23; 2 Kings 16:4, 17:10; also Isa. 57:5; Jer. 2:20, 3:6, 3:13; Ezek. 6:13; also 2 Chron. 28:4). Castigating the Judahites for their excess of sacrificing, Jeremiah cited their altars (to Canaanite gods) as being as numerous as “the towns of Judah . . . and the streets of Jerusalem” (Jer. 11:13). Hence, although this ever-present sacrificing is said to have been briefly halted during part of the reign of Solomon (after he built the Temple) and the rule of the Judahite kings Hezekiah and Josiah, it prevailed before their times and reemerged after them, throughout the land, down to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE (1 Kings 3:2–4, 22:44; 2 Kings 12:4, 15:4, 18:4; 2 Chron. 32:12, 33:3; see also Ezek. 6; Hos. 8:13). Accordingly, although the postexilic prophet Malachi wrote at a time when sacrifice had ceased to be the Israelites’ main ritual, he retained the common memory of widespread sacrifice as the custom of his early ancestors, conveying it in his image of “the tents of Jacob where one offered sacrifices to God” (Mal. 2:12).

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Mirroring the Bedouin urge to gain baraka wherever possible, even through the wali of a foreign or enemy group, the depicted early Israelites, in their own quest for blessing, engaged in religious pluralism. Perhaps it was the Israelites’ predilection for mingling that led biblical authors to project it onto the Philistines, Moabites, and Canaanites, too, describing them as praising the Israelite god Yahweh (Gen. 21:22–23; Num. 23:21–23; Josh. 9:9–10). In so pluralistic an atmosphere, therefore, we should not be surprised if the Israelites did in fact sacrifice at Canaanite shrines, as the Bible repeatedly reports them doing (e.g., Judg. 2:11, 2:15, 2:19, 3:7, 6:10, 6:28; 1 Kings 14:22–24, 16:31–33; 2 Kings 23:5; Jer. 11:13; Ezek. 6:4–5; Hos. 10:1; 2 Chron. 33:3–4). The biblical depiction of Israelites sacrificing at Canaanite shrines and even to Canaanite gods is also endorsed by the social intercourse that the Israelites are portrayed as maintaining with their neighbors. This is clear from the stories of marriages contracted with Hittite, Canaanite, Philistine, Moabite, and Phoenician women by Esau (Gen. 26:34–35), Judah (Gen. 38:2), Gideon the Aviezerite (Judg. 8:37), Samson (Judg. 14:2–3), the sons of Elimelekh and Naomi (Ruth 1:4), and Ahab (1 Kings 16:31), just as it was also obvious from the several entreaties by Moses to keep away from the women of the neighboring people (see, e.g., Exod. 34:16; Num. 25:1–5). By the same token, the patriarchs Abraham and Jacob maintained sufficiently good relations with other peoples to buy property from them at Hebron, Beersheba, and Nablus (Gen. 21:30–31, 23:16, 33:19), and Jacob’s son Judah attended Canaanite festivities (Gen. 38:12). Also evident among the early Israelites are the analogous reasons that drove premodern Bedouin to sacrifice their livestock. Thanksgiving was one. Primordial Noah (Gen. 8:20) is cited as making a thanksgiving sacrifice after having survived the flood, and Moses sacrificed after defeating the Amelekite assailants upon his leaving Egypt (Exod. 17:15). Abraham sacrificed after the weaning of Isaac, whom his formerly barren wife, Sarah, ultimately bore (Gen. 21:8); and Elkanah, whose wife Hannah had also been barren, made a thanksgiving sacrifice upon the weaning of their long-­ anticipated son, Samuel (1 Sam. 1:25). On a less personal type of meaningful occasion, King Saul commanded his troops, who had routed the Philis-



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tines, to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving in the Valley of Aijalon, where their triumph had taken place (1 Sam. 14:33). Although it is not always possible to discern whether the motive for a biblical sacrifice was to give thanks for an occurrence or simply to involve God in it by seeking his blessing, the latter often appears to be the motive. It was the case when, for example, Jacob performed a sacrifice upon the conclusion of a peace treaty with his father-in-law, Laban (Gen. 31:54), or when his father, Isaac, did so after his men finished digging a well at Beersheba (Gen. 26:25). Moses, too, sacrificed to highlight his descent from Mount Sinai with the law (Exod. 24:4). Similarly, the motive that led the Bedouin Owlad Sa‘id tribe in southern Sinai to erect a shrine to Ali Abu Talib, cited above—namely, to mark a significant event that he wrought there at their behest—is also what led biblical figures to erect sacrificial altar-shrines at sites where God had addressed them significantly, such as Abraham at Alon Moreh (Gen. 12:7), Jacob at Bethel (Gen. 35:7), and Gideon at Ofra (Judg. 6:24). Even if these accounts themselves were subsequent biblical innovations of the seventh century BCE, as argued by the archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, the Bible’s authors nonetheless found it normal to incorporate these acts of sacrifice into the narrative.7 In addition to offerings for thanksgiving, the Israelites’ main intention in sacrificing seems to have been, as with the Bedouin, to ransom something through the deity. For example, Moses’s order that the Israelites smear sacrificial blood on the depicted doorposts of their homes before the Exodus was very likely a device for protecting their own children from the evil of God’s plague that killed the firstborn of the Egyptians (Exod. 12:21–23).8 When Aaron built an altar during Moses’s prolonged absence on Mount Sinai, it was to sacrifice in order to ransom the Israelites from dying in the desert, which they greatly feared would happen (Exod. 32:1, 5–6). When, before Samson’s birth, his parents offered up a sacrifice, it was to ransom themselves from being childless (Judg. 13:22). When the Benjaminites went to Bethel to sacrifice, it was to ransom themselves from extinction, in light of the refusal of the other Israelite tribes to give them their daughters in marriage (Judg. 21:4). When the Philistines were poised to attack the Israelites at Mitzpeh, Samuel sacrificed, asking God to foil their plan (1

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Sam. 7:9–10). When Saul was appointed king, the Israelites sacrificed to ransom him from failure (1 Sam. 11:15). Finally, when King David sacrificed on the threshing floor of the Jebusite in Jerusalem, it was to ransom his people from the plague with which they had been blighted (2 Sam. 24:18, 25). As with the Bedouin, the Israelites sacrificed to ancestors as intermediaries for asking a blessing of God. Thus, Jacob, on his way to Egypt to meet his son Joseph, stopped at Beersheba to sacrifice at the altar that his father, Isaac, had built, asking for success on his journey (Gen. 46:1). Even the sacrifices that Bedouin made to the malayka, or demons of the ground, so that they would not afflict their encampments, are mirrored in the behavior of the early Israelites, whom the Bible condemns for making sacrifices “in the open . . . to the demons after whom they stray” (Lev. 17:5–7). Indeed, despite the seventh-century-BCE efforts to consolidate and centralize the Israelite religion, the impetus to sacrifice locally was so strong that it could not be ignored. The biblical authors therefore retained for it a major role in the new orthodoxy. Accordingly, we find sacrifice prominent, as in the book of Leviticus, although the prescribed ritual names are different and the procedure more regulated and intricate than among the Bedouin. What Leviticus 3 calls a “well-being” offering (shelamim) is what the Bedouin would consider a sacrifice of thanksgiving, expressing relief at receiving God’s bounty or mercy, or marking a significant event. The sacrifices designated for sinning or other causes of guilt (Lev. 4, 5) may be similar to Bedouin ransom offerings, implying that safety and well-being are being requested, despite the wrongs committed. Job, for example, offered sacrifices to ransom his children, acting merely on the assumption that they may have done something bad (Job 1:5). Similar requests might also be assigned to the sacrifice of ordination, as when Aaron and his sons assumed the priesthood (Exod. 29:20–21)—that is, an attempt to ransom them from failure by predisposing God to ensure their success. Thus, the modern scholar of Leviticus Jacob Milgrom, although without reference to a possible nomadic experience that resembles the minha sacrifice, endorses the correlation between it and what the Bedouin consider “ransom”; he asserts that “while there is no explicit statement [in Leviticus] concerning the hope for ‘blessing and salvation,’ there



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is scarcely a rite that does not take it for granted.” All individual sacrifices “have personal gain in mind.”9

Blood for Communion The ritual disposal of the blood of sacrificial victims in later additions to the Bible also bears a resemblance to Bedouin custom. When a Bedouin sacrifices, he establishes communion with his intermediary or with God through blood. If he makes a pilgrimage to a holy tomb or shrine and slaughters there, drops of the blood of the sacrificial animal are made to splash on the tomb. This communion through blood takes place even if the actual slaughter is to be consummated elsewhere, as at the person’s tent. In such a case, only an ear, as mentioned above, will be amputated and the blood of the wound will be sprinkled on the shrine.10 To achieve communion with God through a direct sacrifice performed at home, the blood of the victim is drained directly on the ground—God’s natural abode, as interpreted by W. Robertson Smith.11 Similarly, to establish communion with the intended beneficiaries of a sacrifice, a Bedouin will daub them with some of the blood he would normally let drain into a bowl. As I have witnessed, blood may be smeared

Fig. 23. A family on their way to sacrifice at a sacred tomb. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

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Fig. 24. Sacrificing a goat near a sacred tomb. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

on a camel or on the roof of a tent, just next to the front-center tent pole, or drops of it may be applied between the eyes of the family’s children. At Bedouin weddings, by the same token, the groom establishes symbolic communion with his bride by sprinkling the blood of a “sanctification” sacrifice (Ar. hilliya) on the bridal tent or, more directly, on the very dress the girl is wearing.12 And when, at a new camping sight, as mentioned above, Bedouin sacrifice to the demonic “owners of the ground” (muluk al-ard), they sprinkle the blood throughout the area. I witnessed this means of establishing communion in Sinai in the 1980s, and Charles Doughty saw it in Arabia a century before.13 In the Bible, too, blood was evidently viewed as a vehicle of communion by the early Israelites and was later integrated into the Tabernacle and Temple rituals. We are told, for example, that Moses, after descending from Mount Sinai, put half of the blood of the twelve tribes’ sacrifices in a basin to be sprinkled on the people so as to establish communion between God and them, proclaiming, “Behold, this is the blood of the covenant that God has made with you” (Exod. 24:6, 8; italics added). Later, when ordaining Aaron and his sons as priests, Moses established communion between God and them in two stages. First, he dashed the blood of the sacrifice



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Fig. 25. Daubing blood between the eyes of a son. Photo: Clinton Bailey.

on “God’s” altar. Then he took blood from upon the altar and sprinkled it on the new priests and their priestly vestments, thereby rendering them holy via this blood (Exod. 29:20–21). The book of Leviticus is replete with instructions for dashing the blood of sacrifices on the altar in God’s abode (Lev. 1:5, 1:15, 3:2, 3:13, 4:7, 4:18, 4:25, 4:34, 5:9, 7:2, 8:15, etc.), not unlike a Bedouin’s letting the blood of his sacrificial animal spurt out onto the tomb of a wali-saint. This method of God’s communing with his people through sacrificial blood may have been assimilated into later Israelite religion, especially if the Jewish credo, as taken from Deuteronomy 6:4–9, adopted the customary Bedouin and early Israelite sprinkling and daubing of blood as a metaphor. That is, the words of God as given in the Ten Commandments (Deut. 5) are presented as his communion with the Israelites, just as if they were equivalent to the blood of their erstwhile sacrifices. Accordingly, God’s commandments should be received by the Israelites like “drops (totafot) between your eyes” (Deut. 6:8)—the puzzling and rare Hebrew word totafot, perhaps a corruption from the standard Hebrew word for drops (tipot) that

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came about through a scribal error that gave it a different form.14 This metaphor for “something to remember,” expressed as “drops of blood between your eyes,” is also used in regard to the Passover sacrifice of a firstborn animal to redeem a firstborn son, an act to be retold to successive generations so that they will remember God’s beneficence in taking the Israelites out of Egypt with the might of his hand (Exod. 13:16). Similarly, I would venture to suggest that the following line in Deuteronomy 6:9, traditionally understood by biblical scholars as “write [these words] on the doorposts of your house and on your gates,” may have metaphorically meant to say, “Receive [these words] as if they were daubed upon the [erstwhile] tent poles at the entrance of your tent,” just as we know from Bedouin practice. This tent metaphor may have occurred to the seventh-century authors of the book of Deuteronomy as a medium for conveying the sanctity attributed to the Sinai experience, despite their then dwelling in the urban environment of Jerusalem and its houses.15 A more permanent vestige of communion through blood in Bedouin culture and in the Bible may be found in the practice of circumcision. W. Robertson Smith, identifying common blood as the strongest element binding ancient Bedouin clansmen to one another and to the particular god that was believed to belong to each clan, recognized in animal sacrifice and its attendant smearing of blood—and in the communal eating of the victim’s meat—a means to reconfirm their communion. He also cited the more significant custom by which an ancient Arabian outsider who wished to join a clan would, together with one of its members, jointly scarify a part of their bodies and lick each other’s blood. In this way, the joiner imbibed the clan’s communal essence and imparted his own blood to the new clan through his scarifying partner.16 The Egyptologist Donald Redford found evidence that the ancient Bedouin, or Shasu, in the highlands of Canaan performed such a blood ceremony when admitting newcomers into a clan.17 Even though the specifics of joining a Bedouin clan changed in the course of time, traces among recent premodern Bedouin of the belief that blood creates communion were still to be found.18 As mentioned above, a Bedouin groom in southern Sinai sprinkles blood on his bride’s dress to create marital communion. By the same token, a father may have his nurs-



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ing child suck the blood from the heart of a crow in order to endow him with the presumed keen instincts of that bird.19 Like Bedouin practice, whether ancient or premodern, the Bible combined scars and blood in circumcision as a way to establish communion between a person joining a clan, God, and God’s clan (subsequently his tribe and then the Israelite nation). Genesis 17 defines this communion as a covenant (Heb. brit) and lays out the process for creating it between God and Abraham. God tells him: This is My covenant, which ye shall keep, between Me and you and thy seed after thee: every male among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be the sign of a covenant betwixt Me and you . . . He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. . . . And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame day, as God had said unto him. (Gen. 17:10–11, 13, 23–24, KJV; italics added)

By the same token, when the sons of biblical Jacob are portrayed as devising a deceitful revenge against the clansmen of Shechem Ben Hamor for his rape of their sister Dinah, they supposedly agreed to resolve the conflict by merging their respective clans, stipulating that the Shechemite men scarify themselves by circumcising their foreskins. “If you will become like us,” they specify, “each man of you must undergo circumcision” (Gen. 34:15). These references to circumcision in Genesis, however, appear to be a retrojective liberty taken by the biblical authors for developing the theological saga of the god Yahweh and the Israelites, beginning it with the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 17. It is more likely that the source of the eventual Israelite practice of circumcision is to be found with the nomadic desert-dwelling Midianites, among whom Moses lived, marrying Zippora, one of their girls. Exodus gives us a short depiction of Zippora circumcising her son and her husband, Moses, when the latter fell ill while on his way to Egypt to liberate his people. Although the passage that describes

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the event is ambiguous, owing to the equivocal pronouns in the Hebrew text, it may well be read—with the pronouns in italics and the ambiguities in brackets—like this: Zippora took a piece of flint-stone and cut the foreskin of her son. Then she applied it [the flint] to his [Moses’s] genitals and said, “Look! You are a blood-husband to me”. . . . “A blood-husband through circumcision.”20 (Exod. 4:25–26)

The fact that the two males had not been circumcised previously indicates that the Midianites did not deem the operation relevant to them. Moses and his son were outsiders to the clan of Jethro, his father-in-law, who did not consider their circumcision necessary, despite Moses’s marriage to his daughter. Their children, after all, would belong to the clan of their father, not their mother. To the Midianite Zippora, by contrast, the practice of circumcision must have seemed significant (since it was practiced on the men she had known, i.e., Midianite men), even if Moses and their son were not her clansmen. Consequently, imagining that the illness that befell Moses on their way to Egypt was a result of their not having previously undergone the operation, she performed it herself. Thereafter, however, she deemed Moses ritually proper for her, apparently owing to the blood of the scarifying circumcision. All this implies that circumcision was practiced by the Midianites as a requirement for joining a clan, just as similar scarifying was practiced among other ancient northern Arabian groups that Donald Redford and W. Robertson Smith discovered in their researches. In particular, it suggests that the Hebrews learned circumcision from the Midianites, among whom they lived after the Exodus, and later introduced it into Israelite religious practice as a symbol of belonging to the clan, or people, of the god Yahweh. Indeed, a further remnant of joining a clan through the blood of scarification may have remained in the Jewish religion in the practice of metzitza—sucking the blood from the scar of a circumcised child by the person performing the operation. In the Bible, Yahweh imparts the clan-oriented aspect of circumcision to Abraham clearly, stipulating, “If any male who is uncircumcised fails to



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circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his clansmen; he has broken my covenant” (Gen. 17:14). If later biblical authors attributed the purported original performance of circumcision to Abraham (Gen. 17:23–27) instead of the Midianites, it may have been in order to claim the practice as belonging uniquely to Israel; see the appendix. Likewise, to portray circumcision as an established tradition among the early, patriarchal-age Israelites, the biblical authors may have integrated it into the story of Dinah, discussed above, in which the sons of Jacob imposed it on the Shechemites as a precondition for giving them their daughters in marriage and merging their clans (Gen. 34:14–16). The authors also stipulated circumcision as a requirement for partaking in the pesah sacrifice before the Exodus (Exod. 12:48)—perhaps again to have it appear as a custom that predated the Midianite influence. Obviously, if the pre-Zippora proto-Israelites had been accustomed to performing circumcision, Joshua would not have been compelled to perform it in a mass ceremony for all those born during the depicted forty years in Sinai, under the less than convincing pretext provided by the Bible, namely, that the Israelites were “on the road” and not in a position to perform the operation on their sons (Josh. 5:4–7)—an excuse refuted by the story of Moses’s own circumcision. The Joshua account ignores the fact that Moses and his son were circumcised literally “on the road” (Exod. 4:24) and presumably in the same desert. In sum, circumcision seems to have come to the Israelites through the nomadic Midianites, becoming a hallmark of their subsequent religious practice and identity. Whatever the biblical origins of the rite, the Israelites are subsequently portrayed as referring derisively to their enemies—especially the Philistines—as “the uncircumcised” (Judg. 14:3; 1 Sam. 14:6, 17:26, 31:4; 2 Sam. 1:20).

Taboos of Blood and Other Kinds Among Bedouin, the holiness in the blood that allows it to be a vehicle of communion emanates from their belief that it contains the essence of life. They express this as “Life is in the blood” (Ar. al-haya fi-d-damm). In 1980, I brought a Bedouin (Id Imsa‘id al-Jabaliyya) from southern Sinai to the Heart Institute in Jerusalem for a checkup, and he adamantly refused

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to allow the staff to take a sample of his blood for a blood test, lest he lose part of his life. The same attitude leads Bedouin to depict an individual’s persona as his “blood.” For example, to say that someone’s blood is heavy, or light, or cold (thagil/khafif/barid) means: he is a stolid or amiable or calm person. We can also observe this close connection between blood and life in other aspects of Bedouin behavior. For example, a menstruating woman must not enter into the presence of a postnatal woman, a circumcised child, or any wounded person, lest her “open” blood harm them through their own open blood.21 She must also refrain from baking, cooking, and preparing or serving drink, lest the partakers of her goods experience open blood. Owing to this sacredness of blood among the Bedouin, it follows that when eating animal meat, one should not imbibe its blood, which would mean mixing one’s blood with that of a creature of a different order. To avert drinking it with the meat of the butchered victim, Bedouin drain the blood before cooking the animal. This abstinence from eating or drinking blood, and the desistence from contact with it, is but one facet of a Bedouin’s belief in taboos, which are designed to let him feel a degree of control over his fate; by refraining from breaking a taboo, he spares himself undue harm. Moreover, in keeping with a Bedouin’s attitude toward blood, he will observe taboos against contact with other things containing the essence of life, such as seminal excretions or animals having human qualities. Accordingly, anyone who has had contact with semen, either through sexual intercourse or auto-ejaculation, is deemed impure and must neither touch another person nor pray without first bathing his entire body. Bedouin believe that an impure person’s touching another may make the latter ill, perhaps even fatally; and if a Bedouin should pray in this impure state, he will anger God. While such taboos can also be found in the Islamic religion, to which Bedouin have formally been adherents since the seventh century CE, some may have originated previously with the Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula, only to become assimilated there into Islam in its early stages. We find them, for example, in Sura 5 of the Qur’an (verses 4–6), where the taboos concerning pure and impure foods are similar to those we find in the Bible and may conceivably be based on them, except that the integra-



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tion of nomadic taboos into the Bible would have preceded their integration into the Qur’an by one thousand years. Accordingly, we find biblical parallels to Bedouin taboos regarding impurity, such as “When a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water” (Lev. 15:16) and “If a man has carnal relations with a woman, they shall bathe in water” (Lev. 15:18). Likewise, the Bible strives to prevent a neutral person from being defiled, by forbidding an impure person to touch him (Num. 19:22). The same precaution pertains to an impure person’s eating with others. Hence, when young David absented himself from King Saul’s table, the king assumed that he had had sexual intercourse without an ablution: “An accident . . . he must be unclean and not yet cleaned,” he said (1 Sam. 20:26). As noted above, another Bedouin taboo pertains to animals with human traits. These are also impure and must be neither touched nor eaten. After studying the behavior of early Bedouin in pre-Islamic Arabia, W. Robertson Smith viewed their forgoing to eat humanlike animals as a safeguard against cannibalism, stemming from a primordial time when they did not always distinguish between humans and animals.22 Premodern Bedouin refrained even from petting dogs, for example, although these were necessary for guarding their flocks. Their explanation was that “the dog is of the same clay as a human being; he eats people’s food, drinks their water, enters their tent and guards them.”23 As to forbidden food, Bedouin mainly cite the porcupine (Ar. anis, lit. human).24 They consider it “like a person; his hand is a child’s hand, and his ear is the ear of a human being.” They relate a legend that the original porcupine was the transformation of a man called Khamis (“fiver”), who underwent this metamorphosis as punishment for washing his hands with camel milk, an act that angered “the prophets,” that is, pious ancients, in Bedouin terminology. Hence, the man’s hands with their five fingers remained part of the porcupine to remind Bedouin that Allah gave them camel milk specifically as “sustenance from starvation” (gowt an al-mowt), since camels endure prolonged drought better than a Bedouin’s other livestock and continue all the while to produce milk.25 Similarities to these aforementioned taboos are found in the Bible, too. They reflect not only the Bedouin aversion to eating blood, but also its ra-

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tionale. When, for example, God instructs Noah about the use of animals as food, he forbids man to eat an animal’s life by eating its blood (Gen. 9:4). This prohibition is reiterated in Leviticus (7:26, 17:10–14), which states the belief that “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” (17:11). These beliefs remained with the Israelites at least into the monarchy. When King Saul’s troops, famished from a day’s battling the Philistines, slaughtered and ate the sheep and cows they took as spoils, “eating with the blood,” Saul tried to repair what he called the “sin” by erecting a new altar and having the troops bring their livestock there to sacrifice again and to eat “without the blood” (1 Sam. 14:32). The Bedouin concept of “open blood” containing a dangerous, supernatural element that must be neutralized by, among other things, covering it with earth after a slaughter, also finds its expression in the Bible. Leviticus 17:13 specifies to “pour out the blood of a hunted animal . . . and cover it with earth.” It is also manifest, as with the Bedouin, in the belief in the contagious impurity of a menstruating woman and, consequently, her isolation for seven days (Lev. 15:19–24). Bedouin restraint about eating the flesh of animals that have human characteristics (such as the aforementioned porcupine) seems also to have been assimilated into the dietary laws of the Bible (Lev. 11; Deut. 14). The two most prominent biblical prohibitions are against the eating of animals whose hands and feet—specifically, their fingers and toes—resemble those of humans; and those that do not chew the cud, just as people do not. Quadrupeds with these characteristics are forbidden as food. Hence, we have the biblical double insistence on an animal having split hooves and chewing cud as the criteria for its meat being permissible; this is to ensure that the animal is not human. One might see the same intention in the prohibition against eating fish that have no scales (namely, because humans, too, have no scales) or the ban on eating carnivorous animals or predatory birds, which eat the meat of other animals, just as people do. Other forbidden animals: crustaceans that move about in the water on limbs, as people do, and insects whose legs resemble those of people—unlike, by contrast, locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets, which have extra, “jointed” leg parts for leaping, and whose use for food, therefore, the Bible allows (Lev. 11:21). The Bible also reflects the taboo that deters Bedouin from petting the



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“humanlike” dog. It manifests itself in biblical references to the dog as despicable.26 In Deuteronomy, for example, vows of money earned from the sale of dogs are disallowed, since a dog is “abominable” (Deut. 23:18, 19); and the suffering Job, in hyperbolic style, recoils from letting people whom he disdains from even getting near his dogs (Job 30:1; italics added).

Oaths and Vows The noted nineteenth-century Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher, having studied the role of poetry in the conduct of conflict, commented that it was believed in ancient days that “a heavenly power was revealed in poetic speech.”27 Indeed, among the premodern Bedouin of Sinai and the Negev, poets were often called upon to compose poems that could be used like a weapon against an enemy. In 1875 CE, for example, when the Tarabin confederation in the Negev threatened the Tiyaha with warfare, persons of the latter immediately came to Mustafa Zabn al-Ugbi, asking him to compose a poem that would dissuade the Tarabin from their course.28 A century later, in 1984, when the Tarabin of central Sinai feared that their Tiyaha neighbors had been insulted by losing a legal dispute with them and might resort to warfare, they came to the poet Anayz Abu Salim al-Urdi, asking him to compose a poem that would dissuade the Tiyaha from belligerence.29 This premodern use, in conflict, of poems that “could harm with artful machinations” was part of an ancient tradition in Bedouin Arabic poetry. For poetic words to be attributed this role, however, Bedouin had to believe, as Goldziher said, that they indeed contained “a heavenly power.” As seen in the chapter on law, the spoken word in the form of an oath played so decisive a role in determining innocence or guilt that its utterance is all a Bedouin defendant needed in order to exonerate himself. As to Goldziher’s observation about “heavenly power,” we have found in the realm of law that the main safeguard against lying under oath comes from the widespread Bedouin belief that both God and the saints at whose graves swearing often takes place are involved in oaths as the forces that confirm them and that will punish anyone who lies—or his descendants, up to seven generations.30 In everyday life, too, words uttered as vows are seen as sacrosanct for

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accomplishing a goal. Among Bedouin men, this often takes the form of throwing one’s head ropes on the ground and making a vow, as if to say, “I divest myself of manhood unless I accomplish such-and-such a task.” Another form is one’s vowing to divorce one’s wife unless certain conditions (bearing no relation to one’s wife) are fulfilled; thus, a man will swear, “I will divorce my wife, unless . . .” I first encountered this in Sinai in 1971 when an elderly Bedouin shepherd I inadvertently met offered to slaughter a goat for my dinner. Deterred by the cost involved for the evidently destitute shepherd, I demurred. But his repeated shouting of the “divorce vow” (Ar. talag), lest I refuse his invitation, led the Bedouin who was my companion to urge me to accept the invitation. He assured me that the man would indeed divorce his wife. In the course of field research into Bedouin culture, I encountered this phenomenon often and learned that—in addition to the holiness of the spoken word—a reputation for recklessness, gained from threatening to deprive oneself of something dear, was involved. Such a reputation is viewed as an asset in ensuring one’s personal security in a desert society devoid of law-enforcement agencies, and Bedouin history provides us a number of examples for the phenomenon. In an eighteenth-century war between the Wuheidat and the Ramadin tribes in the Negev, for example, the military leader of the former, called ad-Dali Jarad, swore to divorce his wife unless he drove the Ramadin from their lands into the Hebron Hills.31 In 1875, in the wake of the expulsion of the allies of the Tarabin leader Hammad alSufi from the area around a well called Khuwaylfa, Sufi aroused the fears of the Tiyaha by vowing to divorce his wife unless he succeeded in “filling his coffee-pot with water from the Khuwaylfa well,” that is, driving the Tiyaha away from there.32 A legend current among the Bedouin in Sinai and the Negev assigns the origin of the divorce vow to a black man called Rashid. The legend relates that, having fallen ill, Rashid, a noted warrior with a tribe of Bedouin, abstained himself from joining a camel raid taking place far from home. Suddenly, the herds of Rashid’s own tribe came under attack. Hearing the shepherds call, “Where are the stalwarts?” the ailing, solitary Rashid girded his sword, mounted his horse, and took battle against a horde of raiders. Cut down one by one, the astounded enemy finally shouted an



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offer to leave him one hundred camels if he would halt his pursuit. Rashid’s answer was, “I shall divorce my wife if I concede a single hair of even one camel! But I shall leave you one to slaughter for your dinner; and consider yourselves lucky!” Refusing his offer, the black man fought until he retrieved every last camel.33

Illustrating the sacredness of the spoken word, the Bible presents several parallels to the Bedouin attitude to vows, as it does to oaths. When the wandering Israelites get to the borders of Moab in Transjordan, the Moabite chief Balaq summons the priest Balaam to recite curses in elevated language against the invading horde. “Come now,” he says, “curse this people for me, since they are too mighty for me; perhaps I shall be able to defeat them and drive them from the land; for I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed” (Num. 22:6; italics added). In the realm of law, as cited in the previous chapter, the Bible, as among Bedouin, allowed the spoken word, in the form of a sworn oath, to exonerate a suspect or defendant (Exod. 22:7, 9–10; Deut. 21:7–8).34 The Bible also affirms the role of God in vows—a role pervasive among the Bedouin. In Deuteronomy, Moses admonishes the Israelites, “When you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not put off fulfilling it, for the Lord your God will require it of you, and you will have incurred guilt” (Deut. 23:22; italics added). Clearly, biblical vows, no less than a Bedouin’s vow to divorce his wife, are spoken words that may not be revoked. Thus, even the conqueror Joshua—despite his own, and God’s, commands to the Israelites to annihilate the natives of the land—was constrained to allow the Canaanites of Gibeon to live and remain resident in situ once he had given them his vow to this effect. His justification—“We swore to them by the Lord, the God of Israel; therefore we cannot touch them. . . . We will spare their lives so that there will be no wrath against us” (Josh. 9:19–20; italics added)—was valid, even though the vow had been procured by deception on the part of the Gibeonites. Indeed, wrath ultimately came, in the form of a famine, following King Saul’s—not Joshua’s—slaughter of some Gibeonites, perhaps hundreds of years later. Moreover, Saul’s successor, David, felt sufficiently bound by Joshua’s vow to accede to the Gibeonite demand for revenge, and turned seven of Saul’s issue over to them to be hung. For his own part, however, David exempted Saul’s grandson Mephiboshet from this fate, on

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the basis of the vow that he, himself, had given the latter’s father, Jonathan, not to harm his offspring (1 Sam. 20:14–15, 42; 2 Sam. 21:1–9). Perhaps the best-known vow in the Bible is that of the judge Jephtah, who, before leading the men of Gilead to war against the threatening Ammonites, swore to sacrifice to God the first thing to emerge from his house if God gave him victory. Upon his victorious return, however, the first thing to emerge was his only and beloved daughter, welcoming her triumphant father in song and dance. The consequences were immediately obvious to them both, and Jephtah sorrowfully divulged, “I have uttered a vow to Yahweh and I cannot retract.” His doomed daughter, acknowledging the gravity of a vow, acquiesced: “Father, as you have uttered a vow to Yahweh; do to me as you have vowed” (Judg. 11:30–31, 35–36; italics added). Similarly, when most of the outraged tribes of Israel joined forces and killed the women of the Benjaminites to punish the rape of a Judahite woman in their territory, they also vowed not to marry off their own women to Benjaminite men. Realizing, however, that this would lead to the disappearance of a fellow tribe and the weakening of the People of Israel, they felt constrained to resort to two ruses to obviate the vow. One was to oblige a section of Gilead that had not participated in the punitive operation, and was therefore absent when the vow was taken, to marry their daughters off to men of Benjamin. The other was to advise the latter to abduct and marry girls from the area of Shiloh, whose inhabitants were gathering to celebrate the grape harvest. They pledged to prevail upon the girls’ fathers to condone their marriages, since these would not be by consent—which the vow precluded—but by forceful abduction (Judg. 21), a form of marital binding common among Bedouin, as seen in chapter 3. Unlike Jephtah, however, who presumably fulfilled his vow by killing his daughter, King Saul, surrendering to circumstance, absolved himself of a vow that would have led to his killing his son Jonathan. When pursuing Philistine forces, the king vowed to execute any of his own troops who ate before victory was won. Hence, the hungry troops, spying some beehives flowing with honey, were sorely tempted to indulge themselves, but desisted, “for they feared the vow.” Only Jonathan, King Saul’s son, not having heard his father’s vow, helped himself to the honey. Thus, when God reneged on his assurance that the Israelites would prevail over the Philistines



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if the former pressed Saul’s pursuit of them, the king suspected that God was angry with his fighters for having violated his vow. When he discovered that the main culprit was his son, he asserted his intention to have him put to death. In this, however, he was deterred by the troops, who countered him with their own vow not to tolerate any harm inflicted on Jonathan (1 Sam. 14:42–45). Although I have found few examples of blessings in Bedouin lore, their occurrence as sacrosanct words in the Bible is prominent. In Numbers (24:10), Balaam explains his blessing of the Israelites as a divine order that could not be defied; but when he blessed them, it made his king, Balaq, “furious,” knowing that the blessings were ominous. The same fury seized Esau when the blessing he was naturally to receive as the firstborn son of Isaac was deprived of him by his brother Jacob, who received it in his stead through deceit. When Isaac, also distraught at the deception, nonetheless explained that his blessing of Jacob, like any other blessing, was irrevocable, Esau “howled a great and bitter howl.” In a clear state of forlornness, he begged Isaac, “Bless me too, Father!” Then again, “Have you not saved me a blessing?” And finally, “Have you only one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And he wept loudly—but all to no avail (Gen. 27:32–38). As to Jacob, the enormity of his own deceit in stealing a blessing did not leave him either, for after twenty years of self-imposed exile, he dreamt that Esau was struggling with him, hitting him in the groin and demanding the return of the blessing (Gen. 32:25–27).35 Later, when the aged Jacob was about to bless Joseph’s sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, and placed his right hand, the vehicle of the preferred blessing, on the head of Ephraim, the younger, their father instinctively took Jacob’s hand to move it to the older child. Aware of a blessing’s power, Joseph protested: “Not so, Father, for the other is the firstborn; place your right hand on his head!” (Gen. 48:12–18; italics added).

Ethical Behavior A relevant Bedouin maxim holds: “He who has no honor has no religion,” meaning that religion requires ethical behavior.36 The behavior of man to his fellow man, which the Bible places in the context of ethics, Bedouin put in the category of honor; but they are quite the same.

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Among Bedouin, honor manifests itself in a number of domains. First is behavior towards one’s clan, the group that is always there to defend one on the basis of mutual responsibility. Accordingly, loyalty to one’s clansmen, compliance with the obligations of clan membership, and actions that promote clan solidarity are seen as moral imperatives. This is affirmed by their proverbs. “When one turns to his cousin, even if he’s wrong, he’s not” indicates that the rightness of a clansman in conflict is not to be questioned. Again, “The burden, if divided, can be borne” signifies that fines incurred by any single clansman must be paid by all. “Ignore a harm your cousin has caused you, till a more appropriate time” means that solidarity requires forbearance for the misdeeds of fellow clansmen, especially when the entire clan is facing an external threat.37 Likewise, concern for clansmen and clan solidarity is stressed in the Bible. People are guided not to bear a grudge against a clansman, not to gossip about him, not to take interest from him, and not to take blood revenge on him (Lev. 19:16–18).38 The last injunction was endorsed even by King David when he ruled against revenge within a clan and subsequently pardoned his own son Absalom, who had killed his half-brother Amnon (2 Sam. 13:29, 39)—although considerations of clan strength may have affected the king no less than ethical concerns. A second social value among Bedouin is assistance. In the previous chapter, we saw the importance that they attach to protection of the weak, which explains why, in their culture, “Protection is a way to gain honor.” Assistance in the form of charity is also valued. Thus, “He who shouts for help should be rushed to” and “There’s no good in one who lets a plea go unheeded.” The expression “A neighbor is the shepherd of one’s wealth” indicates that succor given to neighbors is esteemed; and Bedouin especially view the aid they extend to travelers in the desert, in the form of hospitality, as one of their supreme virtues. In striving to attend to his guest’s needs, a host must have “ants in his pants” or, as the Bedouin say, “a flea in his drawers.”39 Reflections of these social values are found in the Bible in the sections on social legislation as well as in various biblical narratives. As mentioned in the chapter on law, the protection of a ward is famously echoed in such expressions as “Do not stand aside when your protégé is attacked” (Lev.



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19:16), and “Seek for your protégé what you seek for yourself” (Lev. 19:18).40 The deep awareness of the need to afford people protection—in the desert’s endemic absence of law-enforcement agencies—may have also prevailed in the provisions made for the “cities of refuge” to be established in Canaan, according to Numbers 35. As regards assistance, we find the Bible particularly sensitive to the helpless and weak. When Moses instructs the Israelites to ultimately blot out the memory of the Amelekites for raiding them on the Exodus, he emphasizes that they attacked the feeble stragglers in the procession when they were tired and weary (Deut. 25:17; italics added). This consciousness also finds its way into Moses’s rulings for the anticipated Israelite settlement, interdicting the oppression of the weak people in society—widows, orphans, and strangers—and providing them with all the leftover grain, olives, and fruit after the gleaning, as well as the tithe otherwise designated for the Sanctuary every three years, so that they can “eat their fill” (Exod. 22:20–21, 24:19–21; Deut. 14:28–29). The biblical Ruth benefited from this command. Having returned to the Bethlehem area, indigent, with her mother-in-law, Naomi, during the harvest season, she joined the gleaners to pick up their leftovers (Ruth 2:3). Finally, the poor, in need of loans, are not to be charged interest (Exod. 22:24); and a neighbor, whose lost ass or cow is found, must have it returned (Exod. 23:4). These concerns for the weak are echoed in the prophet Nathan’s parable of the rich man who pillaged the sole ewe of a poor man, uttered to chastise King David for causing the death of Uriel the Hittite in order to obtain his wife, Bathsheba (2 Sam. 12:1–10). Such concerns are also found in the Psalms (e.g., 72:4) and in the writings of the prophets (e.g., Jer. 7:6, 22:3; Ezek. 22:7). Although ethical behavior toward the weak is a universal sentiment, found also in ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Canaanite literature,41 its expression among Bedouin should also be considered a possible influence on the Bible, just as nomadic Amorite behavior is thought to have affected the ethical behavior outlined in the Code of Hammurabi.42 Civility is another matter of ethical behavior that is central to the survival of Bedouin society, as manifest in the respect that Bedouin accord one another. Ever wary that someone might bear him enmity, perhaps stemming from a clansman’s misdeed, a Bedouin views an act of disrespect toward

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him as a sign of hostile intent. Therefore, in daily intercourse, Bedouin are almost uniquely careful to be civil and show regard for one another’s dignity. Whenever they meet or gather, for example, they are fastidious in inquiring about one another’s welfare, and their culture has produced and retained sayings such as “Everyone is entitled to respect and dignity” and “Strike a man, but don’t insult him!”43 No less, Bedouin law, to avoid the violence that may erupt from a slight to a person’s dignity, allows suit to be brought for several forms of insult: refraining from greeting another whom one knows, neglecting to offer a passing guest something to drink, or not touching food or drink proffered by a host. If it appears that there is no legal justification for such behavior, the violator may have to pay his slighted victim a fine. Verbal insult is also litigable, in keeping with the stipulation “He whose tongue torments will pay a fine.”44 The Bible, reflecting the Bedouin value of respect, also makes provisions to ensure it. A poor person asking for a loan for which he has only his sole garment to offer in pledge must have it returned to him each evening (Exod. 22:25). A lender, whether to someone rich or poor, may not enter the borrower’s house to take his pledge, lest he humiliate him before his family; the man must bring the pledge out himself (Deut. 24:10–13). In the same vein, Leviticus (19:14) forbids the insulting of the deaf and the tripping of the blind. Even slaves are to enjoy respect. Thus, if an owner strikes a slave and destroys an eye or a tooth, he must set the slave free (Exod. 21:21–22). Among Bedouin, even people condemned for injustice must be respected once they have made amends. Since they are no longer deemed dishonorable, it is a litigable offense to remind them of their erstwhile vio­lation by way of insult. Bedouin society understands that justice exists to curb violations that may be committed by anyone: “Justice works against me as against you.”45 We hear an echo of this respect for the condemned in later biblical laws, too. The excessive punishment of a convict, for example, is prohibited specifically so that he “is not debased in your eyes” (Deut. 25:3).

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as in the foregoing areas of comparison, Bedouin culture finds biblical similarities in the realm of oral traditions. Some of the Bedouin traditions survived until the middle to late twentieth century CE, when I heard them recited, whereas the biblical oral traditions existed orally only until their ancient transcription.1 However long it lasted without the written word, however, the oral tradition comprised a literature consisting of proverbs, genealogies, tribal stories, and poetry. In each of these domains, the literary product of the premodern Bedouin and the ancient Israelites as depicted in the Bible share several likenesses as well as the reasons behind them. Therefore, a review of the Bedouin oral literary product should afford some insight into facets of the biblical materials, indicating how they came about.

Proverbs For thousands of years, the migrations of Bedouin in search of pasture and water for their livestock deprived the youth of organized schooling, which largely helps explain why their society was unlettered down to the recent past. Despite this illiteracy, however, elements of essential knowledge naturally existed and had to be remembered, certainly in the economic, social, religious and, especially, legal fields. One method developed over time, ­ nowledge in oral as in several other preliterate cultures, was to embed this k proverbs, whose structure and rhyme aided their recall. In the economic

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sphere, for example, Bedouin who occasionally engaged in agriculture, as in Sinai and the Negev, were reminded, as noted above, that “the appearance of the Pleiades is planting time,” and those who raised sheep bore in mind that “he who has no sheep has nothing.”2 In the social domain, the security gained from one’s clan was affirmed by the maxim “If people violate you, rouse your clansmen,” just as the importance of clan solidarity was counseled in “A spear with no one to raise it is useless.”3 Likewise, to stress the extreme commitment one owed to a person under his protection, a Bedouin was told, “You will die before the one you’re protecting.”4 In religion, “Most graves are caused by envy” warned against the evil eye; and “Life is in the blood” explained why an animal’s blood must not be eaten.5 In the legal realm, “Blood is not washed but by blood” cautioned Bedouin that revenge was to be expected for murder. In taking it, however, “The murder of a man for a man” stipulated that vengeance must not exceed parity in number.6 Although such sayings are a universal phenomenon, found in all socie­ ties, the Bible presents us with a number of proverbs that are very similar to those of the Bedouin and should be considered in that light. These, too, most likely served as guidelines to life and behavior during the preliterate eras of Israelite history.7 To warn of revenge for murder, for example, the Bible, as cited in chapter 4, states, “He who sheds the blood of a man, by a man his blood will be shed,” (Gen. 9:6), but in the taking of revenge, another proverb cautions the avenger, like a Bedouin, not to go beyond parity (“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, and a leg for a leg”) or proportionality (“A burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a blow for a blow”) (Exod. 21:24–25). For stating the principle of collective responsibility, as in a clan, we find, as cited above, “The father eats sour grapes, and his sons’ teeth become numb” (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). Likewise, to express the importance of protection for a ward, the Bible instructs, “Don’t stand by when your protégé is bleeding” and “Want for your protégé what you want for yourself” (Lev. 19:16, 18).8 Similarly, the proverbial religious injunction against eating blood, as among the Bedouin, is “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11). Owing to our custom of viewing biblical statements in a specific religious context, it is difficult, in some cases, to identify the original proverb.



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For example, “Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk” may well have been a general metaphorical injunction against ignoring the special tie between a mother and her child9—before biblical exegetes in the postbiblical era deemed it a specific dietary law, owing to its mention in the Bible three times (Exod. 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21).10 Similarly, what I identified above as a preliterate Hebrew aphorism warning about the inevitability of blood revenge (“He who sheds the blood of a man, by a man his blood will be shed,” Gen. 9:6) was ultimately integrated into the Old Testament as part of a prohibition on shedding human blood in general.

Genealogies As we have seen when considering social organization, the absence of governmental law enforcement in the traditional deserts of the Middle East compelled people to defend themselves and their rights mainly through the medium of their clan. Also noted was that Bedouin call their clan a khamsa, or “fiver,” designating that all the living descendants of a man removed from a victim of violation by five generations (his grandfather’s grand­ father) are collectively responsible for avenging a wrong done to him, as well as for protecting him if threatened. Conversely, if any member of a clan commits a wrong against a non-clansman, all the men of the wrong­ doer’s clan would find themselves threatened with retaliation by all the men in the victim’s clan. For both contingencies, therefore, it was crucial for each party to know to whom they owed their clan commitments— knowledge that was crucial to them so that they neither harmed, nor were harmed by, someone in conflict with a person no longer their clansman, and toward whom the principle of collective responsibility no longer applied.11 The common instrument used for keeping track of their obligations in this regard was an oral genealogical list or table, the most common of which contained the five generations of a clan.12 In 1980, for example, Atayyig Jum‘a Dakhalallah, of the Tarabin Hasablah tribe, recited to me the composition of his khamsa. It began with the generation of his grand­ father’s grandfather, Himayd, and went on to the subsequent generations, each represented below by the names of the sons. In reciting the relevant genealogy of his clan, Atayyig had to recall, in

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The Fararja clan 1 Himayd

2 Dakhalallah

3

Id

Sa‘id

Hamdan

Frayj

Imfarrij

4 Jum‘a

Ayid

Owwad

Sulaym

5 Atayyig

Ayyad

Swaylim

Faraj

Id

Owwad

Ayad

Atiyya

Ayid



Salim Id



Faraj

Hamd

Himayd

Hamdan Sulayman Hamdan

Sulayman Imsallam

Sulayman Imsallam Silmi

Ayyad

Salman

Salim

addition to himself, its twenty-five other living members—seven of his father’s generation, two brothers, and fifteen first-, second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-degree cousins. Although this required oral recall, it did not— owing to the supreme importance of the clan to his security—seem difficult for him, nor did other Bedouin like him have trouble reciting all the individual names of clansmen, even of deceased clan forefathers going back four generations. Some Bedouin bear in mind oral genealogies more extensive than those of a clan, especially in anticipation of the possibility that parties that are not, or are no longer, clansmen might come into conflict. This risk obliges them to know their relative relationship to others in the broader society so that they choose the right party to help—a need that is especially significant for a dispersed and mobile society.13 The tribal principle noted above, “I and my brother will fight my cousin, and I and my cousin will fight the stranger,” requires of Bedouin to aid the party to a conflict that is more closely related to them against someone more distantly related. In Wadi Watir and the

Genealogy of the Imsa‘ida clan

Atiyya (forefather of the Tarabin)

Naba (ff. Naba‘at)

Hasaballah (ff. Hasablah tribe)

Imsa‘id (ff. of the Gusar)

Jubayl (ff. Jubaylat)

Ubayd (ff. Ubaydat tribe)

Ishaysh

Lami (ff. Lawami clan)



Shubayth (ff. Shubaythat)

Salim Abu Zuwayr

Imtawi



Nijm (ff. Nijmat)

Mu‘aysh

Slaym

Furayj (ff. Fararja clan)

Mughannam (ff. Arayda sub-tribe)

Imsa‘id ( ff. Imsa‘ida clan)

Imfarrij



Id

Faraj

Sabah abu Mansur (ff. Manasra clan)

Imtawi (ff. Imtaw‘a clan)

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adjacent seacoast of southeast Sinai, for example, six clans (the Lawami, Fararja, Alowna, Manasra, Imsa‘ida, and Imtaw‘a) make up the Tarabin Hasablah tribe. In the past, their ancestors constituted a single clan, but as the generations grew, they split into additional groups. When, therefore, I asked the leader of the Imsa‘ida clan how he could keep track of his clan’s relationships with these other groups so that he would know which to aid in their mutual conflicts, he recited to me a genealogy that included the relevant persons of fourteen generations. It began with the attributed forefather-leader of the entire Tarabin confederation, a man called Atiyya, who lived (treating a generation as thirty years) in the fifteenth century CE, and proceeded to the subsequent generations, the direct ancestors of the reciter himself. The basic realities of life in a patriarchal, nomadic, tribal society such as the Bedouin made genealogies essential for their security and helps explain why they are also common in the Bible. The biblical authors, who portrayed the earliest Israelites as nomads, found it necessary to place them among relationships of relative obligation, in lists that rendered the stories told before and after them credible and convincing.14 The genealogies in Genesis and Exodus, for example, deal with families, just as basic Bedouin genealogies relate to clans. Hence, they are limited to three to six generations, reflecting the significance of these numbers to nomads. For example, Genesis 46:8–27 cites the offspring of Jacob who went down to Egypt with him, and Exodus 6:16–23 does the same for Moses and the Levites. As in Bedouin genealogies that address the world surrounding the clan—that is, its related tribes and confederations—the biblical authors also composed genealogies that took in the surrounding Near East in order to show where the Israelites fit in with other peoples (Gen. 10:1–31; 1 Chron. 1:5–54, 2:50–55), including the offspring of former clansmen, such as Ishmael (Gen. 25:12–16), Esau (Gen. 36), and the offspring of Abraham and his second concubine, Ketura. (Gen. 25:1–4). Such genealogies were also compiled to help the Israelite authors locate themselves in the chronology of known world events: from the Creation to the Flood (Gen. 5), from the Flood to Abraham (Gen. 11:10–31), and through the generations that preceded King David, from Jacob’s son Judah and the Canaanite woman Tamar through Boaz and the Moabite woman Ruth (Ruth 4:18–22).



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Prose Narratives Like many other peoples, the Bedouin had a tradition of oral narratives. While they socialized around the campfires of their tents, their conversation always comprised stories that evoked interest, either about current events, such as ongoing conflicts, or past events, like the lives of forebears and others. Ancestral stories in particular were attractive, Bedouin believing that family qualities are genetically conveyed.15 Tales about how tribal ancestors fared in life and how they manifested qualities with which their descendants could identify—such as faithfulness, goodness, honor, daring, spirit, and cunning—may explain why these narratives survived for generations. The Israelites, too, transmitted ancestral stories about the biblical patriarchs and the Exodus that survived orally for centuries before their inclusion in the Hebrew Bible.16 Among them were the rites of the “epic cycle of the Israelite league,” as explored by the Bible scholar Frank Cross.17 While ancestral material found in the Bible is not always extensively detailed (I identified twenty-four such stories in Genesis alone, including some of just one line), whatever fragments did endure owed their survival, as among Bedouin, to features that held the interest of subsequent generations. Among the few Bedouin stories of forebears that survived were those that contained uncommon elements, such as miraculous acts of nature, on the assumption that they occurred to a person who deserved them. The Aheiwat confederation, of east-central Sinai, for example, remembered that their ancestor Sa‘d Jayyid al-Wa‘d—“Sa‘d who kept his word”—found himself and his followers, upon entering the peninsula, without food to sustain them until they discovered the leaves of the hawi plant (Launaea nudicaulis), which proved edible and thus saved them from starvation. Indeed, the name they consequently bore was Aheiwat—“people of the hawi plant.”18 By way of conferring legitimacy on ancestral figures, some Bedouin stories carried themes current in the desert, such as the finding of water at a moment of imminent dehydration. As mentioned in chapter 1, an example from the Azazma confederation derived from their attributed forefather, Azzam. While he was an infant in the northern Hijaz, his shepherdess mother cast him aside as she searched for water, only to discover on her return that the child’s kicking the ground with his heels had uncovered a

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spring.19 Another miraculous theme tells of a sudden gust of wind on an otherwise windless day carrying the cloak of a dead man to a spot suitable for his grave—that is, on high ground safe from the flash floods of winter. Both the Aheiwat Safeiha and the Tarabin Fararja groups in Sinai attributed such an event to their holy forebears, Salim al-Mijrib and Himayd, respectively.20 Bedouin were susceptible to the miraculous. In 1971, for example, a chief of the Alaygat confederation explained to me that a nearby oasis called Springs of Moses, just southeast of Suez, is where Moses slept, but that he spent his days pasturing his flock in the well-watered Feiran Valley. When I challenged him that Feiran was 125 miles away—a great distance to walk back and forth each day—he dismissed my intimation, protesting, “But he was a prophet!”21 In the Bible, we find similar supernatural happenings, albeit through the intercession of the god Yahweh, as the Bible has it. As noted in chapter 1, such an event was the discovery of water by Hagar at a moment of desperation (Gen. 21:15–19); another was the extraordinary hundredfold crop that Isaac reaped one year in the otherwise arid desert (Gen. 26:12). Likewise, the biblical Sarah’s bearing a son to Abraham when she was “ninety” (Gen. 17:17), or Joshua’s causing “the sun to stand still and the moon to wait” in order to have time to slay his Amorite enemies (Josh. 10:13–14), must also have fascinated Israelites who heard these stories recited orally for generations. Nomads, whether Bedouin or biblical, also related stories of how their forebears had acquired their tribal lands, which they knew were vital to their survival in the desert. Several such stories were recited to me by Bedouin of the Tiyaha, Tarabin, and Azazma confederations, which tried to establish tribal borders throughout the Negev in the nineteenth century.22 In Sinai, too, I heard accounts reflecting the importance of possessing land. One told how the Aheiwat came to possess their coastal strip along the Gulf of Aqaba. One day when an Aheiwat forefather was fishing in the gulf off a point called Wadi Imrah, he was suddenly visited by members of the Alaygat confederation, which had preceded the Aheiwat in that area but had long since moved westward. The guests, having come a long way, unsaddled their camels and left them free to graze in the vicinity of the man’s tent, where he had tethered a goat kid he intended to slaughter for their lunch. One of the camels, however, nibbling at the buds of an adjacent aca-



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cia tree, trampled on the kid and killed it. In mock seriousness, the host, aware of the law in cases of animal damage, demanded of the guests his due, which he termed “the blood payment for the goat-kid” (diyit al-jidi), as if the kid were a murdered human being, since only human slaughter warranted a payment of blood money. Playing along with him, the guests asked what he wanted for recompense. He replied, “Ownership of your coast.” “Granted,” they said; and diyit al-jidi has since been known to the Aheiwat, in a humorous vein, as the way in which they gained possession of their southeastern lands.23 Another story that circulated in southeast Sinai told how the Tarabin— the enemies of the Muzayna confederation, which preceded them—moved into neighboring territory that had belonged to the Alaygat, former Muzayna allies. According to the Muzayna, the Alaygat imposed on the Tarabin two (rhyming) conditions, striving to ensure that their stay would be short: to pasture only on dry plants (gashsh) from the previous winter and to sleep only in brush-built shelters (khashsh)—which the Tarabin proceeded to violate by staying on until fresh winter pasture sprouted anew, and also by pitching their winter tents to live in.24 Not surprisingly, we also find among the Bedouin and the Israelites some surviving ancestral stories that proudly related acts of unusual goodness. Bedouin of the Tarabin Hasablah, for example, tell of an ancestor, Imsallam al-Hajj, who once saw a man of the Arabian Ma‘aza tribe at a market in Cairo, crying because his camel had been impounded by a merchant to whom he owed a debt. Al-Hajj thereupon paid the man’s debt in time for him to join the returning caravan to his home.25 Another section of the Tarabin in southeast Sinai, the Fararja, recall the good deeds of Himayd, their first forefather to stake a claim to the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba north of the palm grove Nuwayba. Himayd had taken to fishing, going out to sea in the hollowed trunk of a date palm. One year, when drought was heavy in the land, five of the Tarabin from the interior came to collect him so that he might join them in moving to Egypt to seek sustenance. Himayd, however, declined, claiming that he could sustain himself from what he caught at sea; he even offered to look after their families. His offer accepted, he went out to sea every day and, on his return, filled five bowls, one for each family, with fish and a few dates from the palm grove.26

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Likewise, the descendants of the biblical Abraham (or his prototype) must also have taken pride in the beneficent acts performed by their ancestor, such as his rushing to the aid of his estranged nephew Lot upon hearing that he had been kidnapped and his livestock plundered by raiders from the distant north. They might also have derived honor from his magnanimous declaration—“I will take not even a string or sandal lace of what is yours”—in declining the offer of reward made by the king of Sodom after Abraham had routed the raiders and retrieved the spoils (Gen. 14:13–16, 23).27 By the same token, one can imagine the pride that the offspring of Joseph enjoyed from the story of the magnanimity he showed toward his treacherous brothers when they arrived in Egypt, despite their having sold him into bondage (Gen. 45:4–5, 50:18–19). Good character and a dedication to principle are also reflected in both Bedouin and biblical stories about forebears. In the Negev, a well-remembered man of character was the chief of the Hukuk section of the Tiyaha confederation, Fiheid al-Huzayyil. After he had led the Hukuk to victory over their rivals, the Atowna, for the leadership of their confederation—in a war that lasted twenty-two years (1842–64)—Fiheid’s allies throughout the war, tribes of the Tarabin confederation, demanded that he let them take possession of the lands of the vanquished Atowna. Knowing that lands of a confederation are sacrosanct to its members, Fiheid stood up to them and refused their demand.28 Similarly, Bedouin of the Ghawali division of the Tarabin in the Negev proudly told of a forefather, Sagr Abu Sitta, who had angered the Khedive Ismail (the ruler of Egypt, 1863–79) because of the many plunder raids he conducted into that country. Learning that Abu Sitta owed a debt of gratitude to Mansur Abu Baghdadi, a chief of the Egyptian Tumaylat tribe, Ismail ordered the latter to summon him, on pain of imprisonment, so that he could be punished. Abu Sitta, for his part, not wanting to endanger Mansur, who had done him many favors over the years, was quick to pre­ sent himself and accompany him to the khedive. Such principled loyalty to a friend impressed Ismail so deeply, however, that he reversed his intention to punish him, granting him, instead, a set of fine clothes and a large plantation, where some of his offspring settled as farmers.29 Among the Israelites, too, it is likely that pride over a show of character



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by ancestors manifested itself in oral traditions before they were transcribed. For example, the Israelites may well have respected Lot for refusing to surrender his guests to the lust of the men of Sodom (Gen. 19:4–10); or Joseph, who, unwilling to betray his master and benefactor, Potiphar, rebuffed the amorous advances of his wife (Gen. 39:7–10). Another story conveyed with pride referred to the biblical David, who rejected the urgings of his followers to kill King Saul when the latter, pursuing him with murder in mind, stopped to relieve himself in a cave where they were then hiding. Behind his refusal was respect for the fact that Saul had been “legitimately ordained” (1 Sam. 24:2–12). In a slightly different way, the qualities of courage, guile, and spirit in both Bedouin and biblical ancestors were also orally recalled by their descendants with pride. Hence, generations of the Tiyaha Atowna told of the time that their courageous ancestor Salim Salim al-Atowna led the Bedouin of the Negev in an attempt to end the occupation of Palestine by Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptian army, in 1834. Though wounded in his deft left hand, Salim cut down many of the enemy with the sword he bore in his right.30 Bedouin likewise admired the cunning of forebears in battle. I have often heard people of the small Ramadin tribe tell, for example, how, in 1799, their forefathers and a small contingent of horsemen feigned an attack on the camp of the most powerful chief in the Negev, al-Wuheidi, drawing his forces out into an open space in pursuit, only to have the Ramadin’s main force attack the Wuheidat from the rear and defeat them.31 Among the Israelites, as among Bedouin, ancestral courage and cunning in battle were virtues related by the oral tradition that became part of the Bible. Courage was manifest, for example, in Moses defiantly challenging the might of Pharaoh (Exod. 14:8–9, 21) and pitting his straggling refugees against the Amelekites, who assaulted them (Exod. 17:8–13). The leader Shamgar single-handedly killed “600” Philistines with only an ox goad (Judg. 3:31); Samson killed “1,000” with the jaw bone of an ass (Judg. 15:15); and Saul’s son Jonathan, along with his weapons bearer, attacked a Philistine outpost, putting the whole enemy camp in disarray (1 Sam. 14:6–15). The young David, too, was described as facing the giant Goliath with only a slingshot and some stones (1 Sam. 17:40–51). The fortitude of their ancestor Samson was celebrated in the tribe of Dan by repeated recitations of the

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story of how he, though blinded and bound, nonetheless brought the palace of the Philistines down on their heads (Judg. 16:27–30). Ancestors’ cunning in battle also impressed generations of Israelites. Abraham routed a larger force of raiders from Syria through the device of night attacks (Gen. 14:15). Joshua took the city of Ai by having his men ambush its pursuing forces (Josh. 8:4–8). Ehud Ben Gera ingratiating himself with King Eglon of Moab surreptitiously used his adroit left hand to stab him to death (Judg. 3:15–21). The judge Gideon startled and scattered the large Midianite camp at Mount Tabor with a smaller force bearing torches and raising a clamor (Judg. 7:18–22). And Jephtah tricked the dissimulating tribesmen of Ephraim by making them pronounce the word “shibbolet,” which they could not do correctly (Judg. 12:5–6). Deceit, like cunning, is seen as a facet of spirit. Bedouin stories about it survive, even though it is not apparent—at least to Western eyes—that they glorify ancestors. For example, members of a large tribal confederation east of Beersheba called the Zullam (Offspring of the Unjust One) cite their first ancestor in the Negev as a man whom they call the Unjust One (Zalim), that is, one who had violated the principles of Bedouin justice. Zalim, whose actual name was Matar, took blood revenge for a son murdered in a camel raid, despite already having accepted blood payment for him. His Bedouin descendants apparently overlook Zalim’s lawlessness, preferring to respect his disproportionate reaction to his son’s slaying as a principled effort to establish a deterrent against the murder of his clansmen. Bedouin’s enjoyment of stories of deceit is particularly evident in those about ancestral women. In the central Negev, for example, the Sarahin section of the Azazma confederation relate back to a forefather called Sirhan the Ibex (Sirhan al-Badan), whose father was killed, leaving young Sirhan and his six brothers to avenge his death. They lacked, however, a gun. Therefore, Sirhan’s mother, Sa‘ida, thought up a trick. Every week, she and Sirhan would go to the market in Gaza with their donkey. Sirhan would then sell the donkey to someone, and after a bit, Sa‘ida would accost the buyer, shouting, “He stole my donkey; he stole my donkey,” raising such a ruckus that each buyer returned the donkey to her rather than suffer shame. Finally, the family amassed the money they needed to buy a rifle, and Sirhan took his revenge. His descendants, the Sarahin, retain the memory of



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this event through the saying “Sa‘ida sold her donkey for a gun” (Sa‘ida ba‘at al-ayr min shan baruda). Also found among the Azazma is another seemingly negative portrayal of a woman. One of their member tribes is called the Zaraba, or Offspring of the Boy Hid in a Sheep Pen (zarb). His descendants relate that Zarb was the illegitimate child of a shepherdess who kept him hidden to conceal her immoral behavior.32 The spirit of defiance, too, was likewise recalled with admiration by the Tarabin Hasablah, one of whose ancestors, named Ishaysh, killed a monk. In their account, this Bedouin once went to St. Catherine’s Monastery in southern Sinai to receive food for having conveyed supplies to the monks there from Gaza. Standing on the ground before the monastery wall and beneath the high window through which a pulley raised and lowered items, he learned that his portion was denied him. Hungry but defiant, he deftly flung his broad wooden food bowl the thirty feet up to the window, striking a monk and killing him. Although murdering a man for merely denying one a meal may seem disproportionate, the Tarabin saw the meal through the prism of a just entitlement that Ishaysh could not concede, lest he be seen as weak. Since then, eight generations of offspring, proud of his defiance, have transmitted to their progeny the saying “’Ishaysh killed a monk with his food bowl” (Ishaysh qatal ar-rahib bi-l-batya), thereby establishing defiance as a social imperative.33 Several Bible stories, like those of the Bedouin, do not shrink from portraying the outrageous deeds of ancestors, including deceits they practiced. These, too, naturally aroused interest for generations. Just as Bedouin Zalim, the Unjust One, is remembered for going beyond the strictures of revenge by avenging his murdered son after having received his blood payment, the biblical Lamech, the reported father of Noah, was recalled as having violated the rules of proportionality by killing a man who had only wounded him, and killing a lad who only bruised him (Gen. 4:23). Simon and Levi— after their sister Dinah was raped by Shechem—were remembered for slaying all the males of the Shechem community and leaving their other brothers to plunder the settlement and enslave the wives and children—all this after they had earlier agreed to reconcile with the Shechemites (Gen. 34:25– 29). Likewise, just as the Tarabin forefather, Ishaysh, is recalled with awe

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for killing a monk who refused to give him food, we may assume that the Israelites of the tribe of Dan proudly related how their forefather Samson killed thirty Philistines for having cajoled his wife into disclosing the secrets of his riddles (Judg. 14:19), and how he burned the Philistines’ grain, vineyards, and olive trees because this same wife was given in marriage to another man by her Philistine father (Judg. 15:1–5). Similarly, just as the tale of the Bedouin Sirhan, the forefather of the Azazma Sarahin, and his mother practicing deceit in order to obtain a rifle was nonetheless reverently remembered by generations of offspring, the story of Jacob and his mother, Rebecca cheating Esau out of their father Isaac’s blessing (Gen. 27:1–41) may also have survived among the Israelites orally for centuries. Nor did generations of Israelites forget the story of Abraham giving his wife Sarah to other men (Gen. 12:10–16, even if the details got jumbled; see Gen. 20:2, 20:10–12, 26:6–10); of Jacob’s son Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine Bilhah (Gen. 35:22); of the Levite from Ephraim giving his concubine to the men of Gibeah to rape and kill in order to save himself (Judg. 19:25–28); or of King David sending Uriah the Hittite to die in battle so that he could gain his wife, Bathsheba (1 Sam. 11:14–17). The Bible’s recounting of these episodes, in addition to the fascination they aroused concerning the dark side of human nature, as we find among Bedouin, may have stemmed from a sentiment that accepts people, including ancestors, as they are. Likewise, oral stories uncomplimentary to women proved popular and survived among the Israelites no less than among the Bedouin. Some had to do with immoral behavior. For instance, just as the Azazma shepherdess who hid her illegitimate infant in a sheep pen had let herself become pregnant out of wedlock, so biblical Rebecca allowed herself to travel with Abraham’s servant all the way from northern Syria to the Negev without wearing her veil—which she only donned when she spotted Isaac, her betrothed (Gen. 24:65). By the same token, the Israelites apparently enjoyed hearing the episodes in which two of the female ancestors of King David may have shamelessly compromised themselves in order to bear sons: Tamar, by getting pregnant through her father-in-law, Judah (Gen. 38:13–19), and Ruth, by lying with Boaz (Ruth 3:3–10). Also remembered for hundreds of years— no less than the donkey and rifle trick of the unethical ancestor of the



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Azazma Sarahin—were the unethical actions of the Hebrew women who, before leaving Egypt with Moses, “borrowed” objects of gold and silver from their Egyptian neighbors, knowing they would never return them (Exod. 11:2); or the story of the woman Jael, who treacherously offered refuge to the Canaanite commander Sisera, thereupon to kill him (Judg. 4:18– 21, 5:24–27). One can assume that Jael’s violation of the sacrosanct rules of hospitality—which hold that even the killer of a clansman may not be harmed in the latter’s tent—originally fascinated the Israelites no less than her actual slaying of the enemy leader. In addition to dishonorable female ancestors, other women may also be recalled in an unflattering, though amusing, light. These often illustrate a popular theme that depicts groups marrying off their undesirable girls to destitute hired shepherds from afar who are living among them. The Zullam describe their ancestor Zalim’s wife, Galola, as “backward,” for going around indecently with her hair uncovered.34 Another such “backward” ancestor was the Bili woman who was married to the forefather of the Owdat clan of the Azazma Sarahin tribe in the central Negev hills. When Owda, in his youth, spent time among the Bili tribe in the northern Negev working as a shepherd, they had him marry one of their girls known to be “stupid” (habla). After a while, the story goes, Owda told her that he had decided to return to his own people and that she was free to return with him or stay with her own. As related by her descendants, she said, “Wherever you go, I go. Your people will be my people.” Ultimately, Owda also took a wife from the Azazma, whose offspring were called after him, the Owdat, and his offspring from the Bili woman were named the Bilayyat. On the same theme of “foreign” shepherds and undesirable women, twelve tribes of the largest confederation of northern Sinai, the Suwarka, belong to a division known as the Owlad al-Darwa. They claim a common ancestor named the “woman with black and grey striped hair” (darwa). According to tribal tradition, she was a woman from the Bili tribe in northwestern Arabia, among whom one of the Suwarka men, called Maniyya, had found refuge as a fugitive from blood revenge. He worked for them as a shepherd, and when fate enabled him to return to his tribe with his strange-looking wife, the other Suwarka called her children and descendants “the offspring of the Darwa.”35 Similarly, the Nijmat division of the

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second-largest confederation in Sinai, the Tarabin, recall that their earliest ancestor in the peninsula, a man called Nijm, had an ugly wife whom he married from a tribe for which he worked as a shepherd. He and a friend called Wuheidi had found employment with the chief of one of the more veteran tribes in Sinai, the Bani Wasil, who had two daughters. The chief, seeing that Wuheidi was the better of the two men, let him marry the more beautiful daughter, foisting her less comely sister onto Nijm.36 Negative Israelite stories found in the Hebrew Bible also contain humor that remained popular. Even a murder can have an amusing side. Thus, just as descendants of the aforementioned Ishaysh enjoyed the story of his throwing his broad and heavy wooden bowl up toward the pulley platform in St. Catherine’s Monastery in a fit of pique, only to have it kill a monk, the killing of the Moabite king Eglon by Ehud Ben Gera must have amused the Israelites enough to be included in the book of Judges. Eglon is depicted as so excessively fat that the hilt of the dagger with which Ben Gera stabbed him sank into his fatty midriff following the blade and couldn’t be pulled back, thus adding an amusing touch that made the story memorable (Judg. 3:15–22). The Israelites might also have been entertained by the ploy adopted by the sons of Jacob toward the men of Shechem following the aforementioned rape of Dinah, persuading them to become circumcised, purportedly so they could have mutual marital relations—but actually in order to attack them when they were incapacitated by pain (Gen. 34). In the case of various minor judges, almost all of whose deeds went unremembered, humorous touches may have been used to embellish the stories of two: Ya‘ir of Gilead, whose thirty sons were depicted as riding around on thirty donkeys (Judg. 10:4), and Abdon Ben Hillel, whose sons and grandsons rode around on seventy jackasses (Judg. 12:13–14). Other themes that Bedouin find humorous—such as marrying off undesirable girls to hired shepherds from distant places—are also found in the Bible. Thus, mirroring the aforementioned ancestors of the Suwarka, Tarabin, and Zullam confederations and the Bilayyat clan in Sinai and the Negev, we have Laban unabashedly tricking Jacob, who had tended his flocks for seven years, into marrying his homely daughter, Leah, rather than her beautiful sister, Rachel, whom Jacob loved (Gen. 29:20–25). Like-



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wise, Moses, who herded the flocks of Jethro the Midianite, was given the latter’s daughter Zippora to wed (Exod. 2:21). Zippora—similar to the retarded Bedouin woman Galola, who was married off to the forefather of the Zullam in the Negev—showed signs of oddness, judging from her erratic behavior when Moses fell ill while on their way from Sinai to Egypt proper. After circumcising their son, she circumcised her husband, too, as shown in chapter 5, enthusiastically proclaiming, “You are my husband through blood! . . . A husband through the blood of circumcision!” (Exod. 4:25–26). Finally, audacity in a biblical story is also enjoyed as humor. Thus, just as generations of his descendants remembered the man of the Aheiwat confederation who demanded a long coastline as blood payment for his trampled goat kid, so too must generations of Israelites have been entertained by the feat of Jacob, as a shepherd, putting one over on his oppressive ­father-in-law, Laban, by learning the magic that made most of the newborn lambs striped and speckled—this, after having agreed to receive only such lambs of the latter’s flock as his salary for herding (Gen. 30:37–43).

Poetry As with prose narratives, similarities also exist between poems composed by Bedouin and poems in the Bible, offering us insights particularly into the reasons behind the biblical compositions. Among Bedouin, almost all of whom were unlettered until the late twentieth century, poetry was a much-loved medium.37 I discovered this love in 1968. While on a field trip in southwestern Sinai, I came upon a census of Bedouin of that area being conducted by the Israeli army in Wadi Gharandal. Speaking to some Bedouin men, I asked whether anyone among them knew any poems. They directly showed me one of their chiefs, Owda Salih Imbarak, of the Muzayna confederation, who, they said, was gifted at reciting poetry. The chief agreed to recite some for me, so we sat down on the sandy ground facing each other. I opened my tape recorder and he began to declaim. Before long, others sat down and formed ever-widening circles around us so that they too could listen to the recitation. What fascinated them, in addition to the content of a poem, was

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that most of the poems were composed in monorhyme—that is, all the lines ended with the same rhyming sound. What they wanted to hear was how the poet managed to maintain the logical content of a poem and still keep to the same rhyme. Thus, whenever Owda finished a line with that rhyme, the crowd enthusiastically repeated the rhyme word after him. It was an expression of admiration, revealing just how much they loved their poetry—despite the fact that they were unlettered, just as most of the composers of these poems had been. It was truly a folk poetry, and thus anyone with a modicum of ability—man or woman—might compose a poem to express emotions, communicate a message, or entertain, three of the main incentives for versifying.38 Each of these incentives may also be found in biblical poetry. Especially during the preliterate stage of the Israelites’ development, they were among the initial motivations for the creation of biblical poems, even though later editing may have influenced the written versions, in keeping with concurrent theological and political reasons.39 Expression Sadness, relief, and exultation are the usual feelings that find expression in both Bedouin and biblical poetry. One Bedouin example of sadness is a poem of grief that a herdsman, Id Imfarrij Imsa‘id, of the Tarabin Hasablah tribe in southern Sinai, composed after his little daughter was bitten by a snake and died. Among its lines: The fates came along and our dear dispossessed, And, after the sweet, gave us bitter to taste. The fire of this grief my heart cleaves in two, Draining my liver and kidneys. I had sent off my daughter with hardly a thought, Then behold there she came, burning with fright, And as camels’ teeth here are clenched so tight, So were mine that night, as I sucked at her bite. Two brave men passed by and stopped to alight, But brave as they were they wept at the sight. Nights like these swell our burden already not light, Like a judge who delivers his sentence slowly.40



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When the same poet’s brother died, he intoned: How deeply I’ve sighed over all sorts of pain, But the heaviest sigh was the sigh today. I laid brother Jum‘a at Idwit al-Ayn: I’ll never meet any like him again!

In the Bible, similarly, David, hearing of the death in battle of his dear friend Jonathan, the son of King Saul, was moved to express himself in verse: I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan, You were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me, More than the love of women. (2 Sam. 1:26; NJPS Tanakh)

Feelings of relief and exultation as well impelled Bedouin and biblical figures to express themselves in poetry. Relief sometimes accompanied a momentous event, such as revenge or war. Mainly, however, it resulted from more mundane matters. An event that inspired such a poem, for example, occurred when a group of travelers in northwestern Arabia finally found welcome and a plentiful meal with a man called Sirhan, chief of the Shawama tribe, after having been turned down at the encampment of a man called Fagir. Fagir said, “Move on,” so we left: A guest goes by naught but his host’s desire. It’s not he that deprived us, but rather our luck; And luck sometimes brings pain, then takes it away. For we stopped to alight at a camp of the Shawama Like hawks whose talons are lowered for prey. There, Muhammad Sirhan, whom perfumed women long for, Swore to divorce his wife if we didn’t stay. Then he poured out hot suet that hissed round our hands, And the fattest sheep’s meat stacked high on a tray. So we ate of this bounty until we were full; Then like well-watered camels, we went on our way.

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In the Bible, such relief was expressed in verse by Abraham’s wife, Sarah, barren throughout her long life, after she finally gave birth to Isaac: God has given me laughter Whoever hears will laugh with me, too. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah will suckle children? Yet I have borne him a son in his oldness (Gen. 21:7)

By the same token, the parched and wandering Israelites (as shown in chapter 1) expressed their relief in verse when, crossing the arid Araba depression, they suddenly came to a well of water: “Well up, O well—Sing to it! Well that headmen dug, That good folk burrowed with their staffs And from the desert [gave us] a gift. (Num. 21:17–18)41

In a different vein, a Bedouin poem may express exultation after a victorious battle. In the War of Zari al-Huzayyil in the Negev (1875–87), the final encounter, fought at a place called Milayha, inspired such a poem, one in which Swaylim Abu Argub, of the Azazma Farahin, rejoiced over the triumph by his allies, the Tarabin, and expressed his joy, characteristically, by recalling the events of the battle. Yesterday my heart pained me, and I was afraid Of a war that has sated all of our tribes— Which seems set on parting the dearest of friends. But then I saw dust rise over Milayha, Broad daylight—not a treacherous attack at dawn; You could hear the clang of swords, even of the hilts! The Hanajra came to the fray, Their rifles sounding like thunder in the air; And the sons of Ibn Hammad riding thoroughbreds, Butting the mounts of the attackers; Upright as a tent’s pole when you tighten the rope. The offspring of Abu Isma‘in joined us, as if racing to a well,



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Each rider butting mounts that wished to get away; Oh for a hundred Zaghaba-like men such as they. The sons of Abu Uwayli, wanting nothing but battle, Left the enemy’s wives on a cold winter’s night To complain of their calamity to those who might avenge it. This is Wadi Shari‘a, but, like glorious girls, You won’t be able to taste of its goodness So long as al-Sufi fans the flames of war And blights you like you’d been plagued with locusts.

As in this Bedouin poem, the biblical Miriam composed one of the earliest of the Bible’s poems—a poem of relief and exultation (Exod. 15)—after the Hebrews, pursued by Pharaoh’s troops, crossed the Reed Sea (often mistranslated as Red Sea) safely. Whether or not the composer of this poem was actually a woman called Miriam experiencing relief, or was someone later composing in what he understood as the poetic tradition, the biblical author retells the events, describing the danger that was averted; and he attributes the victory to the perceived leader of the Israelites—God—just as the composer of the preceding Bedouin poem attributed triumph to Hammad al-Sufi. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host He cast into the sea; and his picked officers are sunk in the Reed Sea. The floods cover them; They went down in the depths like a stone. (verses 4–5; RSV) The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. (verse 9; KJV) Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: The horse and its rider hath he thrown into the sea. (verse 21; KJV)

We again find such exultation, articulated by the retelling of events, in the book of Judges when the Israelites expressed relief at their victory over the Canaanites, in the “Song of Deborah” (Judg. 5; RSV translation):

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From Ephraim they set out thither into the valley, Following you, Benjamin, with your kinsmen; From Machir marched down the commanders, And from Zebulun those who bear the marshal’s staff. (verse 14) Then the kings came, they fought; Then fought the kings of Canaan, (verse 19) Then loud beat the horses’ hoofs with the galloping, galloping of his steeds. (verse 22) Most blessed of women be Jael . . . She put her hand to the tent peg, and her right hand to the workmen’s mallet; She struck Sisera a blow she crushed his head she shattered and pierced his temple. He sank, he fell, He lay still at her feet; (verses 24–27)

Again, in the “Song of Heshbon” (Num. 21:27–30; NJPS Tanakh), events are similarly replayed, elatedly describing how the Israelites overwhelmed the Amorites after the latter had defeated the Moabites: Woe to you, O Moab! You are undone, O people of Chemosh! His sons are rendered fugitive And his daughters captive by an Amorite king, Sihon. Yet we have cast them down utterly, Heshbon along with Divon. We have wrought desolation at Nofah, which is hard by Medeba.

Accordingly, we see that the replay of events surrounding the emotional experiences that inspired the above poems, Bedouin and biblical, is a com-



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mon feature in poems of expression, whether inspired by grief, relief, or exultation. Communication The second category of poems consists of those sent to communicate a message. In the premodern Middle Eastern deserts, where education was rarely accessible and literacy uncommon, people largely communicated over distances through oral poetry, which was conveyed by messengers that had learned the lines by heart. Among Bedouin, the subjects included missives sent to threaten, complain, pacify, cajole, request, inform, or share an emotion.42 One Bedouin threat in verse, for example, was composed around 1883 during the War of Zari al-Huzayyil in the Negev. At this stage, the semisettled tribe of Dudayn became an ally of the Tiyaha confederation and sent a poem to the Tarabin, warning them against pressing on with the war they had begun. The remaining fragment says: O wind, bear my greetings to the Tarabin And tell them Dudayn has entered the fray; For this war that you’ve started, O Tarabin, You will yet have dearly to pay.43

Fifty years earlier, the leader of a coalition of Negev tribes, Salman Azzam al-Huzayyil, sent a warning to the leader of an Arabian tribe, the Bani Atiyya, some of whose members had come to the Negev seeking pasture in a year of drought, but who stayed on and planted summer crops. Huzayyil sent a poem to their chief, Ibn Busays, threatening warfare if they did not directly leave: O rider on a mount, fast as a flood With side-sacks and a saddle that stimulate pride, Follow Wadi al-Ghamr to Ayn Ghadyan; Fill your water bag, and back on the road do ride. Steer him to tents above Wadi Yitam, From the horses of Karak, their encampment they hide. Warn Ibn Busays, who smokes dukhan, This brotherly counsel not to chide.

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Say: your homeland is Tubuk, ours the plain of the Khan; No mercy will you meet if with us you abide. Before tobacco and melon, you’ll meet spears of zan And mounts champing at the bit and tugging bridles aside!44

Whereas Bedouin poems of communication can convey a variety of messages, versified threats are all that remain of biblical poems of this type. The Bible is replete with poems of this genre, issued not by tribal chiefs, but rather by God in his capacity as chief of ‘am yisra’el—the overall Israelite confederation of tribes. Sometimes the threats are directed at Israel’s enemies, as in Amos (1:3–2:3), against the Arameans, Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Ammonites, and Moabites; in Jeremiah (46–51), against Egypt, Philistia, Moab, the Ammonites, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Hazor, Elam, and Babylon; in Zephaniah (2:4–15), against the Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, and Assyrians; and in Isaiah (37:29), against Assyria. In other cases, the threats are addressed to the Israelites themselves (see, e.g., Amos, 2:6–6:14; Jer. 25:8–11). Another facet of Bedouin and biblical poems of threat is poetic invective, composed against a background of conflict. In desert culture, a versified curse, boast, insult, or threat has always been part and parcel of warfare—a use of poetry that was illuminated by pre-Islamic Bedouin poets.45 Describing one battle, the poet Amir Ibn al-Tufayl said, “There came upon us an overwhelming mass, full of boastful words.” Another poet from that period, Muzarrid, defined these words as “arrows” and “spears.” Any conflict was a suitable arena for this use of poems. A scornful rhyme might adhere to an enemy forever, like “a collar round his neck,” “conspicuous as a mole on his face.” The damage thereby caused to an enemy’s reputation was relished by the poet, as revealed by Muzarrid, who said: I warrant to him with whom I contend that my words shall be so striking, that the night-traveler shall sing them as he fares along, and the caravans be urged forward by them on their road; Well remembered are they, cast forth with multitudes to bear them about. ... They are repeated again and again . . . when the diligent lips of men test my verse by repetition.



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In this cultural milieu, it is little wonder that the biblical poet who composed the victory poem that we call the “Song of Deborah,” with its parade of martial prowess, sought the same widespread exposure for its message, by urging: You riders on tawny she-asses You who sit on saddle-rugs, And you wayfarers, Declare it Louder than the sound of archers! There among the watering places, Let them chant the grace of Yahweh Yahweh— His gracious deliverance of Israel. (Judg. 5:10–11; NJPS Tanakh)

Entertainment Ditties sung by women are a form of entertainment in Bedouin verse that is also found in the Bible. Among Bedouin, such ditties are simple verses sung, repetitively and usually in unison, especially by girls and young women at celebrations, while the male guests either dance before them or sit in seclusion, but within earshot. At weddings, for example, the women, to amuse themselves, compose and repetitively sing ditties of one or two lines that commonly deal with persons present. In 1973, I heard, for example, lines praising the groom (in rhymed Arabic): A bird in the sky whose wings have been clipped, Tell Owda we applaud his bride.46

Many Bedouin ditties contain references to current or past events, even battles, where women who were present may have gathered images. It is considered a source of tribal pride to have girls and women at celebrations sing about their tribe’s victories and their enemy’s defeats or mistakes. As noted above, a ditty heard sung at a Tarabin celebration in Sinai, in 1974, went: O camel-mare, you can tread on the Ijma plateau The cloak of Rahhai is thrown over his grave.47

It originated at a battle that took place three hundred years before, in which fighters of the Tarabin confederation drove their predecessors in southern

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Sinai, the Ayayda confederation, over the Ijma plateau to the north. In fact, one of the passes leading up to the plateau was thereafter known as the Pass of Rahhei, after the grave of the Ayayda leader who was killed there. Another ditty, heard among the Azazma in 1981, tells of a battle that took place between them and the Majali tribe of Transjordan toward the end of the nineteenth century, at an intermediary place called Wadi Rasif. Since Azazma warriors killed the leader, Owda al-Majali, in that battle, their women were wont to sing: Majali fell dead in Wadi Rasif And was trampled by the mounts of Bin Jazi. No need to water the Azazma steeds, Having drunk the blood of Majali.48

Another ditty is from the War of Zari (1875–87), which began, as described above, when Dahshan Abu Sitta of the Tarabin Ghawali killed the father of Hammad al-Sufi, leader of the other major division of the Tarabin, the Nijmat. In the ensuing war, the Ghawali were joined by tribes of the Tiyaha confederation and enjoyed predominance until a truce was effected in 1879, a truce that provided the background for the ditty. It occurred when Hammad al-Sufi agreed to release the Abu Sitta clan from blood revenge, on the condition that he receive in free marriage the renowned beauty Harba Abu Sitta; that union would allow these two sections of the Tarabin to join forces against the Tiyaha, a prospect that dismayed the latter. To alleviate their concerns about the threat posed by the marriage of Harba to Hammad, the Tiyaha chose to view it mainly as a disgrace, alleging that it was shameful for the Abu Sitta to surrender their finest maiden in order to purchase a pardon, and that it was reprehensible for Hammad al-Sufi to leave his father’s blood unavenged for the sake of a woman. Accordingly, women of the Tiyaha entertained themselves with these themes, composing ditties that they would sing to each other responsively, one group playing the part of the Sufi clan, and another giving Harba’s reply. THE SUFI: O Harba, O worthless one, [Ar. ya Harba ya shinlash] O you whom we got free. [Ar. yilli akhadhnaki balash]



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HARBA: Though we slaughtered you with spears [Ar. dhabahnaku ba-l-ahrab] We’ve appeased you with pudenda. [Ar. u-tayyabnaku ba-l-aksas]49

In the Bible, as well, such singing of ditties by women to celebrate victories is clearly evident.50 For example, after crossing the Reed Sea on dry land and seeing Pharaoh and his pursuing troops drowned after them, Moses’s sister, Miriam, “took a timbrel in her hand and all the women went out with her dancing, and Miriam led them in song (Heb. va-ta‘an lahem): Sing to Yahweh, for he is highly exalted. Horse and rider he threw into the sea. (Exod. 15:20–21)

Singing ditties of praise was apparently also the intention of the daughter of Jephtah when she came out of their home “with timbrel and dance” to welcome her father, returning from his triumph over the Moabites (Judg. 11:34). Two further allusions to ditties sung by women come from events in the life of David. The first is in 1 Samuel (18:5–7): “When the troops came home and David was returning from killing the Philistines, the women of all the towns of Israel . . . danced and sang” (italics added): Saul has slain his thousands, David, his tens of thousands. (NJPS Tanakh)

The second is the mention of ditties in David’s lamentation over the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, where he cautions (2 Sam. 1:20; italics added): Tell it not in Gath, Announce it not in Ashkelon, Lest the daughters of the Philistines be merry; Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice [with words].

Narratives in Poetry and Prose In addition to parallel reasons for the composition of poetry, Bedouin and biblical poems share typological similarities, particularly poems that

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are accompanied by a prose narrative context, providing background to the verse.51 This style of telling a story is widely dispersed in the oral epic literatures of several cultures around the world, as initially demonstrated by Hector and Nora Chadwick in their monumental The Growth of Literature.52 Nonetheless, a glimpse into the relationship between the poetry and the prose in such storytelling formations among Bedouin may shed important light on aspects of the same form in the Bible. The following Bedouin story in prose and poetry tells how a chief whose son was murdered in a camel raid perpetrated by people of a distant tribe had to travel far and under disguise as a beggar in order to avenge his death. After finally accomplishing his mission and watching the burial of the murderer from a cave where he hid, he composed a poem of relief. The verbatim version of the story and the poem, as recited in 1971 by Id Imsa‘id, of the Tarabin Hasablah, is as follows: Once upon a time the ancient tribes used to make raids on each other. Once, one shaykh raided the Bedouin of another shaykh, took away the camels of the shaykh he had raided and slew his son. He then cut off the forelock of the boy’s hair and hung it on the mount that he, the shaykh, was riding.  Some time later, the father of the boy disguised himself as a dervish in clothes that were filthy and tattered (far be it from the listeners), and had a poisoned dagger made for himself, which he hid under his ragged clothes. Then he went on the trail of him who had killed his son. He went along and came upon that one’s Bedouins. When he came upon them they said, “the Bedouins of Salih would like you to stay with us.” He stayed. He stayed with the Bedouins he had come upon and, as he was staying there, Salih arrived; he who had killed his son. When he arrived, the father of the boy followed him with his eyes. [Salih] said: “That fool is peering at me.” [The Bedouin] said: “He’s only a fool.” [Salih] said: “God save us from a fool who sets his sights on the fat game and ignores the thin. Take him away from me.” They took him to a distant tent. Darkness. [The father of the boy] went over to a low hill, like this hill here, and spied upon the tents. While spying on them, a fire flashed in the night. He recognized it [as Salih’s] as another flashed nearby. He stole in among the people who were gathered there, staying near the side of the tent. While he was at the side of the tent, after the men had taken their supper, they all went to sleep. When they went to sleep, [Salih] took his place between two of them. As he lay between these two, [the father of the boy]



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crept up on him. As he crept up, [Salih] started, the others remaining asleep. As he jumped up, he who had crept in dropped among the sleepers. He dropped down and the other looked around and around, but saw no one stirring. So he said the shihada prayer and lay down again. As he lay down again, [the father of the boy] fell upon him and jabbed him with a dagger. He jabbed him pulling the dagger back and forth, and fled. He fled, but he had no provisions; they were with a black slave at the edge of the camp. He picked up the provisions and fled. He fled heading toward a mountain, like this mountain here, and stayed there until mid-morning. At mid-morning, he saw everyone carrying Salih away, walking behind him. [The father of the boy] composed a poem, in which he said: I was your guest before Salih came your way; Salih alighted at your camp just today. I sat without shame and ate unrestrained And though among dregs was myself disdained. A reed of verbascum my defense against mongrels With which I beat back every howling hound. But a dagger of the Ijbara lay at my waist; You could hear it scraping within its case. I plunged it in twice, perhaps even thrice, Quickly; I had no time. I plunged it in twice, perhaps even thrice: Jets from a rain cloud for a droughty land. Thank God for the slave at the edge of the waste, Diverting the dogs in an adverse direction. It’s morning and I’m in a steep mountain crag; Wild animals only had been here before. I retired encumbered, but arose feeling light: My side-heavy saddlebags have now been put right.53

In like fashion, in the Bible’s “Song of Deborah,” a prose narrative (Judg. 4) relating how some Israelite tribes under the direction of Deborah defeated a Canaanite force, is followed by a poetic depiction of the battle, in Judges 5, as we have seen. The poem was judged by Frank Cross and Noel Freedman to be the oldest poetic creation in the Bible, dating from approximately 1100 BCE, when Israelite society was mainly unlettered and its literature oral, much like premodern Bedouin society.54 The events of

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the Deborah story as told in Judges 4 (without most of the theological references) reads: King Jabin of Canaan . . . ruled in Hatzor. His army commander was Sisera . . . who had nine hundred iron chariots. . . . Deborah, wife of Lapidot, was a prophetess; she led Israel at that time. . . . She summoned Barak, son of Abinoam of Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, “Go, march up to Mount Tabor and take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulon. And I will draw Sisera with his chariots and his troops toward you up to Kishon Brook and will deliver him into your hands.” But Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go. . . .” She answered, “Fine, I will go with you. But, there will be no glory for you in the path you are taking, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman,” and she went with Barak to Kadesh. Barak mustered Zebulon and Naphtali at Kadesh; ten thousand men marched up with him, and Deborah went up with him. Heber the Kenite had separated from the other Kenites . . . and pitched his tent . . . near Kadesh. . . . Sisera was informed that Barak . . . had gone up to Mount Tabor and he ordered all his chariots—nine hundred of them—and all his troops to move . . . to Kishon Brook. Deborah said to Barak, “Up! This is the day when the Lord will deliver Sisera into your hands.” Barak charged down Mount Tabor, followed by the ten thousand men, and the Lord threw Sisera and all his chariots and army into a panic, in the face of Barak’s attack. Sisera leaped from his chariot and fled on foot as Barak pursued the chariots and the soldiers. . . . All of Sisera’s soldiers fell by the sword. Sisera fled on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. Jael came out to greet Sisera and said to him, “Come in, my Lord, come in here; Do not be afraid.” So he entered the tent and she covered him with a blanket. He said to her, “Please let me have some water; I am thirsty.” She opened a skin of milk and gave him some to drink; and she covered him again. He said to her, “Stand at the entrance to the tent. If someone comes and asks you if anyone is here, say ‘No.’ ” Then Jael, wife of Heber, took a tent peg and grasped the mallet. When he was fast asleep from exhaustion, she approached him stealthily and drove the pin through his temple till it went down to the ground. Thus he died. Now Barak appeared in pursuit of Sisera. Jael went out to greet him and said, “Come, I will show you the man you are looking for.” He went inside with her, and there was Sisera lying dead with a pin in his temple.



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That day, Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam, sang: In the days of Shamgar, son of Anat, In the days of Jael, caravans halted And wayfarers went by, By roundabout paths. . . . Till you arose O Deborah, Arose, O mother in Israel. Then did the people of Yahweh March down to the gates! Deborah awoke Awoke, and set words to song. Barak got up The son of Abinoam took captives. Then was the remnant made victor over the mighty; Yahweh’s people won my victory over the warriors. From Ephraim came those whose roots are in the valley. After you, your kin Benjamin; From Machir came down From Zebulon such as hold the leaders, marshal’s staff. And Issachar’s chiefs were with Deborah; As Barak, so was Issachar Rushing after him into the valley. . . . In Reuben’s ranks are leaders who feared. Why did you stick to your campfires Listening to the shepherd’s calls? In Reuben’s ranks are leaders who feared. Gilead stayed put over the Jordan. And why did Dan stay with the ships? Asher remained on the sea shore Harboring within its bays. Zebulon is a people that mocked at death, So Naphtali on the open heights. . . . Then the kings came, they fought: The kings of Canaan fought At Taanach, by Megiddo’s waters. They got no spoil of silver. . . . Then the horses’ hoofs pounded As headlong galloped the steeds. ... Most blessed of women be Jael, Wife of Heber the Kenite, Most blessed of women in tents. He asked for water, she offered milk; In a princely bowl she offered curds. Her left hand reached for the tent peg, Her right for the mallet. She struck Sisera, crushed his head. Smashed and pierced his temple. At her feet he sank, lay still; At her feet he sank, lay outstretched, Where he sank, there he lay—destroyed.

(NJPS Tanakh)

Owing to the similarity between the two prose-poetry narratives, the Bedouin poem might help us answer a question about the “Song of Deborah” that has occupied several modern Bible scholars trying to understand the dynamic of biblical poetic creation. They have asked which came first, the poem or the prose? One of them, Frank Cross, had this to say: “We possess

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lyric poems with strong narrative content in the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). In both instances, we possess side-byside prose narrative accounts (Exodus 14 and Judges 4), and in both instances, the poetry is earlier, the prose secondary and derivative.”55 Another scholar, Baruch Halpern, also found the prose in these narratives totally dependent on the poem.56 To apply the Bedouin prose-poetry narratives to the scholarly opinions that view the poetry as earlier and more original than the prose in the story of Deborah, let us begin by examining the poetry. First of all, serious poems motivated by an emotional experience—such as we found in the war poem from the Negev cited above—are not composed immediately following it, but only after an interim during which the poet can think deliberately and craft his words carefully (as opposed, for example, to light Bedouin rhymes often improvised on the spot to praise someone at a gathering).57 One indication comes from the experience of Bedouin poets. In 1970, Jum‘a Id alFararja, of the Tarabin Hasablah, described to me the process of his composing a specific serious poem, or gasida, that he had sent as a message to ringleaders of a smuggling team to inform them that he, normally a fisherman, had nearly drowned while bringing a consignment of hashish in his boat from Jordan to southeastern Sinai: Once I was out in my felucca-boat. When I was out at sea a kilometer or a kilometer and a half, the wind picked up. When the wind picked up, a wave rose and covered the boat and me, and I fell out. The boat and the oars were carried towards the shore, and I followed them, my clothes drenched and completely ruined. I was barely able to reach the land, and when I was finally treading on the coral reef, pushing the boat, the waves were still coming down on my head. I anchored the boat and went ashore. My clothes were ruined. I changed them and brought whatever I needed for the fire and made some tea. I sat quietly for a while, thinking. I had been in a bad situation, in danger; and I was lucky not to die at sea. So, after I had seen death with my own eyes, and after I had been saved from drowning, I composed this gasida. I sat with my little pot-stove from the felucca and drank tea. When I had drunk tea, I thought quietly to myself, for perhaps two or three hours, remembering what had happened. I gathered up words from here and there and pressed them together [italics added], and I composed the poem. Some people saw me sitting there reciting slowly, saying the



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words softly. They said, “What have you composed, Jum‘a? Certainly you must have made yourself a poem while drowning at sea.” I said: “Yes, I have made a poem.” They said: “Give us knowledge of the poem.” And I recited this poem after what the sea had done.58

Support for Fararja’s experience came from other Bedouin poets with whom I spoke in the 1970s and 1980s about the process of composing what they deemed a serious poem—Anayz Abu Salim al-Urdi, of the Tarabin; Sabah Salih al-Ghanim, of the Agayli; and Atiyya Owwad, of the Alaygat. All attested to the same phenomenon, namely, the need for some time to think the subject over and “gather up words from here and there and press them together,” as expressed above. Accordingly, it appears that considerable delays almost certainly took place before the composition of oral poems that followed battles or other significant events, whether by Bedouin or early Israelite poets. The second indication of the need for “composition time” can be gained by observing a poetic genre that portrays disputes between persons—­ compositions in which a single poet takes up exchanges that may have transpired and puts them into verse, creating a supposed poetic dialogue in which the contestants vie with each other. Such exchanges, which require thought and artistry, are clearly too intricate to be composed spontaneously. In the late nineteenth century, for example, two brothers are said to have exchanged the following poems—ostensibly on the spot—after one of them, Sulayman Ibn Rifada, the chief of the Arabian Bili tribe, insulted his brother, Fuhayman, in the presence of guests in his tent. Sulayman: O you who serves the coffee, dispense it now by cup; Serve certain of the persons; pass others of them up. Serve those who get around and know the taste of every well; Who save their friends in battles when their tongues from dryness swell. Serve those who’re not remiss in their social obligation; Who, even when they’re feeding guests, will show no ostentation. Yet there are those among us whom I would fain eschew: Fresh coffee don’t prepare for them; re-boiled dregs will do. Fuhayman: O woe the tent that’s just been rent where it was tightly sewn; While some things may a secret stay, others will be known.

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And where are we to find some shade, the day of our disgrace; A day whose sun is burning both our liver and our face? Of him who’s wasted forebears’ fortune, what are we to deem, Though, shamelessly he lets himself behave with self-esteem? Even if a camel were his saddle pad to bite, No worthy here would silent stay, pretending it all right. But having neither power nor a carbine to extend, Nor proudly with a whetted sword my enemy to rend; Insult must make me take my leave, like thunder looses rain: I’ll be alone, yet I’ll be far from lies and from disdain.59

Obviously, we cannot expect that the parties to this argument addressed each other spontaneously in such elaborate verse, containing, in this case, two rhymes for each line in the Arabic original. It could only be the outcome, as said, of reflection and concentration. In addition to the unlikelihood of a serious poem being composed spontaneously after a moving event, we must examine the role of the prose passages that accompany the poem. On the face of it, materials from the Bedouin avenger’s poem and the biblical “Song of Deborah” could have served as the basis for the prose that precedes them in the telling. The Bedouin poem may have supplied eight such elements: the father pretended to be an itinerant beggar; he kept a dagger by his waist; he arrived at the killer’s tent when Salih, the killer, was away; he made a plan for revenge and escape with a slave living at the edge of the encampment; he fell upon Salih fiercely with his dagger; he fled to a mountain crag; he observed the burial next morning; and he expressed relief at having attained justice. By the same token, the poem in the Deborah narrative may have provided material for the prose story in Judges 4. We learn the following from the poem: the Canaanite commander was Sisera; Deborah led Israel; Deborah ordered Barak Ben Abinoam, of Naphtali, to attack from Mount Tabor with tribesmen from Naphtali and Zebulon; Sisera led his army to attack Barak; Sisera’s army took flight; Sisera fled to the tent of Jael, wife of a Kenite; Jael allayed Sisera’s fears and slew him with a tent peg. The above notwithstanding, Bedouin poetic composition gives a slightly different picture of how the prose and poetic elements of a narrative affect each other. First of all, the flow of information may go in two directions.



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Thus, in the Bedouin story above, the prose rendition, may have provided elements to the poem, such as the murderer’s name was Salih (as presented in the poem); the initial murder was during a raid for camels (implying a raid by a distant tribe; hence, the long journey for vengeance); the avenger was a “chief” (obliging him to disguise himself in clothes and behavior that would put him above suspicion); he had a poisoned dagger (although only a dagger in the poem); Salih suspected him (hence he had him stay with the slave at the edge of the camp); the slave helped him (diverting the dogs from revealing his flight); and the avenger watched the burial (hence his relief). Similarly, the prose account that we find in Judges 4 may have been a source for the poem in Judges 5. For example, Deborah’s instigating the action and summoning Barak; Deborah’s planning the strategy; Deborah’s anticipating the deed of Jael; Sisera’s fleeing to Jael’s tent for refuge; Jael’s preparing the murder by putting Sisera to sleep; Barak’s learning that Sis­ era had already been killed. These are all points that enhance our understanding of the poem. In particular, they depict Sisera lying down and being pampered by Jael, who covers him (twice), gives him fresh curds to drink, and consents to deny his presence to any Israelite pursuing him. It also renders Sisera’s murder more credible. Jael’s driving a tent peg through his temple with a mallet would have been difficult if the warrior were still standing, as the poem by itself leads the reader to assume. Naturally, we must consider that the prose versions of the two stories might not be as original as the poems, in keeping with the opinion of the scholars cited above. In the Bedouin narrative, I heard the prose version from two people. The version presented here was recounted by Id Imfarrij Imsa‘id, of the Tarabin Hasablah in southern Sinai; but a somewhat different prose narrative with the same poem was heard from Id Isbayh al-­ Imtayrat, of the Zullam Abu Rubay‘a in the northern Negev. Among the differences, while both reciters presented the story as one of revenge for murder during a camel raid, Id Imsa‘id reported that the central figure was avenging a son, while Id Imtayrat claimed it was a brother, a factor that the poem does not mention. As for the prose rendition of the Deborah story, Frank Cross and Noel Freedman, working together, negated the precedence

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of the prose version on the basis of its later linguistic style, deeming it less original than the poem.60 It is important to note, however, that there are at least two prose renditions of every prose-poetry narrative. One is what appears with the recitation of the poem. The other, oral one is what is surely discussed in simple prose, contemporaneous with a momentous occasion—such as the father’s revenge for his son in the Bedouin story or the Israelite-Canaanite battle in the Bible—by the participants in it or observers of it, close upon its occurrence. Thus, for example, the original prose rendition of the Deborah story was not necessarily the written version that appears in Judges 4. When Cross deemed the poem to have preceded the prose addition on the basis of style, he was referring to this late, written prose version, overlooking the possibility that an earlier, oral version had emerged contemporaneously with the event. Of course, it is also quite likely that the original, oral prose provided information that was ultimately used in both the presented prose as well as the poem. In sum, the above observations indicate that as with their Bedouin parallels, many of the early poems in the Bible, at least as they appear, were composed somewhat after the events that inspired them and were probably preceded by prose impressions of those events, maintained orally. This depiction is not far from the opinion of the Biblicist Charles Echols, who imagined the “Song of Deborah” as “an occasional piece borne from reflection on a battle of great significance . . . and first sung shortly after the event in a non-religious setting to praise the heroes who may have been present and to entertain the audience” (italics added).61 How like the Bedouin war poems that were composed in the Negev in the nineteenth century CE! This mode of composition, moreover, must have been pursued in the case of other examples of biblical poetry, whether we are referring to the fragmented poem of Lamech (Gen. 4:23–24), Sarah’s lines after giving birth to Isaac (Gen. 21:7), Miriam’s “Song of the Sea” (Exod. 15), the song of the well (Num. 21:16–18), Hannah’s utterance after the birth of Samuel (1 Sam. 2:1–10), David’s lamentation over Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:17–27), or other of the earliest Israelite poems. In the “Song of Deborah,” one of the Bible’s oldest poetic compositions, the original prose version must have been followed by another, which was subsequently transcribed by scribes62 (Judg.



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4). By contrast, we may assume that the form in which we know the early poem of Judges 5 is close to what it was originally, with the ultimate biblical authors and editors having refrained, perhaps out of a Bedouin-like reverence for poetry, from changing it—unlike what they seem to have done with the prose.63

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Bedouin Israelites in the Hebrew Bible

alongside the israelites, the bible portrays peoples such as Canaanites, Philistines, Hittites, and others as also inhabiting the land of Canaan (Deut. 7:1; Judg. 3:2–3; 5), even though they eventually disappear off its pages without a clue as to what became of them. If these peoples ultimately acceded to being deemed Israelites, they too—no less than the Bible’s depicted nomadic patriarchs and their descendants—formed a part of the ancient Israelite population, contributing their own content to the biblical opus. Since that contribution is still largely in the realm of conjecture, however, let us use the plethora of Bedouin cultural occurrence in the Bible, as conveyed in this book, to explore what it tells us about the possibility that the ancient Israelites who were depicted as nomads were indeed that. In the 1960s, a scholarly challenge was launched at the soundness of these depictions, by way of examining the veracity of the Old Testament narrative as a whole. In 1962, the Biblicist George Mendenhall proclaimed: “The assumption that the early Israelites were nomads . . . is entirely in the face of both biblical and extra-biblical evidence.” To him, the Bible’s Israelite tribes were really bands of Canaanite peasants who rebelled against the prevailing political system and withdrew from their former, lowland settlements to find refuge in the sparsely populated hill country of eastern Canaan, where most of the Bible’s portrayal of the sedentarizing Israelites takes place.1 The biblical sociologist Norman Gottwald, also ascribing Canaanite peasant origins to the Israelites, claimed that the biblical depictions

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of nomads in the patriarchal stories were no more than “anachronisms to embroider the motif of migration as a preparation for religious destiny.”2 And Lawrence Stager, a biblical archaeologist, found that the earliest excavated permanent Israelite structures in ancient Canaan pointed to “a successful adaptation to farm life in the hill country by local agriculturalists, but not to vestiges of nomadic people settling down” (italics added).3 Absent from the ensuing historic half-century debate over the identity of the ancient Israelites was an in-depth and broad database of Bedouin culture. All that was available to scholars down to the present were the works of learned persons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose knowledge of Bedouin life came either from familiarity with classical Arabic texts covering the pre-Islamic period (e.g., W. Robertson Smith, Julius Wellhausen, and Morris Seale)4 or from the casual observation of Bedouin they met during their travels (e.g., Henry Palmer, Charles Doughty, and Alois Musil).5 While these scholars’ conclusions illuminated several points in the biblical text, the scope of their sources was limited. Therefore, hoping to augment this sparse database, I decided to provide an in-depth ethnographic dimension by sharing observations acquired from firsthand contact with Bedouin during forty-five years of research among them. The result is this book, which provides considerable new evidence that the biblical portrayals of the early Israelites as nomads and former nomads closely tally with the Bedouin culture of adjustment to the desert’s natural surroundings. To survive economically in these arid regions, as we saw in chapter 1, the depicted ancient Israelites raised goats and sheep and migrated as needed; their migrations were enabled by their living in tents. In the specific circumstances and environment of Sinai and the Negev, shrub booths were the Israelite shelters in the late summer, just as unleavened bread, migrating quail, and the plant exudates that arguably constitute biblical manna were parts of their diet. The rationale of their tribal social organization and their laws, especially those stressing vengeance and protection, guaranteed them security in the absence of a government to protect them. And their religious practices of sacrifice, communion through blood, observance of taboos, and respect for vows provided the depicted Israelites with some psychological relief, helping them feel a degree of control over their often menacing desert surroundings. Even their oral literary endeav-

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ors in proverbs, genealogies, stories, and poems were an aid to survival, ordering their world and serving as a vehicle of expression. In the social, religious, and legal realms, we find that the book of Genesis alone replicates in faithful detail the Bedouin extension of hospitality, the centrality of animal sacrifice, and the resort to revenge for ensuring security. Adding to these overt, obvious elements of behavior, the biblical presentation of the early Israelites contains subtle allusions taken from desert life, even though they are not essentially relevant to the Bible’s theological themes. This profusion of Bedouin-like knowledge in the Bible raises the question whether the depicted biblical Israelites were not in fact Bedouin, or people of nomadic background. To answer this question, however, requires us to address two issues: How did the biblical authors acquire their rich Bedouin-like materials? And what impelled them to infuse these materials into a theological opus concerning the relationship between the Israelites and their god, Yahweh?

How Did the Biblical Authors Acquire Their Rich Bedouin-Like Materials? There are two possibilities for determining how the Bible’s authors attained their knowledge of Bedouin life: observation and cultural heritage. Ostensibly, the biblical authors—who wrote much of the Hebrew Bible between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE, when most Israelites were already leading a sedentary life—may have learned about Bedouin culture through observation. Without venturing far from their homes in, say, Jerusalem or Shiloh or Hebron, they could have casually observed Bedouin who lived in the adjacent Judean Desert or those who arrived with their camel caravans from farther afield. In this way, they might have seen that Bedouin lived in black goat-hair tents, conceivably the origin of “I am black and beautiful, O girls of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar” (Song of Songs 1:5), and that they raised their tents in a particular way, as in Jeremiah’s metaphor for the Israelites’ desertion of Yahweh: My children have left me and are no more;



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No one remains to stretch out my tents and raise their woven roofs. (Jer. 10:20)

The biblical authors may even have noticed how Bedouin shepherds got relief when their flocks found ample grazing in a year of plentiful rain, sparing them the need to chase after the dispersed animals as they had to do in years of drought (“The Lord is my shepherd, I do not lack. . . . He lets me lie down in lush pastures”; Psalm 23:1–2); or how Bedouin steer their camels (“I will put a ring in your nose . . . and drive you back from where you came”; 2 Kings 19:28). Similarly, biblical scribes traveling to Egypt through Sinai might have noticed Bedouin living in shrub booths in late summer and early autumn, eaten the unleavened bread their guides prepared for them, or even witnessed the trans-Mediterranean migration of quail in the fall. While the above may have enabled the biblical authors to learn obvious facets of Bedouin experience, such superficial observation would not likely have informed them of the many subtleties of that life, as we find in Lamech’s aforementioned boast of wreaking disproportionate vengeance (Gen. 4:23), Zippora’s picking up a piece of flint stone for circumcising Moses (Exod. 4:25–26), clansmen of the daughters of Zelophehad protesting the girls’ inheritance of land (Num. 27, 36), or Job’s knowing that Bedouin shepherds eat the leaves of the saltwort bush and the parasitic growth broomrape (Job 30:4). It is improbable that the Bedouin whom the biblical authors peripherally met would have been in a position to make such intimate and esoteric knowledge accessible to them, especially since the Israelites had been settled for a few hundred years, according to the Bible’s chronology. After all, the reality of mutual alienation between the desert and the sown has always existed, as suggested in the Bible by the Cain and Abel story (Gen. 4) and by Joseph’s remark about shepherds (i.e., nomads) being “an abomination” to peasants (Gen. 46:34). As if to further highlight this mutual alienation, even those Israelite biblical authors whose ancestors had once been nomadic, but whose families had been settled for centuries, seem to have acquired a practical dread of deserts and the life that took place in them. The Hebrew prophets Isaiah

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and Jeremiah, for example, used deserts as the ultimate image of perdition when admonishing the Israelites not to violate the covenant with Yahweh (see, e.g., Isa. 7:23; Jer. 9:9). Isaiah (21:1) termed the desert “terrible” and viewed Bedouin life, especially the migrations, as arduous; in fact, his metaphor for security was “a tent that would no longer move / whose pegs would never be pulled up / and none of whose ropes shall break” (Isa. 33:20, 38:12). Jeremiah (whom the Biblicist Richard Friedman credits with writing much of the Bible)6 depicted the desert as desolate (Jer. 2:6, 17:6) and the Bedouin as bandits (Jer. 3:22). These attitudes are far from the Bedouin’s affirmative views of the desert (“The land that has raised you is like your father / Whose hair seems black although it is gray”) and their lives in it (“The pride of the Bedouin is to migrate every day”); they also clash with the Bedouin censure of theft (“A thief has no rights”).7 These contrasting perceptions do not suggest an intimate connection. This mutual antipathy, moreover, may still be witnessed. In 1973, for example, when I was responsible for arranging the distribution of flour to the population of the Suez Canal Zone—Egyptian peasants and Bedouin alike—mutual mistrust made the leader of each group insist on overseeing the allotment for his own people rather than allowing it to be distributed geographically to these groups mixed. When I asked them why the distribution could not be mixed, both expressed fear that people not from their group would suspect they were cheating them—and this despite their having lived together since the digging of the Suez Canal, more than a hundred years before. Even in the twenty-first century, many Bedouin in the Negev still reject the marriage of their daughters or sisters to the descendants of the Egyptian peasants living among them, whose forefathers came there during Ibrahim Pasha’s occupation in the 1830s—rejection that often leads to violence between the families concerned. Such historic alienation highlights how unlikely it would have been for biblical authors to pick up the subtleties of Bedouin life from chance observation or marginal contact alone. To discover an alternative source of information about Bedouin, therefore, we should explore a different path: namely, their own nomadic traditions as inherited from forebears. Fortunately, there is both biblical and extrabiblical evidence to confirm that the ancestors of at least some of the biblical authors had desert-based



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life experience. This evidence indicates that two groups of “proto-Israelites” seem to have had this experience in the Negev and Sinai Deserts and in the deserts and semiarid hill country of eastern Canaan—“proto-­Israelites” referring to people who came to constitute an early component of the Israelites despite there being no specific reference to them in the Bible Evidence for the first group starts with the stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, which makes cursory mention of Israel as a tribe that he defeated in battle, around 1208 BCE. If, as most scholars agree, the stele was in fact referring to Israel as a tribe,8 we naturally must ask when and from whom did this tribe take form. Most of the extrabiblical evidence points to western Semitic nomads who, over time, had come—or had come back—to the Canaanite highlands, where Merneptah presumably found them. The Egyptologist Donald Redford has shown that a number—perhaps the earliest— of these nomadic pastoralists made their way to the sparsely inhabited eastern mountains and deserts of Canaan from Egypt, to where they had originally gone searching for pasture in years of drought.9 The biblical historian Baruch Halpern then integrated these findings with internal biblical materials to propose that the main proto-Israelite emigration from Egypt to Canaan took place in the sixteenth century BCE, around 1550, when native Egyptians overthrew the Fifteenth Dynasty, called the Hyksos. As this ancient Egyptian name implies, the Hyksos were “foreign” or “shepherd” rulers, alluding to the fact that they were largely Semites from western Asia who had taken over northern Egypt around 1650 BCE—and whose origins, among other things, disposed them to welcome Semitic-speaking herdsmen from the east who brought their flocks to Egypt in years of drought, searching for fresh pasture.10 Indeed, the biblical accounts of Joseph led Halpern and other scholars to suggest that he, having been sold into bondage, arrived in Egypt during the Hyksos rule. Consequently, as a fellow Semite, Joseph was readily admitted into a position of trust and responsibility in the home of a major official— Potiphar, “Pharaoh’s chief steward”—over whose household he became the overseer (Gen. 39:4). As told in the Bible, Joseph later attained even higher office as the chief minister to Pharaoh himself, in charge of the storage and distribution of grain during the “seven good and seven bad years” (Gen. 41:39–41). As additional affirmation of the presumed collusion that took

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Fig. 26. The Stele of Merneptah. Photo: Zev Radovan.

place between Hyksos rulers and immigrant Semitic pastoralists, the Bible has Joseph counseling his brothers, new to Egypt in the wake of a drought in Canaan, to declare to Pharaoh that they were shepherds and wanted to stay there (Gen. 46:33–34), advice he would have been unlikely to offer if the Pharaoh were of Egyptian, rather than Hyksos, stock, especially since he was aware that native Egyptians—who were mainly farmers—viewed “every shepherd as an abomination” (Gen. 46:25–36, 47:3–5). All the more so, the manner in which Joseph reportedly confiscated on behalf of Pharaoh the livestock and land of the Egyptians (Gen. 47:13–20) may explain why they hated and ultimately rebelled against the colonialist Hyksos, under their native leader Ahmose. Understandably, with Ahmose’s expulsion of the Hyksos, many Semitic shepherds went with them, in what must have been a massive emigration,



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some of them to dwell in the Canaanite hill country.11 If some of these émigrés carried with them the memory of a distinguished fellow Semite called Joseph when they came to dwell with their livestock in the area of central Canaan north of Jerusalem, it may help explain the ultimate presence there of what are known as the “Joseph tribes:” Benjamin, Manasseh, and Ephraim. A second potential component in the tribe of Israel that Pharaoh Merneptah fought at the end of the thirteenth century BCE may have been pastoralists thought to have come from the regions of northern Syria and southern Anatolia (later known as Aram) in the middle of that century— people perhaps fleeing the punitive invasion of that area by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser I.12 These refugees—who may be the source of stories about the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (“My father was a wandering Aramean”; Deut. 26:5)—made the semiarid eastern Hebron Hills and the arid southern Judean Desert and northern Negev their home territories, extending from Jerusalem south to present-day Nahal Tzin (Ar. Wadi al-Figri), that is, the attributed territory of the biblical tribes Judah and Simeon.13 By the same token, the ascribed Israelite tribes in Transjordan— Reuben, Gad, and one part of Manasseh—may also have its origins in this group.14 It is these thirteenth-century proto-Arameans, together with the earlier Hyksos people—each with their own nomadic background—who may have come to be known as Israel (Heb. Yisrael: a Canaanite name meaning “God [‘El’] rules”),15 the group mentioned by Merneptah in 1208 BCE. Yet another element that the Bible depicts as having desert-based experience seems to have joined the other proto-Israelites subsequently in about 1170 BCE. The Biblicist Frank Cross called this element the “Moses group.”16 They were the biblical Hebrews, or Children of Israel, about whom the Bible tells of their bondage in Egypt, their liberation, and their wanderings in Sinai, led by their attributed leader Moses, who was aided mainly by members of the tribe of Levi, to which he himself belonged (Exod. 2:1–10). In keeping with the depiction that we find in the books of Exodus and Numbers, the Hebrews, like Moses, were apparently no longer nomadic—if they ever had been—but rather had assimilated in Egypt, some of them bearing Egyptian names such as Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Merari, Hofni, and Pinehas.17 Despite their assimilation, however, they were sufficiently foreign—and amply disliked as “Habiru” (perhaps “He-

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brews”), or “outlaws”—for them to be subject to impressment by Rameses II (1279–1213 BCE), famous for his massive building projects, into forced labor on the construction of what the Bible calls his two cities, “Ramses and Pithom” (Exod. 1:11), in the eastern Nile Delta.18 If we take the biblical account at face value, it was when Moses, as described, liberated the Hebrews from this bondage (in what some scholars reckon to have been around 1210 BCE),19 leading them out of Egypt and into the inhospitable wasteland of Sinai and southern Transjordan,20 that they, too, like their proto-Israelite predecessors, experienced desert life. This was in the company of what the Bible portrays as the desert-dwelling Midianites, with whom they lived and herded livestock for an extended time (forty years according to Numbers 14:33–34) and who guided the Moses group, initially unfamiliar with desert life, in their wanderings (Num. 10:31).21 Jethro, a “Midianite priest,” had been Moses’s employer and was his father-in-law from a previous sojourn with them (Exod. 2:21, 3:1); relations between Moses and the Midianites, in the words of Frank Cross, “could not be more harmonious.”22 We therefore should not be surprised if the Hebrew wanderers, in general, developed an appreciation for their Midianite benefactors and their Bedouin way of life;23 and ultimately espoused a tradition of desert life that they then brought with them when they joined the tribal community that, in the Merneptah Stele, was called Israel. Over and above these extrabiblical and textual data that lend themselves to the picture of an early Israelite populace with a background of desert experience, we should notice how the biblical authors were quite accurate when describing the arrival of the depicted nomadic patriarchs in Canaan, which also may have reflected some innate understanding of Bedouin. In particular, the depiction of Abraham coming there from Haran in northern Syria with only his immediate household reflects awareness of a process that was typical over the ages. Although religious inspiration is the ascribed, biblical motive for this move, it often happens that nomads who relocate from one major region to another do so in small groups, perhaps clans, in order to escape drought, avoid conflicts with others in their society, or find new economic opportunities. Examples from the histories of several premodern tribes in Sinai and the Negev confirm that their ancestors arrived in just such small groups and



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for similar reasons. In the sixteenth-century-CE Negev, for example, the forefather of the present Zullam confederation and his clansmen got there after fleeing from conflict; the Bani Ugba, Tiyaha, and Tarabin ancestors, also in small groups, were looking for better pastures; and the Wuheidat, Aheiwat, and Tawara forefathers, as individuals, were in search of other sources of livelihood, such as conveying merchandise and Christian pilgrims to St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Sinai, and Muslim pilgrims to Mecca from Cairo.24 In like fashion, the proto-Israelite nomadic immigrant groups in Canaan may have been initially small in size, in keeping with the presentation in Genesis, which does not depict them as either dominant or threatening. To the contrary, we are told how they acquired property at the sufferance of their new neighbors in Hebron and Beersheba (Gen. 21:25–34, 23:2–20), how shepherds in the Negev chased them from one well to another (Gen. 26:15–23), and how the people of Shechem tested their mettle, as with the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah (Gen. 34:1–7). Indeed, the Israelite fore­ fathers were remembered as being so intimidated that they felt constrained to surrender their wives—Sarah and Rebecca—to powerful local leaders in order to acquire good pastures from the people they found on the land (Gen. 12:14–16, 20:1–13, 26:6–11). Hence, although Middle Eastern history has known the mass relocation of major tribal groups (such as the tenth-­ century-CE Bani Hilal and Bani Sulaym tribes, which went from central Arabia to North Africa,25 or tribes of the sixteenth-century-CE Aneza and Shammar confederations, which moved from central Arabia to the Syrian and Iraqi Deserts, both migrations involving tribal wars and conquests),26 the migrating patriarchal people in the Bible were, by contrast, more typically limited in number. One can also assume that just as the depicted forefathers made their way to Canaan for personal reasons, additional small groups from northern Syria, or Aram, and speaking roughly the same Semitic dialect, followed a similar route for similar reasons, thereby augmenting that element among the Israelites who had a nomadic past. Hence, although the Haran area was in turmoil in the thirteenth century BCE, the Bible is correct in not attributing unusually dramatic or unique political or climatic changes to the migration of a nomad such as the ascribed Abraham, since small-scale nomadic relocations were the norm.

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What Impelled the Biblical Authors to Include Bedouin Materials in the Hebrew Bible? Before concluding that a portion of the early Israelites were in fact desert people, we might find it useful to explore the second question mentioned above, namely, why do we find Bedouin-like material in the Bible at all? Ultimately, the Hebrew Bible is a religious book for conveying a theological message rather than drawing attention to Bedouin life. If the biblical authors thought that their primary audience comprised Israelites who believed themselves descended from Canaanite farmers or town dwellers— the proposition developed by the Biblicists George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald, as seen above—we would have expected them to portray Israel’s ancestors as being of that ilk, in the hope of having the overall population of Canaan support the religion of Yahweh. The fact that they did not follow that path logically suggests that the Israelite descendants of sixteenth-, ­thirteenth-, and twelfth-century-BCE nomads, as suggested above, were their preferred audience; and that to ensure their identification with the religion and the religious community that the biblical authors were helping to develop, they included as many references to the Israelites’ nomadic culture and ancestors as they could. Some of these references, as shown by the Biblicist Alexander Rofe, were clan and tribal stories from the oral tradition, allusion to which, in the midst of the Bible’s theological saga, lent the holy book legitimacy and credibility.27 As we have seen, the Israelites, like the Bedouin, enjoyed hearing about their forebears. It was, as suggested by the Jesuit scholar Jean Louis Ska, a form of entertainment—perhaps their most popular.28 Therefore, the biblical elements based on Bedouin knowledge and culture consisted, first and foremost, of stories of the purported patriarchs and the Hebrews in Sinai, about whom a collective memory may have existed, judging from the fact that they were included in the prescriptural ritual performances of the Cultus of the Israelite League, as Frank Cross called it,29 which was also based on a self-identification of the Israelites as former nomads in the desert. Alongside these narratives, the authors incorporated a number of genealogies and poems, as shown in chapter 6. They knew that genealogies were vital to Bedouin for monitoring their place in the tribal world and for



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knowing their kinship commitments. They also integrated poems into their theological narrative just as Bedouin do in prose-poetry compositions. Further to gain legitimacy, subtleties of Bedouin life were introduced into biblical stories. In describing the halt of the funeral cortege of Jacob in Transjordan, for example, the biblical authors included two Bedouin methods for giving place-names. To convey the great sorrow over Jacob’s death, they claimed that the name of the camping ground there was changed from the Threshing-Floor of the Box Thorn (named for a local plant) to Egypt’s Mourning (named for an event; Gen. 50:11). As with Bedouin, the Israelites must have enjoyed even recollections that cast their forebears in a bad light. Why, otherwise, would the authors of a theological book include the account of a patriarch’s giving his wife to another man in order to gain pastures, as attributed to Abraham twice and Isaac once; or of Jacob lying to his father in order to cheat his brother Esau out of his legacy; or of Jacob’s son Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine? The biblical authors knew what bad behavior was, but had no need to launder it with a theological justification, as medieval Bible exegetes subsequently did. The important thing to them was that the tribal ancestors depicted in the Bible were credibly Israelite, at least culturally. This, they believed, would itself add legitimacy to the professed theology. As posited by the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, another example of garnering legitimacy and credibility for the Bible was the attempt to create a history of the seventh-century-BCE Kingdom of Judah by compiling “myths, folktales, popular heroic tales, and shreds of memories known to the population of Judah.”30 Albeit inadvertently, the historian Mario Liverani also offered support for this suggestion that the Bible’s authors were courting the credibility of formerly nomadic Israelites. In discussing the composition of the Bible, he maintained that there is no reason to invent a historical context when there is no politically relevant reason for it.31 This tells us that if Bedouin culture—as opposed to a Canaanite sedentary ­heritage— was accepted by many Israelites as being that of their forebears, there was no need to fabricate it. Liverani also argued that “it is hard to make up a social setting that never existed.” Accordingly, when we find biblical authors garnishing with Bedouin values a story that they created for otherwise theological or political

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reasons, it resonates with authenticity. A main example is the detailed depiction of Bedouin hospitality that accompanied Abraham’s reception of the men who appeared at his tent to announce the imminent pregnancy of his aged wife, Sarah (Gen. 18:1–8, 16)—a depiction that appears in the story, despite its theological goal of showing Yahweh’s close involvement in the patriarch’s life. Similarly, when the biblical authors set their mind to giving unity to the Israelite community of Yahweh by creating a story that depicted, in Bedouin fashion, the eponymous forefathers of the Israelite tribes as the sons of Jacob (Gen. 29:31–30:24), they were careful to underscore the high value that Bedouin place on sons (as seen in chapter 3), using, as the storyline, the attendant rivalry between Jacob’s two wives to bear them. The future will witness continued discussion about what in the Bible resulted from a Bedouin past and what we should attribute to other influences. No matter how these questions are resolved, one hopes that the present exposure to the substance and logic of Bedouin culture and its relevance to the Old Testament will enhance the discussion. The plentitude of parallels between Bedouin culture and the Bible constitutes a critical mass, obliging us to examine much biblical material from this viewpoint, alongside others. In addition, the display of Bedouin culture in this book should serve as a counterpoise to the absence of corroborative evidence from contemporary documentation or archaeology for the biblical portrayal of the patriarchs, the depicted Israelite Exodus, their wanderings in the desert, and the stories of subsequent intertribal conflicts and clashes with neighboring foes (as in the books of Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel). Receptivity to the Bedouin effect, especially since the Bible explicitly depicts it, should provide insights that otherwise might not come to light.

appendix: moses and the midianites

further to our effort to discover whether the ancient Israelites were in fact people with nomadic experience, as discussed in chapter 7, an examination of the influence of the Bedouin Midianites on the Israelite ancestors might be helpful. Judging from details in the biblical account of the Exodus, we may presume that the “Moses group” (the Hebrews as called by the Biblicist Frank Cross) were favorably impressed with the Midianites.1 These ancient Bedouin received Moses as a young fugitive from vengeance (Exod. 2:15–22), warmly welcomed him and his group after their flight from Egyptian oppression (Exod. 18:1–12), gave them advice on how to organize efficiently under their new conditions (Exod. 18:13–26), and provided them with guidance during their wanderings in the unknown and threatening desert (Num. 10:29–32). This aid may have predisposed those with Moses to adopt from the Midianites certain elements that became incorporated into the future Israelite religion: a belief in the god Yahweh,2 the invisibility of the deity,3 the practice of circumcision (see chapters 2 and 5), and the taboo against eating pork (see chapter 5). The Israelites may also have adopted from them the use of goat hair for the roof of their depicted tented sanctuary (Exod. 26:7), since the Midianites were using this weave for the roofs of their temples, such as the one discovered at Timna by the archaeologist Beno Rothenberg.4 Confirmation of Yahweh as the god of the Midianite nomads in their tribal territories of central and western Sinai and southern Transjordan

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may also be had from Israelite hindsight.5 These are the places that the Bible indicates as Yahweh’s venue, as we find in Deuteronomy (33:2: “Yahweh came from Sinai, He dawned from Se‘ir [southern Transjordan], He appeared from Mount Paran”), Judges (5:4–5: “Yahweh, when you went out from Se‘ir, when you marched from the plains of Edom”), Habakkuk (3:3, 7: “A god came from Teman, a holy one from Mount Paran . . . the tents of Cushan quivered, the curtains of the land of Midian shook”), and the Psalms (68:8–9: “Before Yahweh, the one of Sinai, Before Yahweh, the God of Israel”).6 The Bible may also intimate that Moses, having become a believer in Yahweh while a fugitive among the Midianites (Exod. 3), contrived his eventual mission to extricate his people from forced labor in Egypt in collusion with the Midianite priest Jethro.7 The latter not only gave Moses leave for the undertaking (Exod. 4:18) but also, upon its success, greeted him in Sinai, rejoicing that Yahweh had been good to his people by delivering them from their oppression in Egypt (Exod. 18:9–10). Jethro indeed declares, “Now I am certain that Yahweh is greater than all the other gods” (Exod. 18:11)— more likely, as the biblical archaeologist Roland de Vaux found, reaffirming his ongoing faith than expressing a new epiphany.8 Finally, with his faith reaffirmed, Jethro offered up a sacrifice, and Aaron and the Israelite elders participated in the sacrificial meal—perhaps a sign of their entering Yahweh’s cult9 (Exod. 18:1–12). In light of this survey, the possibility that Moses actually performed his attributed act of liberation under the influence of the Bedouin Midianites emerges more clearly. Indeed, although the experiences of the Moses group in Sinai were ultimately metamorphosed into the extravagant theological drama on Mount Sinai that we know from Exodus 19, details gathered from other descriptions in the same biblical book can be reordered, with a modicum of logic, to create a story more life-sized and realistic. First of all, let us assume that the Exodus was smaller than its biblical depiction. If, for example, it comprised only some 500 persons, as calculated by the Biblicist Yisrael Knohl,10 the Moses group could conceivably have survived in the Sinai desert, whereas survival by over 600,000 Israelites, as cited in Numbers 1:45, would have been impossible, owing to the limited food and water sources found there. Second, Moses can appear in a more credible light from a rereading of



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the details in Exodus and Numbers. Let us speculate, for example, that even if the story of Pharaoh’s daughter raising him from infancy is allegorical (Exod. 2:3–10),11 it appears from his Egyptian name—Moses—that he grew up assimilated to Egyptian society and life.12 But we know from his killing of the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew (Exod. 2:11–12) that he harbored an ambiguous self-identity. In turn, such an identity, during the years he spent with the Midianites as a shepherd, may have fostered Moses’s susceptibility to their belief in the unseen god Yahweh. We are thus presented with the image of a reflective man in the desert, where he spent time alone herding, a man who might, upon his victorious return to Sinai, go off on his own to meditate, perhaps as he had while a shepherd, even retreating to a mountain, such as “Sinai” or “Horeb”—a retreat that the later authors of the book of Exodus developed into a spectacular theophany, exploiting the dimness of centuries-old memory to carry it off. From this rereading, we also may judge the impact of the Midianites on Moses. We first meet them when the Egyptian-assimilated young man, fleeing to Sinai to escape vengeance for having killed the Egyptian, finds asylum with them. He stays among them for years, is employed as a shepherd by the priest Jethro, and is married off—an uncircumcised outsider to their clan—to Jethro’s somewhat strange daughter Zippora, who circumcises him herself, apparently feeling it to be a Midianite holy rite, as it in fact was—but only in regard to clansmen.13 The Midianite holy man Jethro (Exod. 3:1) not only initiated Moses into the cult of Yahweh and perhaps encouraged him to release his people from bondage, but was also subsequently his mentor in matters of des­ ert life (Exod. 18:13–26), as well as the guide for his sedentary followers, who were not used to surviving in a desert (Exod. 15:23–25, 16:2–3, 17:2–3; Num. 20:2–5). Indeed, Moses implored his father-in-law not to leave the lost wanderers, saying, “You have known where we should camp in the desert; you have been our eyes!” (Num. 10:31). This relationship of trust makes it conceivable that in the course of time, the Moses group as a whole may have learned the religion of Yahweh from the Midianites and subsequently passed it on—especially through the Levites among them as the future priestly caste (see Numbers 18, 35:2–8)—to the proto-Israelites they met in Canaan and Transjordan.14 These in turn integrated it into the cultic

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practices acquired from the Canaanites beforehand.15 Thus, the Midianite name for God, Yahweh, was added to the Canaanite name El or Elohim.16 We might even suppose that the Levites in the Moses group heard from the Midianites the story, as originally told in prose, of a long-suffering and righteous desert dweller called Job. Although the origin and setting of the book of Job is clouded in much uncertainty, it cites the titular character as dwelling in Uz, which is located in eastern Midianite territory;17 and although its present poetic form is thought by some to be the product of the sixth century BCE,18 some find its epic story in prose to be more ancient, even dating to the second millennium,19 raising the possibility that the Le­ vites in the Moses group may have first heard of Job while among the Midianites. The Arabic scholar Alfred Guillaume inadvertently strengthened the case for locating the geographic venue of the Job story in northwestern Arabia, the area now generally referred to as Midian. Guillaume found that by applying early Arabic vocabulary and the rules of Arabic prosody to some of Job’s more obscure Hebrew passages, he could help shed light on their meaning. He deemed the verses to have originally been composed in Arabic by one of the Jews living in northern Arabia, and only later to have been translated into Hebrew.20 Guillaume thus considered Job “the first book to come out of Arabia.”21 In light of the above, some basic elements of Judaism itself—circumcision, dietary restrictions, and the invisible god Yahweh—may have originated with Bedouin, the Midianites being Bedouin according to our definition. This is lost, however, in the Bible, where the depiction of the Midianites is ambiguous. According to Frank Cross, the Levite scribes of the Moses (Mushite) line depicted them favorably, as we find in Exodus, while those of the Aaronite line recoiled from giving the Midianites credit for religious or other influences on the Israelites.22 The Aaronites’ interest, perhaps understandably, was to represent these influences as direct revelations from Yahweh. As a result, they mainly portrayed the Midianites as enemies of the Israelites (Num. 25:6–8, 25:16–18, 31:2–18; Judg. 7, 8), despite the benefits that their forebears had bestowed on them.

notes

Introduction 1. Throughout the book, two tribal names together denote the tribal confederation (here, Azazma) and the individual tribe (e.g., Sarahin). The Arabic transliterations used in the text and notes are mostly phonetic. Except for the names and ­titles of written sources in Arabic, diacritical spellings in the text and notes pertain only to glottal stops. For the convenience of Arabic readers, the Index of Arabic Spellings supplies all Arabic words in the proper script. 2. Translation from the Hebrew is mainly mine, as will be most of the translations of biblical verses, unless otherwise noted. 3. See chapter 7. 4. Since some Middle Eastern nomads throughout history exploited years of sufficient rainfall to grow winter grains (planting their seeds, leaving them to sprout, and returning in five months for the harvest), twentieth-century scholars came to call them “semi-nomads,” inferring too that their migrations with sheep and goats were shorter than those of nomads who raised only camels and did not plant. In modern biblical scholarship, therefore, the Bedouin or nomads depicted in the Bible are mainly referred to as semi-nomads, deriving from the fact that they (especially the patriarch Isaac) are shown as engaging in agriculture as well as animal husbandry. (See Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 17–25, for a succinct definition of the types of Middle Eastern nomads, presented from an economic perspective). If we rely solely on this criterion, we might indeed consider the Genesis-depicted Israelites as semi-nomads whose areas (according to Numbers and Joshua) extended south to the Wilderness of Zin, and the tribes farther south, the Amelekites and Midianites, as more fully nomadic. From a cultural point of view, however, we can define almost any transhumant Bedouin as nomadic without the prefix “semi-,” specifically because the absence of gov-

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ernmental law enforcement in their areas of migration obliged them to protect themselves by organizing into clans and tribes and by developing their own legal system, as discussed in chapters 3 and 4. These self-defense mechanisms, in themselves, suffice to characterize Bedouin culture as the integral culture of migrant desert dwellers who lived outside the sway of government and whom I thus designate as nomads, whether they practiced cultivation or not. In this book therefore, I refer to Bedouin as nomads. 5. See Bailey, Bedouin Law. 6. See Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival. 7. Rowton, “Autonomy and Nomadism,” 247–48, 251. 8. For a survey of other scholarly estimates of the beginning of Middle Eastern nomadism, see Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 97–102. According to the yet-unpublished archaeological findings of Avner Goren and Ofer Bar-Yosef on the nawamis burial sites in Sinai (see Goren “Nawamis”), a culture of pastoral nomadism existed there as early as the fourth millennium BCE. 9. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 271–73. For premodern examples in Egypt, see Burckhardt, Arabic Proverbs, 56, 122. 10. Klein, “The Marriage of Martu,” 83–90. 11. Freyha, Modern Lebanese Proverbs, 427. 12. As, for example, heard by Michael Rowton during his many years there (“Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment,” 206). 13. See Abraham Malamat, who suggests that the patriarchal narratives may have been put into writing in the second millennium BCE, perhaps even during its first half (Mari and the Bible, 4). 14. Rowton, “Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment,” 202. Rowton viewed the culture of pure Bedouin as not having basically changed, even under the impact of the two major historic innovations in Middle Eastern nomadic life: the second millennium BCE domestication of the camel and the first millennium CE emergence of Islam. The camel only facilitated life there (Rowton, “Enclosed Nomadism,” 1–4); and Islam, having integrated much of Bedouin culture, merely took its place alongside traditional animistic practices, in an equal and perhaps junior capacity (see Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices”). 15. See Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 35–80. For examples from Sinai, see Burckhardt, Syria and the Holy Land, 457–630. 16. See Zevit, who also advocates viewing biblical materials from a premodern point of view (“Israelite Family Religion,” 291–98). 17. For examples of scholarly reservations concerning this historical veracity, see Thompson, The Bible in History; Liverani, Israel’s History; and I. Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 33–47, 61–73, 310–18. By contrast, some scholars (e.g., Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt,” 92–98, and Meyers, Exodus, 8–12) recognize a plausible historical background to some of the events in Exodus. 18. For textual presentations of these influences, see Ancient Near East Texts (ed. Pritchard; hereafter, ANET); Hallo and Younger, The Context of Scripture; and Matthews and Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels.



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19. For more on a common Mediterranean culture, see Gilmore, “Anthropology of the Mediterranean Area,” 175–205; Peristiany, Honour and Shame, 9–17; and Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 269–72. 20. See, for example, Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. 21. Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 19–21.

Chapter 1. Bedouin and Israelites in the Desert 1. For the Shasu, see Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 271–73. 2. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 9. 3. Arabic: howd u-rowd; ibid., 156–57. ¯ rif, Ta’rı¯kh Bi’r al-Sab‘ wa-Qaba¯’iliha¯, 94–95. 4. Musil, Northern Hegaz, 96; see ‘A 5. Shaykh Salim Husayn Agayli, of the Masa‘id Marabda, oral communication to the author, Sept. 3, 1975. 6. Bailey and Shmueli, “Settlement of the Sinaitic ‘Ayaydah,” 30. 7. Swaylim al-Kallab of the Azazma Sarahin, oral communication to the author, 1995. 8. While this last phrase is generally understood and translated as “They went from Midbar to Mattana,” it is more reasonable to translate it according to the literal meanings of the attributed nouns: desert (midbar) and gift (mattana), as we find in the Aramaic Targum Onkelos; this, despite the absence of the verb [give] in the Hebrew original. First, there is no previous designation of the place being called Midbar, from which the Israelites might have started off on another leg of their journey. Second, considering the water they found there a gift, the Israelites, as in Bedouin practice (see chapter 2), could have named the place after it, as further indicated in the following line (21:19), “They went from Mattana to Nahliel.” 9. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 39n3, 135n7; A Culture of Desert Survival, 125. 10. A Culture of Desert Survival, 241. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. My use here of “dry land,” adopting the original image of dryness behind the geographical designation, Negev, is more logical than other translations such as “land of the Negev” (see, e.g., the Revised Standard Version) or “a south land” (see, e.g., the King James Bible), because the terms “Negev” and “south land” in themselves do not preclude the presence of water, which may be found in the overall area they refer to, albeit sparsely. By contrast, Caleb’s gift to Achsah may well have been a waterless spot, as most locations in the Negev or the south would be. 13. Evenari, Shanon, and Tadmor, Negev, 30. 14. Figures provided by the Negev Research Center, Beersheba, 1974. 15. Figures provided by Kibbutz Sde-Boker, 1974. 16. Musa Hasan al-Atowna, of the Tiyaha al-Nutush, oral communication to the author, Oct. 1, 1973. 17. Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, of the Azazma Sarahin, oral communication to the author, July 1972.

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18. Ibid., July 1973. 19. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 72–73. 20. Noth, History of Israel. 21. The figures were provided by Kibbutz Sde-Boker (1974), where the annual and monthly rainfalls had been measured. The evaluations were those of Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, of the Azazma Sarahin, offered in each year. 22. For more on Bedouin livestock, see Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 53–55. 23. Schmidt-Nielsen, “Animals and Arid Conditions,” 374–80. 24. Shkolnick, Borut, and Choshniak, “Water Economy of the Beduin Goat,” 40–55. 25. Shkolnik, “Adaptation of Animals to Desert Conditions,” 310–11. 26. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, 57–86. 27. See Lemaire, “La Haute Mesopotamie,” 97–98, for a thirteenth century BCE migration from Aram that may have comprised persons upon whom the biblical patriarchs were conceived. 28. Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food, 290–93, which cites these sheep as 25 percent of the world’s sheep population. 29. See Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 34, 345. 30. See also Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text, 76, and the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh translation (as it appears in the Jewish Study Bible, 578), for the use of the ambiguous term ha-alyah as a “fat sheep’s-tail.” 31. See Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 59–63, for more on nomadic migration in general. 32. For more on these movements in the Negev, see Marx, Beduin of the Negev, 81–87, and Abu-Rabiya, Negev Bedouin and Livestock Raising, 25–41. 33. Bailey and Shmueli, “Settlement of the Sinaitic ‘Ayaydah,” 28. 34. See ANET, 1:183–84. 35. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 39n7. 36. Marx, “Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence,” 343–63; Cole, “Tribal and Non-Tribal Structures,” 124–25. 37. For the location of Gerar, see Mazar, Canaan and Israel, 123n7, 136–37. 38. Barslavski, Do you Know the Land?, 106. 39. The following is based on oral communications from Musa Hasan al-Atowna of the Tiyaha Nutush, of the northern Negev (1973), and Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, of the Azazma Sarahin of the central Negev (1974). ¯ rif, Ta’rı¯kh Bi’r al-Sab‘ wa-Qaba¯’iliha¯, 116–20; Shuqayr, Ta’rı¯kh Sı¯na¯’ wa-l-‘Arab, 40. ‘A 117. 41. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 55–58. 42. Barslavski, Do You Know the Land?, 107. 43. For the historicity of this citation, see Na’aman, “Pastoral Nomads in the Southwestern Periphery,” 265n15. 44. See Torczyner, Lishonenu, 108–9, for this translation of the Hebrew noun adirim, though most English versions use the less suitable word “nobles.”



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45. Barslavski, Do You Know the Land?, 108. 46. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 24. 47. Frayj Himayd al-Saddan, of the Azazma Sarahin, oral communication to the author, 2007. 48. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 66. 49. Ibid. 50. While J. J. Finkelstein has shown that the terms of employment of a shepherd, as mentioned above, were also known in ancient Mesopotamia (e.g., the Laws of Hammurabi, #266 and #267; see “Old Babylonian Herding Contract,” 30–36), Malamat (Mari and the Bible, 29–69) and Greengus (“Biblical and Mesopotamian Law,” 63–79), have pointed out that some of the laws of that area may have emanated from the nomadic Amorites who ruled Babylonia before Hammurabi. 51. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 66–68. 52. Bailey, “The Bedouin Budget,” 123–25. 53. Musa Hasan al-Atowna, of the Tiyaha al-Nutush, oral communication to the author, 1973. 54. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 71. 55. Ibid., 72. 56. For the text, see Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, 58. 57. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 74–75.

Chapter 2. Bedouin Culture in the Biblical Home 1. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 30. 2. Ibid., 382. 3. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 185–88. 4. Bailey and Shmueli, “Settlement of the Sinaitic ‘Ayaydah,” 34–35. 5. For a more extensive survey of Israelite tent dwelling in the Bible, see Homan, To Your Tents, O Israel!, 29–34. 6. Ibid., 29–48. 7. See I. Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 238–50. 8. See, for example, Cross, “The Priestly Tabernacle,” 213, 217–19, and Clifford, “The Tent of El,” 221–27. 9. Rothenberg, Timna, 151–52; see also Homan, who considered the Midianite tent shrine at Timna to be one of the closest parallels to the biblical Tabernacle (To Your Tents, O Israel!, 118). 10. Danin, Desert Vegetation of Israel, 47–49, 64, 67–68, 117–18. 11. See Mankowski, who argues for mezuzah coming from a proto-Semitic root z-w-z (Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, 85); Kaddari, Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 595, affirms this derivation. See also HALOT, 565, which claims that it comes from an Akkadian word meaning “stand, base, pedestal (of a column).” 12. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 30. 13. HALOT, 1614a.

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14. For more on these understandings, see chapter 5. 15. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 36–40. 16. For the entire poem, see Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 361–64. 17. Ibid., 268–71. 18. Ibid., 230–31. 19. See Cagni, The Poem of Erra, 28; Reiner, “City Bread and Bread Baked,” 118–19. 20. See Levinson, who details the scholarly claim that the Israelites originally celebrated the Feast of the Unleavened Bread separately from their historical celebration of Passover (Deuteronomy and Hermeneutics, 53–81). 21. Tigay, “Exodus,” 139 (note on section 16). 22. Although Meyers, Exodus, 8–12, does not specifically identify unleavened bread as a symbol of Israelite cultural differentiation from the Egyptians (Exodus, 94), she attributes other aspects of the Passover story as signs that biblical authors during the period of the Israelite kingdoms sought to define the Egyptians as “the quintessential other,” especially since the Israelites were then seeking to establish “a distinctive identity,” that is, one different from others in Canaan. 23. See Bailey, “Bedouin Place-Names in Sinai,” 42–52, for the following materials on Bedouin toponyms. 24. Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, 44–46. 25. HALOT, 1036. 26. See Bailey, “Bedouin Place-Names in Sinai,” 51, for a similar phonological Arabic adaptation in the southern Arava depression, where Ayn Ghadyan (the spring of the Haloxylon persicum bush, common to the area) was formed from the name of a Roman temple called Ad Dianum (see Aharoni, 9-16). In regard to the adaptation of biblical “ ‘Azmon” to Bedouin “Gusayma,” we should note that the actual Arabic spelling of “Gusayma” is “Qusayma,” the Bedouin in Sinai pronouncing the consonant q as a hard g. Thus, the transition from the Hebrew letter ‘ayin in “ ‘Azmon” to the Arabic q in “Qusayma,” though rare, is a known phenomenon between Semitic languages (Prof. Israel Ephal, oral communication to the author, Mar. 19, 2017); see also Qimron, Biblical Aramaic, 11–13, and Fitzmyer, The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefire, 29 (for the example of qaraq, “to flee”). 27. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1:244. 28. Ibid., 1:381. 29. Musil, Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, 93–94. 30. Bailey and Danin, “Bedouin Plant Utilization,” 145–62. 31. Ibid., 154. 32. Danin, Desert Vegetation of Israel, 95–96, 108, 124. 33. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 379. 34. Bailey, “Nature Preservation Bedouin Style,” 221. 35. For the following material on stars, see Bailey, “Bedouin Star-Lore in Sinai,” 580– 96. 36. For more on this event and circumcision, see chapter 5. 37. Although some commentators envisage flint as “a flint knife,” Zippora’s depicted



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“taking a flint” (va-tikah Zippora zor) is more akin to picking a piece of flint off the ground. This is further affirmed by Menahem Kaddari, who defines flint as a “sharp rock-stone that was used as a knife for circumcision” (Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 924). 38. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 266. 39. For this and the following remarks on hospitality, see ibid., 195–218. 40. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 142. 41. Ibid., 130. 42. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 199–201. ¯ rif, al-Qad.a¯’ bayn al-Badu¯, 193. 43. ‘A 44. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 212–13. 45. Ibid., 213–14. 46. Musil, Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, 447–48. 47. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 175.

Chapter 3. Desert Society 1. In the Sinai Peninsula, the powerful Tarabin possessed four regions: the northeastern plain north of Jabal Halal, the Jabal Maghara area in west-central Sinai, the northern half of the southeastern coastal area, and the northern part of the southwestern coastal area, near Jabal Raha. 2. For the workings of a Bedouin clan, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 60–72. 3. Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 81. 4. For examples, see Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 61–72. 5. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 159–60; “stranger” means the nonmember— here of a clan, but by inference of any group. 6. For an extensive description of biblical tribal groups and their inconsistencies, see Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 245–323; for a discussion of the definitions of biblical social groupings, see Levine, Numbers 1–20, 131–33. 7. Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 24; see also Schloen, The House of the Father, 155–65, for a detailed discussion of the ostraca and their ramifications for understanding the longevity of the clan system down to the end of the Israel monarchy in the late eighth century. 8. See below for the use of ‘am as “people” or “nation” in the development of the original use of this term for “clan.” 9. See Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 288–90, for a discussion of this procedure. See also Routledge, who depicts how Mesha, the eighth-century BCE tribal leader, similarly appended, through warfare, several tribal groupings that subsequently constituted the superconfederation of Moab (“The Politics of Mesha,” 231–47). 10. See the discussion by Tigay, Deuteronomy, 212–13. 11. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 424. 12. Although nasi’ may also be understood in the passive sense as a person raised to high position (see TDOT, 10:45–46), I interpret it in the active sense, as with ref-

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ugee (palit) or survivor (sarid), who do their fleeing and surviving by themselves, even if aided by others (see Kadari, A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 859–60, 1145). 13. Raswan, Black Tents of Arabia, 67. 14. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 431. 15. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 55–58. 16. Musil, Northern Hegaz, 7. 17. Stager, “The Song of Deborah,” 51. 18. Ibid., 61–65. 19. Oral communications from Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, of the Azazma Sarahin (1974), and Muhammad Faraj Abu Jarabia, of the Azazma Mas‘udiyyin (2009). 20. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 61–67. 21. Ibid., 67–72. 22. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 161. 23. Ibid., 122–23. 24. Marx, Beduin of the Negev, 193. 25. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 131. 26. This supposition is based on the ancient meaning of the Arabic preposition “with” (‘-m, later metathesized to m-‘; see Good, The Sheep of His Pasture, 30, 39). In keeping with this image of binding, the Arabic root ‘-m-m might be incorporated in the Bedouin word for turban, amama. 27. According to Malamat, the term ‘am, like other Hebrew terms for “clan,” came “to expand its scope to encompass entire peoples or nations,” as in ‘am yisra’el, the People of Israel (Mari and the Bible, 166). 28. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 159–60. 29. See HALOT, 29a, which, in addition to “brother,” defines akh as “kinsman” (clansman); also, the Bible scholar Frank Cross understood the biblical term “brother” as “kinsman” (From Epic to Canon, 4). 30. Although in Deut. 25:5–10, which defines levirate marriage, the term akh could be understood as either “brother” (see JSB, 422) or “clansman,” akh in the book of Ruth is definitely “clansman,” since neither Boaz nor “so-and-so” (4:1), the closer redeemer, is obviously a brother of Mahlon, Ruth’s deceased husband. 31. For different interpretations of these terms, see Meyers, “The Family in Early Israel,” 32–36, and Perdue, “The Household, Old Testament Theology,” 174–77. 32. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 58–59. 33. Noth also translates the Hebrew moledet as “kindred” (Numbers, 74). 34. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 123. 35. See the NJPS translation; HALOT, 961; Kaddari, Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 876. 36. See Blau, Phonology and Morphology, 188–89. 37. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 63–64. 38. Ibid., 123–26. 39. Maja¯lı¯, Mudhakkara¯tı¯, 13–14.



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40. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 416. 41. For my use of “destroy,” see Kaddari, Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 174; HALOT, 209b, also suggests “to drive away.” 42. For the metaphor, see Rofe, “Clan Sagas,” 192. 43. My use of “tents” instead of the more common translation of “gates” derives from the image of an open dwelling, with the Hebrew root sh-‘-r resembling the cognate Arabic th-gh-r (see HALOT, 1614a). 44. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 414. 45. Ibid., 153. 46. Ma’ariv (Israeli daily newspaper), July 16, 2008. 47. Gordon, “Biblical Customs and the Nuzu Tablets,” 4; Frymer-Kensky, “Patriarchal Family Relationships,” 211. 48. My translation and understanding of the Hebrew “halo anochi tov lach me‘asarah banim” is “My love for you is greater than if you had ten sons,” rather than the more accepted “Am I not more devoted to you than ten sons” (see, e.g., JSB, 562). My translation emphasizes the cultural role of sons in the love of a husband for a wife, whereas the accepted translations—rendering the Hebrew tov lach as “devoted” or “good” to you—mistakenly imply that the advantage of sons lies in what they can do for their mother. 49. Although the intention of the Hebrew batim, which I translate here as “sons,” is ambiguous, literally meaning “houses” or “households” (as in the JPS/Tanakh translation used in Tigay, “Exodus,” 108), there is no household—according to what is explained above—without sons. Hence, Sarai’s and Rachel’s metaphor for having sons (Gen. 16:2; 30:3) is “to be built” (ibanneh), that is, like a house. Further, the Hebrew root for build (b-n-h) is thought to derive from the root for son (b-n) (see Kaddari, Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, 111b), not only in this metaphor, but also in biblical passages pertaining to levirate marriage, such as Deut. 25:9 and Ruth 4:11 (Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11, 85). Shalom Paul, “Exodus 1:21,” 139–42), also understands batim as “families” or “dynasties” (as in 2 Sam. 7:11 and 1 Kings 2:24), which infers, ipso facto, the meaning of sons. 50. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 320. 51. Levenson concurs in this interpretation of the act (“Genesis,” 52). 52. Although most exegesis cites the identity of the man who struggles with Jacob as unknown (see, e.g., Levenson, “Genesis,” 67; Speiser, Genesis, 253), my interpretation of the episode as a dream of an attack on Jacob by Esau is psychologically reasonable, given Jacob’s fearful forebodings of the next day’s meeting with his wronged brother, as portrayed in Gen. 32:4–12. Moreover, it is logical that the struggle was a dream, since it took place all night long (“till the dawn”), and since the attacker hit his victim repeatedly only “in the upper thigh.” The dream thus reflects Jacob’s subconscious bad conscience over having cheated Esau out of his birthright, as well as his consciousness of the extreme penalty (no more sons) that he deserved for doing so. The fourteenth-century biblical commentator Yosef Ibn Caspi also cites the struggle as a dream, owing to Jacob’s fatigue and “fear

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and horror from someone who would do him evil,” but without mention of Esau as the person (Mishna Cesef, 116–18). 53. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 39–47. 54. For the previous sayings, see Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 422. 55. For the following formula and its explanation, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 71–72. 56. This is a statement of the principle of mutual responsibility regarding the seeking of revenge for a violation against one’s clan, and of fleeing from revenge for a violation perpetrated by a fellow clansman. 57. See Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 278, for contemporary extrabiblical evidence for circumcision among nomads (perhaps proto-Israelites) in the hill country of Canaan. For more, see chapter 5. 58. W. R. Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 3. 59. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 126–29. 60. For the proverbs, see ibid.; for the verse, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 159. 61. The admonition in Leviticus 19:17 not to hate a clansman adds the phrase “in your heart,” just as in the Bedouin verse cited above. In Deuteronomy 23:20, “clansman,” in the original, is rendered as “brother” (akh); see above for my reading of the Hebrew akh as “clansman.” 62. For this explanation, see Tigay, “Exodus,” 186. 63. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 414. 64. Ibid., 138. 65. Ibid., 371. 66. For more on Bedouin endogamous and exogamous marriage, see below. 67. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 284. 68. See, for example, Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, 1863. 69. “Non-tribesmen” rather than “non-clansmen,” owing to the centrality of Moses’s recent apportioning of land to the tribes and to the logic of male inheritance pertaining to clans and tribes alike, as is evident from Numbers 36:8. 70. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 269–71. 71. Ibid., 263. 72. Ibid., 79–82. 73. For a different understanding of “desecrate,” see Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, 1810. 74. See Tigay, who also allows for a bride’s prior promiscuity being an offense against her father, shaming him for not having raised her properly (Deuteronomy, 206). 75. For more on the Abu Zayd saga, see Lane, Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 397–400. 76. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 264. 77. Bailey, “Bedouin Weddings in Sinai,” 129. 78. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 258. 79. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 115–16, 245. 80. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 153. 81. Bailey, “Bedouin Weddings in Sinai,” 109n6. 82. Marx, Beduin of the Negev, 134–38. 83. Bailey, “Bedouin Weddings in Sinai,” 111.



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84. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 146. 85. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 55–56. 86. Ibid., 56, 111–12. 87. See Klein, “Additional Notes,” 100n12, and Klein, “The Marriage of Martu,” 89, 93n31, for an example of an ancient Amorite nomad, Martu, presenting gifts to the father and family of his prospective bride, as a premodern Bedouin would do. 88. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 111–12. 89. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 148. 90. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 251–54. 91. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 150. 92. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 251. 93. It may have been unpromising to send Esau, unlike Jacob, to Paddan-Aram to find a clan bride, owing to his independent and impetuous nature.

Chapter 4. Desert Laws 1. Ephal, The Ancient Arabs. 2. For more on the use of private violence, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 101–57. 3. For the date, see I. Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 323. 4. For more on collective responsibility, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 60–63. 5. The Covenant Code also contains other elements that indicate an early, conceivably tribal provenance. For example, Exodus 22:27 refers to a tribal leader (nasi’; see chapter 3)—“Do not curse God or revile the chief of your clan.” Although nasi’ is commonly translated as “king” (an institution that appears only later in the biblical narrative), some scholars, such as Tigay (“Exodus,” 157), have understood it to mean a chief. 6. See Malamat, Mari and the Bible, 20–21, and Greengus, “Biblical and Mesopotamian Law,” 64–72. 7. In Deuteronomy 16:18, we find Moses instructing the Israelites, in anticipation of their future settlement in Canaan, to appoint “policemen in thy gates.” 8. For Bedouin judicial punishments, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 214–22. 9. For examples of these non-Bedouin sources, see Hallo and Younger, The Context of Scripture; Westbrook and Wells, Everyday Law in Biblical Israel, 9–33. 10. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 238. 11. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 30–32. 12. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 18. 13. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 249. 14. Bailey and Shmueli, “Settlement of the Sinaitic ‘Ayaydah,” 30. 15. For an explanation, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 16–17. 16. Greengus, “Biblical and Mesopotamian Law,” 64–72; see also Malamat, who likewise endorsed the idea that talion was an innovation in ancient Mesopotamian law stemming from the Amorite nomadic cultural heritage (Mari and the Bible, 20–21).

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17. For the Bedouin expression, see Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 253. 18. Burckhardt, Syria and the Holy Land, 513–16. 19. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 36–57. 20. For the considerations underlying the payment of blood money, see ibid., 73, 214–15; for the expression, see Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 250. 21. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 129. 22. See Paul, The Book of the Covenant, 71–73. 23. For the Arabic rhyme, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 109–11. 24. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 238. 25. See Horowitz, “Legacies of Biblical Violence,” 163–82. Even if the biblical account is exaggerated, it seems to have been included in the Bible in order to appeal to a religious constituency that respected harsh revenge for rape. 26. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 112–14. 27. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 261. 28. For the foregoing proverbs, see ibid. 29. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 81. 30. Ibid., 234, 241 31. Ibid., 260–61. 32. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 174. 33. Musil, Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, 441–43. 34. See Tigay, who attributes this need to a lack of nearby kin (“Exodus,” 157, 158). 35. My rendition of ahavta lo as the imperative “want for him,” rather than “love him,” (owing to the preposition “l” in the Hebrew “lo”), follows Jacob Milgrom’s translation of Leviticus 19:18 (Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, 1655). 36. HALOT, 1253, although conceding that rea‘ is of uncertain origin, nonetheless refers the reader to the root r-‘-y, whose meanings are given as “to shepherd” and “to protect” (1262); similarly, TDOT, 10:526. Although rea‘ is not built on any of the normal Hebrew passive patterns (qatil, qatul, etc.), I am suggesting that it either reflects an ancient passive form of the root r-‘-y or was used here idiosyncratically; see Olyan, “The Hebrew Noun me¯re¯a‘,” 217–19. 37. For this legal maxim and those that follow, see Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 175–76. 38. Ibid., 404. 39. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 55–56. 40. Ibid., 54. 41. Ibid., 288. 42. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 173, 176. 43. Na’aman, “Sojourners and Levites in Judah,” 262. 44. For this analysis, see Bar-Efrat, “First Samuel,” 603. 45. See Propp, Exodus 19–40, 206–12. 46. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 213–14. 47. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 212–15. 48. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 288–89.



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49. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 395. 50. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century Negev,” 61–67. 51. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 24–25. 52. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 419. 53. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 160–62, 172. 54. For other specialist judges, see ibid., 162–67. 55. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 349–50. 56. Ibid., 317. 57. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 189. 58. Ibid., 190. 59. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 318–19. 60. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 193. 61. Ibid., 191. 62. Ibid., 128. 63. Ibid., 190–99. 64. Ibid., 222–23. 65. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 365–66. 66. Ibid., 347. 67. Ibid., 340. 68. Ibid, 42. 69. For more on Bedouin reconciliation, see Bailey, Bedouin Law, 228–30.

Chapter 5. Desert Religion 1. For examples, see Hallo and Younger, The Context of Scripture, and Mathews and Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels. 2.  For premodern Bedouin religious practices that predate Islam, see Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 65–88. 3. W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 2–3. Although Smith was, for a time, criticized for his research sources and methods (see, e.g., Wilson, History in the Biblical World, 13–14), anthropologists, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, heralded his “significance for the history of thought, especially for the history of social anthropological thought” (cited in Cross, From Epic to Canon, 3n1). Cross, himself finding Smith’s insights into social anthropology rich, urged social historians of ancient Israel not to lag behind. I, too, find those of Smith’s writings that I cite in this chapter reliable and insightful. 4. See Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1:499. 5. See Musil, Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, 419. 6. For other early Israelite cultic practices, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 79–144. 7. I. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 23, 46, 70. 8. See Levinson, Deuteronomy and Hermeneutics, 58–61. 9. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 18.

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10. Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 76. 11. W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 114–16. 12. Bailey, “Bedouin Weddings in Sinai,” 126–27. 13. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1:136, 2:100, 198. 14. For the morphological change, see HALOT, 373; for the possible error, see Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11, 333–35. 15. For the sanctity of the Sinai experience among early Israelites, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 112–44. 16. W. R. Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 57–62. 17. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 278. 18. See Bailey, Bedouin Law, 71–72, and chapter 3 for the premodern mode. 19. Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 84. 20. For other readings, see Propp, Exodus 1–18, 233–38. 21. Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 80. 22. W. R. Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 287–90. 23. Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 81. 24. Although the s may be found to transliterate the Arabic letter “s.a¯d” in Classical Arabic (see, e.g., The Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary, 949), the Bedouin enunciate it as a “sı¯n,” as presented here. 25. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 50. 26. Tigay, for example, attributes the repugnance toward dogs to their being scavengers and predators (Deuteronomy, 216). As scavengers, dogs are cited derogatorily throughout the Old Testament (see, e.g., 1 Kings 14:11, 21:19, 21:23). The depiction of dogs as predators is, of course, in keeping with the Bedouin taboo, since hunting is a human activity. 27. Goldziher, “Uber die Vorgeschichte der Hija’-Poesie,” 24–27. 28. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 256–59. 29. Ibid., 91–97. 30. Bailey, Bedouin Law, 195, 367. ¯ rif, al-Qad.a¯’ bayn al-Badu¯, 182. 31. A 32. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 67–68. 33. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 200. 34. For Exodus, see Tigay, who affirms exoneration by oath (“Sharing Weal and Woe”); for Deuteronomy, see Tigay, Deuteronomy, 192–93, 474–75. Here, however, Tigay defines the second part of the depicted oath as a prayer. 35. See chapter 3 for an explanation of this interpretation. 36. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 184. 37. Ibid., 127, 130, 132. 38. Cross confirms this interpretation (From Epic to Canon, 4). Milgrom, while acknowledging that the intention is to clansmen (“kinsmen”) in parts of verses 16–18, sees “countrymen” in other parts (Leviticus 17–22, 1644–47). 39. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 175, 191, 179, 205. 40. See the section on protection in chapter 4 for this interpretation. 41. Fensham, “Widow, Orphan, and the Poor,” 129–39.



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42. See Greengus, “Biblical and Mesopotamian Law,” 75–77. 43. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 185, 187. 44. Ibid., 347 45. Ibid., 189.

Chapter 6. Desert Oral Traditions 1. See Niditch, who stresses the early existence of oral biblical materials before their eventual transcription into the written Bible (Oral World and Written Word, 8–23). This outlook is further developed in Person, Deuteronomic History, 41–68. 2. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 60, 71. 3. Ibid., 122, 126. 4. Ibid., 175. 5. Ibid., 95. 6. Ibid., 250, 254. 7. The biblical book of Proverbs, with its Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Hellenistic influences, is not dealt with here. For a succinct summary of proverbs in the ancient Near East, see William Hallo, “Proverbs: An Ancient Tradition,” the foreword to Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, reprinted in Hallo, World’s Oldest Literature. 8. See chapter 4 for a discussion of these phrases and my understanding of them. 9. See Propp, who explicitly calls it “a proverb . . . counseling empathy” (Exodus 19–40, 206). 10. See Haran, “Seething a Kid,” 23, for this explanation. Haran believed that the expression originally stemmed from humane sentiments and was appended to its biblical context in Exodus (from where it was adapted into Deuteronomy) from the “pre-literary stage of oral transmission.” If this adaptation was not completely arbitrary, concluded Haran, it was at least out of its original context (29, 33–35). 11. When a first son is born to someone in the fifth generation, he creates a new clan, based on his father’s grandfather through the paternal line; this is done to ensure that he and his father belong to the same clan. 12. For a discussion of other reasons for the genealogies of nomads, see Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 138–48,. 13. See Bailey Bedouin Law, 60–63; Wilson, History in the Biblical World, 18. 14. Wilson, History in the Biblical World, 18. While Wilson is skeptical about the authenticity and accuracy of most biblical genealogies, the Biblicist Gary Rendsburg makes a thorough and convincing argument for the credibility of some lineages, especially those of Moses and David (“Reliability of the Biblical Genealogies,” 185–206). 15. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 151–52. 16. Also see the Biblicist Alexander Rofe, who viewed many of the originally oral traditions that we find in the Bible as having been derived from the narratives of clans, for whom the actions of their ancestors were of eminent importance (“Clan Sagas,” 196–99).

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17. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, ix; Cross, From Epic to Canon, 47. 18. Shuqayr, Ta’rı¯kh Sı¯na¯’ wa-l-‘Arab, 118. ¯ rif, Ta’rı¯kh Bi’r al-Sab‘ wa-Qaba¯’iliha¯, 94. 19. Musil, Northern Hegaz, 96; ‘A 20. Bailey, “Bedouin Religious Practices,” 75–76. 21. Shaykh Abaydallah Salam Owda, of the Alaygat Zumayliyyin, oral communication to the author, 1971. 22. See Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century.” 23. Shaykh Sulayman al-Gusar of the Aheiwat Shawafin, oral communication to the author, Dec. 10, 1974. 24. Shaykh Abdallah Darwish, of the Muzayna Sakhana, oral communication to the author, Sept. 3, 1972. 25. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 193–94; Bailey, “Relations between Bedouin Tribes,” 256. 26. Bailey, “Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes,” 45. 27. Abraham’s image for the most worthless of things (a thread and a sandal lace) also existed in the pre-Islamic Bedouin tradition. In the famous War of Basus, the brother of the murdered Klayb ibn Rabi‘a, after taking revenge on a clansman of the murderer, Jassas ibn Murra, declared that the revenge was only for Klayb’s “shoe latchet” (i.e., the most worthless of things: “A lord for a shoe latchet is too dear”), intimating that many acts of revenge would yet take place before Klayb was fully avenged; see Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, 58. 28. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 65n83. ¯ rif, al-Qad.a¯’ bayn al-Badu¯, 119–20. 29. ‘A 30. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 59–61. 31. Ibid., 39–44. 32. Swaylim Sulayman Abu Bilayya, of the Azazma Sarahin, oral communication to the author, Oct. 1, 1973. 33. Shaykh Sulayman Salim Ibn Jazi, of the Tarabin Hasablah, oral communication to the author, Sept. 9, 1975. For the eight generations, see the graph in Bailey, “Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes,” 41. 34. Abdallah Mu‘attig al-Wajj, of the Zullam Janabib, oral communication to the author, Jan. 15, 1978. 35. Murray, Sons of Ishmael, 253. 36. Ibid., 254; Sulayman Ateiwi al-Alowna, of the Tarabin Hasablah, oral communication to the author, 1978. 37. See Bailey, Bedouin Poetry. 38. As noted above, although Bedouin also composed didactic poetry, that genre is not addressed here, owing to its main biblical appearance in Proverbs, where the chief influences are non-Bedouin. 39. Although much recent interest in biblical poetry has focused on the oral epic ballads that Milman Parry heard in pre–World War Two Yugoslavia, as recited for generations (see Lord, Singer of Tales, for Yugoslavian oral poetry; for a comparison with biblical poems, see Hendel, Epic of the Patriarch), many of the Bedouin poems that I heard in Sinai and the Negev, by contrast, were personal, composed



notes to pages

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237

by poets whom I knew, and in the context of specific recent events that could be identified (Bailey, Bedouin Poetry). 40. This Bedouin poem and others were translated by me. My use of rhymes, where possible, was to highlight the importance of rhyme in Bedouin poetry. 41. See chapter 1 for the explanation of this unique rendering of the last line of the poem. 42. For more on poems of communication, see Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, chap. 2. 43. Ibid., 260. 44. Bailey, “Negev in the Nineteenth Century,” 57–58. 45. For the following discussion, see Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 416–18. 46. Bailey, “Bedouin Weddings in Sinai,” 122. 47. Bailey and Shmueli, “Settlement of the Sinaitic ‘Ayaydah,” 30. 48. Bailey, “Relations between Bedouin Tribes,” 258. 49. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 263–64. 50. See Goitein, who found biblical parallels of this phenomenon in pre-Islamic poetry as well as in ditties sung by premodern Jewish Yemenite women (“Women as Creators,” 5–9). 51. See Bailey, “The Narrative Context of the Bedouin Qasida Poem,” for the discussion and verbatim examples of poems with a prose introduction, presented in both English and a transliteration from Bedouin Arabic. 52. Chadwick and Chadwick, Growth of Literature, vol. 3. 53. For the verbatim Arabic text of the prose, see Bailey, “Narrative Context of the Bedouin Qasida Poem,” 76–81; see also Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 30–32. 54. Cross and Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, 3. 55. Cross, From Epic to Canon, 32. 56. Halpern, First Historians, 80–81. 57. For an example of such a light “social” poem, see Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 264–67. 58. Bailey, ““Narrative Context of the Bedouin Qasida Poem,” 68–69. 59. For cultural explanations and the original Arabic text, see Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 215–17. 60. Cross and Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, 33. 61. Echols, “Tell me, O Muse,” 198–99. 62. Halpern, First Historians, 82–89. 63. Cross and Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, 32.

Chapter 7. Bedouin Israelites in the Hebrew Bible 1. Mendenhall, “Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” 66–87. 2. Gottwald, “Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?,” 4. 3. Stager, as quoted in Hiebert, “Israel’s Ancestors Were Not Nomads,” 199. 4. See, for example, W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites and Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia; Wellhausen, Reste Arabischen Heidentums; Seale, Desert Bible. 5. See, for example, Palmer, Desert of the Exodus; Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta; Musil, Customs of the Rwala Bedouins. 6. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, 146–49, 208–10.

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7. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival, 16, 30, 363. 8. For more on this question, see Yurco, “Merneptah’s Canaanite Campaign,” 30, 40–42. 9. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 275–80. 10. Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt,” 92–98. 11. Alt, Essays on Old Testament History, 182. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 278, provides evidence of Hyksos refugees in Canaan. 12. Lemaire, “La Haute Mesopotamie,” 97–98. 13. For the location of tribes, see Halpern, Emergence of Israel in Canaan, 47–106. 14. Cross, From Epic to Canon, 53–70; Rainey, “Inside, Outside.” 15. Kogut, “Studies in the Name,” 219–34, that is, as opposed to the biblical explanation, namely, “He who struggled with God” (Gen. 32:29). 16. Cross, From Epic to Canon, 51; for the date 1170 BCE, see Knohl, Me‘ayin Banu, 27–28, 66. 17. See, for example, Albertz, The History of Israelite Religion, 44–45; Griffiths, “Egyptian Derivation of the Name Moses,” 225–31; Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords, 207–29. 18. See Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt,” 99–101. 19. For the approximate date, see Tigay, “Exodus,” 104. 20. See Stager “Forging an Identity,” 142–49; Mazar, “Cushan,” 685–91. 21. See the appendix for more on the Israelites’ Midianite connection. 22. Cross, From Epic to Canon, 61. 23. Cross attributes the later biblical vilification of Midian to subsequent conflict among the Levites, the descendants of Moses and Aaron, each vying for priestly preeminence (ibid., 61–63). 24. Bailey, “Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes,” 26–28. For accounts of the arrival of tribal ancestors in the Galilee in small groups, see Ashkenazi, Tribus Semi-Nomades de la Palestine du Nord, and Eloul, Culture Change in a Bedouin Tribe, 19–20. 25. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah , 1:305. 26. Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, 371–76; Peake, History of Jordan, 215–21. 27. Rofe, “Clan Sagas,” 200–203. 28. Ska, “Story Telling and History Writing,” 3. 29. For more on these cultic rituals, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 83–90, and Cross, From Epic to Canon, 43–52. 30. I. Finkelstein, A. Mazar, and Brian Schmidt, Quest for the Historical Israel, 18. 31. Liverani, Israel’s History, 59.

Appendix: Moses and the Midianites 1. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 63–65. 2. Ibid.; Albertz, The History of Israelite Religion, 49–53. 3. For evidence of a belief in Yahweh’s invisibility, see Rothenberg, Timna, 151–52,



notes to pages

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180–84; Patrich, The Formation of Nabatean Art, 173–78; and Na’aman, “No Anthropomorphic Graven Image,” 391–415. Although Bedouin have practiced Islam since the seventh century CE, anyone who has been with premodern Bedouin at prayer in the open desert will have noticed the intimate, almost conversational contact they have established with the unseen deity Allah, leading the observer to wonder whether the concept of an invisible God did not also serve them throughout their pre-Islamic (including Midianite) history. 4. See Rothenberg, Timna, 151–52, 180–84; for more on this, see chapter 2. 5. Although modern scholars often designate ancient Midianite territory as having been located in southern Transjordan and the northwestern Arabian Peninsula (see, for example, Dumbrell, “Midian,” 323–37; Stager, “Forging an Identity,” 142–45), it may have also extended into Sinai at the time of the depicted Exodus, as did the territories of premodern confederations such as the Aheiwat and Huwaytat, which have dwelled both in Sinai and to the east of it since the sixteenth century CE (Bailey, “Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes,” 21–49). Assuming that the Midianite Jethro dwelled in Sinai, it would have been suitable for his sheltering of the fugitive Moses (Exod. 2:16–20) and his welcoming him after the Exodus (Exod. 18:1–6). For more on Midianite territory in ancient times, see Mazar, “Cushan,” 689–91. 6. For these biblical quotations in context, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 100–103. Scholars have also found ancient sites bearing the name of Yahweh in attributed Midianite territory; see, for example, De Vaux, “Sur L’Origine Kenite ou Madianite du Yahvism,” 30. 7. See Meyers, who also suggests that Moses became a follower of the god Yahweh through the Midianites (Exodus, 12–15). 8. De Vaux, “Sur L’Origine Kenite ou Madianite du Yahvism,” 31–32. If, as I am positing, Jethro encouraged Moses to confront the Egyptians, his reason may have been to pit Yahweh against their gods; hence, his flaunting of Yahweh’s prowess as being greater than theirs. 9. As De Vaux points out (ibid., 32), Moses is not cited as attending the feast, perhaps because he had already been converted. 10. Knohl, Me‘ayin Banu, 26, based on the assumption that the Moses group consisted mainly of Levites. 11. See the discussion in Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 142–43. 12. For more on this assimilation, including the Egyptian names of Moses and some of his attributed clansmen, see Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 44–45; Griffiths, “Egyptian Derivation of the Name Moses,” 225–31; Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords, 207–29. 13. See chapters 2 and 5 for the circumcision; see chapter 6 for the strangeness of Zippora. 14. For the proselytizing role of the Levites, see Meyers, Exodus, 15. See Mark Smith, who cites commercial relations between southern Bedouin and the central hill settlements of the Israelites as the source of the latter’s worship of Yahweh (The Origins of Monotheism, 145–46).

240

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15. For these practices, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 147–94. 16. M. Smith, The Early History of God, 7–12, 21–24. 17. Tur-Sinai, The Book of Job, 1. 18. Guillaume, Studies in the Book of Job, 6–14. 19. See Sarna, “Epic Substratum,” 25n81. 20. Guillaume, “Arabic Background of the Book of Job,” 106–27. 21. Guillaume, “First Book out of Arabia,” 151–66. 22. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 200–204, and Cross, From Epic to Canon, 60–61.

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Raswan, Karl. Black Tents of Arabia: My Life among the Bedouins. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935. Redford, Donald B. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Reiner, Erica. “City Bread and Bread Baked in the Ashes.” In Languages and Areas: Studies Presented to George V. Bobrinskoy on the Occasion of His Academic Retirement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Rendsburg, Gary A. “The Internal Consistency and Historical Reliability of the Biblical Genealogies.” Vetus Testamentum 40, no. 2 (1990). Rofe, Alexander. “Clan Sagas as a Source in Settlement Traditions.” In “A Wise and Discerning Mind”: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long, edited by Saul M. Olyan and Robert C. Culley. Providence: Brown University Press, 2000. Rothenberg, Benno. Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Routledge, Bruce. “The Politics of Mesha: Segmented Identities and State-Formation in Iron Age Moab.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43, no. 3 (2000). Rowton, M. B. “Autonomy and Nomadism in Western Asia.” Orientalia 42 (1973). ———. “Enclosed Nomadism.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient” 17 (1974). ———. “Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32 (1973). Sarna, Nahum M. “Epic Substratum in the Prose of Job.” Journal of Biblical Literature 76 (1957). Schloen, J. David. The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001. Schmidt-Nielsen, K. “Animals and Arid Conditions.” In The Future of Arid Lands. edited by Gilbert Wright. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1958. Schniedewind, William M. How the Bible Became a Book. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Seale, Morris. Desert Bible: Nomadic Tribal Culture and Old Testament Interpretations. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974. Shkolnik, Amiram. “Adaptation of Animals to Desert Conditions.” In The Negev, by Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Naphtali Tadmor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Shkolnik, Amiram, A. Borut, and J. Choshniak. “Water Economy of the Beduin Goat.” In Comparative Physiology of Desert Animals, edited by G. M. O. Maloiy. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 31 (1972). Shuqayr, Na‘u ¯ m. Ta’rı¯kh Sı¯na¯’ wa-l-‘Arab [A history of Sinai and the Arabs]. Cairo, 1916. Ska, Jean Louis. “Story Telling and History Writing in the Patriarchal Narratives.” In Recent Trends in Reconstructing the History of Ancient Israel, edited by Mario Liverani, 51–62. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2005.

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Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. The Origins of Monotheism in the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Smith, W. Robertson. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. 1903. Repr., Boston: Beacon, n.d. ———. The Religion of the Semites. 1889. Repr., New York: Schocken, 1972. Sommer, Benjamin D. Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Speiser, E. A. Genesis. Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. Stager, L. E. “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985). ———. “Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel.” The Oxford History of the Biblical World, edited by M. D. Coogan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “The Song of Deborah: Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not.” Biblical Archaeology Review 15, no. 2 (1989). TDOT [The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament]. Edited by G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Thompson, Thomas L. The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Tigay, Jeffrey H. “Exodus: Introduction and Annotations.” In Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. ———. “Sharing Weal and Woe: Expressions of Solidarity.” In Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls, in Honor of Emanuel Tov, edited by Shalom M. Paul, Robert A. Kraft, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Weston W. Fields. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Torczyner, N. H., ed. Lishonenu [Our language; in Hebrew]. Vol. 13. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1944–45. Tur-Sinai, N. H. The Book of Job: A New Commentary [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1957. Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956. Weinfeld, Moshe, Deuteronomy 1–11. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Wellhausen, Julius. Reste Arabischen Heidentums. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1897. Westbrook, Raymond, and Bruce Wells. Everyday Law in Biblical Israel: An Introduction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Wilson, Robert R. Genealogy and History in the Biblical World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Yurco, Frank J. “Merneptah’s Canaanite Campaign.” In Exodus: The Egyptian Evi-



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dence, edited by E. S. Frerichs and I. H. Lesko. Washington: Biblical Archaeological Society, 1993. Zevit, Ziony. “The Textual and Social Embeddedness of Israelite Family Religion.” In Family and Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies, Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Cultural Studies, edited by Rainer Albertz, Beth Albert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014.

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index of biblical passsages cited

GENESIS

13:11 84 13:12 36, 67 14:13–14 84 14:13–16 176 14:14–16 85 14:15 178 14:23 176 16:2 90, 229 16:4 90 16:12 86 17:10–11 153 17:12–13 76 17:13 94, 153 17:14 155 17:17 174 17:20 77 17:23–24 153 17:23–27 153 18:1 36 18:1–8 216 18:2–8 66 18:7 22, 27 18:8 27 18:10 36 18:16 67, 216 18:23–32 129 19:1–10 67

4 207 4:14–15 87 4:15 112, 125 178, 207 4:23 4:23–24 113, 202 5 172 8:20 146 9:4 158 113, 168, 169 9:6 10:1–31 172 11:10–31 172 11:31 84 12:5 84 12:7 147 12:8 36 12:9 47 12:10 25 12:10–16 180 12:12 84 12:14–16 213 12:16 22 12:19 84 13:5 21 13:8 95 13:10 15

251

252

index of biblical passages cited

19:3 45 19:4–10 177 19:8 67, 127 19:38 84 20:1 24 20:1–13 213 20:2 84, 180 20:10–12 180 20:12 85 20:16 199 21:7 186, 202 21:8 146 21:14 60 21:15–19 172 21:19 14 21:21 103 21:22–23 146 21:25–30 4 21:25–34 213 21:28–29 21 21:30–31 146 21:31 48 23:2–20 213 23:9 48 23:16 146 24:2 91, 103 24:3 105 24:10 21 24:36 105 24:47 63 24:50 103 24:50–53 100 24:53 104 24:55 100 24:58 100 24:60 89 63, 180 24:65 24:67 36 25:1–4 172 25:8 84 25:12–16 172 25:16 77 25:17 84, 88

25:18 86 26:6 24, 84 26:6–10 180 26:6–11 213 26:12 24, 31, 174 26:14 21, 22 26:15–23 213 26:17 48 26:20–21 15 26:20–22 48 26:25 147 26:27 129 26:29 138 26:34 105 26:34–35 146 27:1–41 28, 180 21, 27 27:9 27:32–38 163 27:46 105 28:1–2 102, 105 28:9 88 84 29:12, 14 29:15–19 104 29:20–25 182 29:31–30:24 90, 216 29:32 89 30:1 90 30:3 229 30:4 90 30:21 96 30:23 90 30:36 27 30:37–43 21, 183 31:17 96 31:23 84 31:37 84 31:38 27, 29 31:39 29 31:40 28 31:41 29 31:48–50 100 31:54 40, 84, 138, 147 32:4–6 129



index of biblical passages cited

32:4–12 229 32:15–16 21, 28 32:16 22 32:25–27 88, 163 32:26–27 91 32:29 238 33:2 88 33:6–7 88 33:19 146 34 182 34:1–7 213 34:4 102 34:14–16 155 34:15 153 34:15–16 94 34:25–29 118, 179 34:31 119 35:5 119 35:7 147 35:17 90 35:21 36 35:22 88, 180 35:22–26 74 74, 88 35:23–26 36 172 37:12 24 37:24 24 37:25 24, 41 37:31 27 38:2 105, 142 38:6–8 103 38:6–30 102 38:12 146 38:13–19 180 39:4 209 39:7–10 177 41:39–41 209 43:1 25 45:4–5 176 46:1 148 46:8–26 74 46:8–27 172 46:10 105

46:20 106 46:25–36 210 46:33–34 210 46:34 18, 26, 207 47:3 vi 47:3–5 210 47:13–20 210 47:29 91 48:12–18 163 48:22 89 49:1–27 96 49:3 89 49:33 84 50:10 48 50:11 48, 215 50:18–19 176

EXODUS 1:11 212 1:19 59 1:21 91 2:1–10 211 2:3–10 219 2:11–12 219 2:15–22 217 2:16–20 239 41, 68 2:20 2:21 183, 212 3 218 3:1 212, 219 3:22 112 4:18 238 4:24 155 4:24–26 59 4:25–26 154, 183, 207 6:16–23 172 9:18–30 32 9:31–32 32 11:2 147, 180 12:17 45 12:21–23 147 12:27 44

253

254

index of biblical passages cited

12:34 44 12:35–36 112 12:39 44 12:48 155 13:6–8 45 13:16 152 13:20 49 14 198 14:8–9 177 14:21 177 15 187, 198, 206 15:20–21 193 15:23 49 14, 219 15:23–25 15:24 49 15:27 49 16:2–3 219 53, 55 16:13, 14 17:1–6 14 17:2–3 219 17:8 112 17:8–13 92, 177 17:15 146 18:1–6 239 18:1–12 217 18:2 41 18:9–10 218 18:11 218 18:13–26 217 18:21–22 130 19 218 20:7 135 20:13 132 20:24 145 21–24 108 21:13 126 126, 136 21:14 21:16 136 21:21–22 166 21:22–23 117 21:23–25 115 21:24–25 168 21:37 136

22:1, 3, 4, 6 136 22:7, 9–10 161 22:8 135, 136 22:9–10 135 22:15 121 22:15–16 136 22:16 121 22:20 123 22:20–21 165 22:22–30 136 22:24 165 22:25 166 22:27 77, 231 23:1 133 23:4 165 23:8–9 77 23:9 123 23:15 45 23:19 27, 169 24:4 147 24:6, 8 150 24:19–21 165 25:4 37 25:10, 23 38 26:7 37, 217 26:37 38 38 27:6, 11 29:2 43 29:20–21 148, 151 29:22 21 29:23 43 30:1, 4 38 32:1, 5–6 147 32:25–27 78 32:25–28 83 32:26–29 109 32:27–28 95 34:7 87 34:16 146 34:18 45 34:19 28 34:26 169 35:24 38



index of biblical passages cited

35:26 37 35:27 117 36:20, 36 38 37:1, 4, 10, 15 38 38:6 38 38:26 89

LEVITICUS 1:5 151 1:10 28 1:15 151 41 2:4, 5 3 148 3:2, 13 151 4 148 4:7, 18, 25 151 4:28–32 28 4:34 151 5 148 5:6 28 5:9 151 151 7:2 7:26 158 8:15 151 8:31 67 158 11 11:21–22 158 11:22 52 11:31, 32 53 12:2–5 96 157 15:16, 18 15:19–24 158 16:5 28 17:5–7 148 17:10–14 158 17:11 158, 168 17:13 158 19:12 135 19:14 166 19:16 124, 165, 168 19:16–18 95, 164 19:18 124, 165, 168, 232

19:34 123 20:20–21 91 21:9 98 22:12–13 97 23:6 44 23:15–16 33 23:40 32 23:42–44 40 24:19–20 119 25:25–28 98

NUMBERS 1:2 74, 89 1:3 89 1:5–16 74 1:45 218 2:3–32 74 6:14 28 6:15 43 7:12–83 74 7:15–19 28 7:24 77 10:29–32 217 10:30 86 10:31 212, 215 11:10 36 11:21 151 11:31, 32 53 11:34 49 12:1 103 14:25 79 14:33–34 212 15:11 28 15:14–16 76 15:15–16 123 15:24, 27 28 15:29 123 16ff 78 16:18 21 18 219 19–21 79 19:14 36

255

256

index of biblical passages cited

19:22 157 19:22–24 127 20:1 36 20:2–5 219 20:2–11 14 20:17–21 26 20:24 84 21:16–18 14, 186, 202 21:17–21 26 21:19 223 21:21–23 26 21:27–30 188 21:33 93 22:1ff 93 22:4, 7 79 22:6 161 22:7 79, 130 22:15 130 23:21–23 146 24:5 36 24:10 163 25:1 49 25:1–5 146 109 25:2, 5 25:6–8 220 25:14 77 25:16–18 93, 220 26:1ff 89 26:52–56 97 27 207 27:1–11 97 27:8–11 131 28:3ff 28 29:2ff 28 31:2 84 31:2–18 220 32:35 49 33:5–6, 8 49 33:19 45, 49 33:49 49 34:3–5 50 34:4 51 34:13–29 74

35 165 35:2–8 219 35:15, 18 87, 124 35:16–21, 22–24, 116 24–25 35:25 126 35:27 117 35:31 115, 117 76, 207 36 36:1 77 36:1–10 97 36:1–13 131 36:7 74 36:8 85, 97 36:11–12 97 36:12 85

DEUTERONOMY 1:1 49 1:12 77 1:27 36 2:36 49 5 151 5:11 135 5:17 132 6:4–9 151 6:8 151 6:9 38, 152 7:1 204 11:14 18 11:18–21 38 12:2, 8, 13, 14 145 158 14 14:21 169 14:28–29 165 15:19 28 16:3 44, 45 17:6 133 17:8–9 131 19:3 126 19:5, 11, 13 116 19:6 114



index of biblical passages cited

19:15 133 19:16–21 115 19:19 133 21:7–8 117, 135, 164 21:18–21 109 22:13–19 122, 136 22:13–21 104 22:18 109 22:20 98, 121 22:21 98, 109 22:22 120 22:25 118 22:25–27 121 22:29 136 23:8–9 76 23:18, 19 159 23:20 95 23:22 161 23:25–26 137 24:1 122 24:10–13 166 24:16 110 25:2 109 136, 166 25:3 25:4 31 25:5–10 101, 228 25:9 229 25:11–12 101 25:17 165 25:17–18 112 26:5 211 31:28 77 32:50 84 33:2 218 33:6–25 74 33:9 109 33:11 125

JOSHUA 5:4–7 155 6:26 92 7:14 85

257

7:18, 24 87 8:4–8 93, 178 8:9–22 93 9:9–10 146 9:19–20 161 10:13–14 174 13:15–21:40 74 15:3 52 15:14–19 15 15:16–17 104 15:16–19 97 20:5 116 21:41 76 22:6, 7, 8 36

JUDGES 2:11, 15, 19 146 3:2–3 204 3:6 106 146 3:7 3:15–22 178, 182 3:31 177 4 74, 195ff, 198, 201, 203 4:10 83 4:17–21 36 4:18–19 68 4:18–21 181 4:19 61 5 74, 187–88, 198, 201, 203 5:4–5 218 5:6–7 68 5:10–11 191 5:15–17 80 5:21 48 5:24–27 36, 181 6:3–5 26, 92 6:10, 28 146 6:24 147 7 226 7:18–22 178

258

index of biblical passages cited

8 220 8:1 80 8:6 78 8:15–17 112 8:30 90 8:37 146 9:28 88 10:4 182 11:30–31, 35–36 162 11:34 193 12:1–6 80, 83 12:5–6 178 12:8, 14 90 12:8–9 106 12:13–14 182 13:22 147 14:2–3 146 14:3 155 112, 180 14:19 15:1–5 180 15:3–5, 7–8 112 15:6–8 124 15:15 177 16:27–30 178 16:28 112 19ff 74, 119 19:13 95 19–21 79 67, 127 19:22–24 19:25–28 180 19:27–20:7 124 19:30 95, 119 20:29–47 93 21 162 21:4 147 21:21, 22 104

21:25 78

1 SAMUEL 1:8, 11 91 1:25 146 2:1–10 202

7:9–10 148 9:24 22 11:14–17 180 11:15 148 13:2 36 14:6 155 14:6–15 177 14:24 41 14:32–33 41, 158 14:33 147 14:42–45 163 14:47–48 93 14:50–51 85 15:2–3 112 15:9 93 17:26 155 17:40–51 177 18:5–7 193 18:17 106 18:20–21 104 19:4–5 129 162 20:14–15, 42 20:26 157 22:1 85 22:3–4 125 22:18–19 112 22:20–23 125 22:23 127 24:2–12 177 25ff 106 27:8 93 28:1–2 81 29:1–10 81 30:14 92 30:17 93 30:24 15 31:4 155

2 SAMUEL 1:17–27 197, 202 1:20 155, 193 1:26 185



index of biblical passages cited

2:4 83 2:8–5:5 82 3:1 82 3:19–23 114 3:27 108 3:29 86 6:20–23 91 7:11 229 12:1–10 165 12:6 136 12:16–17, 20–22 41 13:29, 39 118, 164 14:6–11 95 14:7 114 16 83 19:9 36, 83 19:42–20:22 81 36 20:1, 22 21:1–9 162 24:18, 25 148

2 KINGS 4:13 100 12:4 145 14:12 36 15:4 145 16:4 145 17:10 145 18:4 145 19:28 207 23:5 146

ISAIAH 7:23 208 21:1 208 33:20 208 37:29 190 38:12 208 57:5 145 58:7 95 60:6–7 28

1 KINGS 1:50 126 2:24 229 2:28 126 3:2–4 145 5:27–28 82 9:16 106 11:3 106 11:27–28 81 12ff, 3–24 82 12:4, 14 83 12:16, 24 36 14:11 234 14:22–24 146 14:23 145 16:31–33 146 21:19, 23 234 22:27 136 22:44 145

JEREMIAH 2:6 208 2:13 14 2:20 145 145 3:6, 13 3:22 208 7:6 165 9:9 208 9:14 56 10:20 206–07 11:13 145, 146 14:3–5 26 14:8 123 17:6 208 17:13 14 22:3 165 25:8–11 190 31:29 108, 168 32:7–8 98

259

260

index of biblical passages cited

37:15–16 136 46–51 190

EZEKIEL 6ff, 13 145 6:4–5 146 18:2 108, 168 22:7 165 27:21 28

HOSEA

94:1 112 113:9 91 120:4 56 127:3–5 89

JOB 1:5 148 9:9 57 30:1 29, 159 53, 207 30:4 38:31 57 38:32 57

8:13 145 10:1 146

AMOS 1:3–2:3 19 2:6–6:14 190 4:7 18 57 5:3

NAHUM 1:2

112

RUTH 1:4 106, 146 1:10 101 2:3 165 3:2–4 97 3:3–10 180 4:1 228 4:1–10 101 4:3–5 84, 97 84, 102 4:10 4:11 229 4:18–22 172

HABBAKUK 3:3, 7

SONG OF SONGS

218 1:5

35, 206

ZEPHANIAH 2:4–15 190

LAMENTATIONS 3:15 56

MALACHI 2:12 145

NEHEMIAH 8:15 40

PSALMS 23:1–2 10, 207 68:8–9 218 72:4 165

1 CHRONICLES 1:5–54 172 2:3 105



index of biblical passages cited

2:16 86 2:50–55 172 3:1–5 106 4:10 36 4:38 74 4:39–42 26 5:6–7 74

2 CHRONICLES 16:10 136 18:26 136 28:4 145 32:12 145 33:3 145 33:3–4 146

261

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index of arabic spellings

The following Arabic words are cited according to their first appearance in the book.

Chap./Page Intro p. 1 p. 5 Ch 1 p. 13 p. 14 p. 15 p. 19 p. 23

Transliteration Swaylim Abu Bilayya Azazma Sarahin badawi badu badiya Azzam El-Arish Masa‘id Nagb Wursa Abu Turban Ayayda Kallab wadi Tarabin Hammad as-Sufi Khuwaylfa Tiyaha hejazi awassi khamsin Zullam Bir Mashash

263

Arabic ‫سويلم ابو بلَيَّا‬ ‫عزازمة‬ ‫سراحين‬ ‫بدوي‬ ‫بدو‬ ‫بادية‬ َّ ‫عزام‬ ‫العريش‬ ‫مساعيد‬ ‫نقب ورسة‬ ‫ابو طربان‬ ‫عيايدة‬ َّ ‫كلب‬ ‫وادي‬ ‫ترابين‬ ‫حمَّاد الصوفي‬ ‫خويلفة‬ ‫تياها‬ ‫حجازي‬ ‫عواسي‬ ‫خمسين‬ َّ ‫ظلم‬ ‫بئر مشاش‬

264

Chap./Page p. 24 p. 25 p. 30 Ch 2 p. 38 p. 41 p. 43 p. 44 p. 45 p. 46

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration Bir al-Malih Bir Arara Nuwayba Bir as-Sowra Ijma Kathib al-Khayl Umm Khashib Tumaylat Abu Sultan Jinayfa Wuheidat Shallala Bani Ugba Aheiwat hawi Bani Atiyya Fanara aysh dunam afir thaghr tabbun raqiq Ayyad Ibn Adaysan Abu Haddaf Fiheid al-Huzayyil Brayr Jidaya Ibn Hadhal Amarat Irgeiya nafal Um Hamata harjal Um Bujma Nabik Wadi Samghi Dahab Naqb Shahin Abu Ma Wadi al-Ayn murr malih

Arabic ‫بئر الملح‬ ‫بئر عرعرة‬ ‫ن َويبع‬ ‫الصورة‬ َ ‫بئر‬ ‫عجمة‬ ‫كثيب الخيل‬ ‫ام خشيب‬ ‫طميالت‬ ‫ابو سلطان‬ ‫ج َنيفة‬ ‫وحيدات‬ َ َّ ‫شللة‬ ‫بني عقبة‬ ‫اُحيوات‬ ‫َحوي‬ ‫بني عطيَّة‬ ‫فنارة‬ ‫َعيش‬ ‫دونم‬ ‫عفير‬ ‫ثغر‬ ‫طبُّون‬ ‫رقيق‬ ‫عيَّاد ابن عديسان‬ َّ ‫ابو‬ ‫هداف‬ َ ‫ف َهيد‬ ‫الهزِِّيل‬ ‫برير‬ َ َّ ‫جديع ابن‬ ‫هذال‬ ‫عمارات‬ َ ‫رقيَّه‬ ‫نفل‬ ‫ام حماطة‬ ‫حرجل‬ ‫ام بجمة‬ ‫نبك‬ ‫صمغي‬ ‫ذهب‬ ‫نقب شاهين‬ ‫ابو ميَّه‬ ‫وادي العين‬ ‫مر‬ ّ ‫مالح‬



Chap./Page

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration

Wadi Jayfi imjayyif tayyib Abu Sayla Jirrafi Nuwayba al-Muzayna Wadi as-Sa‘ida maghara al-Deiga Makatib Jabal al-Buna Gudayrat hasana p. 47 Gubur Awlad Ali p. 48 Bir al-Murra p. 49 Ras Barga p. 50 Ayn Hadra p. 51 Ayn Qudays Ayn Gudayrat al-Hudayra Jabal Halal Gusayma gaysum p. 52 Munbatah p. 52 Wild Ali Rawala p. 53 gataf p. 54 tarthuth p. 56 wasm al-mal thurayya p. 57 al-jawza Jada al-jidi suhayl p. 58 Uz‘eina p. 59 girba p. 60 si‘in p. 61 dhog al-hadig p. 62 fur‘a far‘a shnaf p. 64 kawwi

265

Arabic ‫وادي َّجيفي‬ ‫مجيِّف‬ ‫طيِّب‬ ‫ابو سيلة‬ ‫جرافي‬ ًّ ‫نويبع المزينة‬ ‫وادي الصاعدة‬ ‫مغارة‬ َّ ‫الضيقة‬ ‫مكاتب‬ ‫جبل البنى‬ ‫قديرات‬ ‫حسنة‬ ‫قبور اوالد علي‬ ‫بئرالمر ة‬ ‫رأس برقاء‬ ‫عين حضرة‬ ‫عين قدَيس‬ ‫عين قديرات‬ َ ‫الحضيرة‬ ‫جبل حالل‬ ‫قصيمة‬ َ ‫َقيصوم‬ ‫منبطح‬ ‫ولد علي‬ ‫رولة‬ ‫قطف‬ ‫ترثوث‬ ‫وسم المال‬ ‫ثريَّا‬ ‫الجوزاء‬ َ ‫جداع‬ ‫الجدي‬ ‫س َهيل‬ ‫ظ َعينة‬ ‫قربة‬ ‫سعن‬ ‫ذوق الهادق‬ ‫ُفرعة‬ ‫فارعة‬ ‫شناف‬ ‫كوِّع‬

266

Chap./Page p. 65 p. 66 p. 67 Ch 3 p. 69 p. 71 p. 72 p. 73 p. 77 p. 78 p. 80 p. 81 p. 82 p. 84

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration shawaya Himayd Hamdan as-Sufi Dahshan Muhammad Abu Sitta Huwaytat Huwayti Aneza Siba‘a Rushayd Ibn Masrab fatt mansaf Suwarka Muzayna Alaygat Sawalha Tihi Turbani gabila howdh u-rowdh Hasablah Sulayman Salim Ibn Jazi Nadayat Muslih Salim Ibn ‘Amir khal Jawaziya Jawazi Naba‘at Naba Hasaballah Shubayth Bili kabir Fid‘an Salman Arar Taweiha Harb Abu Tayah Asiyat Owda Abu Mu‘ammar Mas‘udiyyin Owda and Amir al-Atowna amm a‘mam

Arabic ‫شوايا‬ ‫ح َميد حمدان الصوفي‬ ‫دهشان محمد ابو ستَّة‬ ‫ح َويطات‬ ‫حويطي‬ ‫عنزة سباعة‬ َ ‫رشيد ابن مسرب‬ ّ ‫فت‬ ‫منسف‬ ‫سواركة‬ ‫مزينة‬ ‫عليقات‬ ‫صوالحة‬ ‫تيهي‬ ‫ترباني‬ ‫قبيلة‬ ‫حوض وروض‬ ‫حسابلة‬ ‫سليمان سالم ابن جازي‬ ‫ندايات‬ ‫مصلح سالم ابن عامر‬ ‫خال‬ ‫جوازية‬ ‫جوازي‬ ‫نبعات‬ ‫نبع‬ ‫حسباللة‬ ‫شبَيث‬ ‫بلي‬ ‫كبير‬ ‫فدعان‬ ‫سلمان‬ ‫عرار‬ ‫ت َويهة‬ ‫حرب ابو تايه‬ ‫عصيَّات‬ ‫عودة ابو معمِّر‬ ‫مسعو ِديِّن‬ ‫عودة وعامر‬ ‫العطاونة‬ ‫ع ّم‬ ‫عمام‬

‫أ‬



Chap./Page p. 86 p. 87 p. 88 p. 90 p. 91 p. 92 p. 96 p. 99 p. 101 p. 103 p. 105 Ch 4 p. 110 p. 113 p. 114 p. 115 p. 116 p. 120

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration akhuwi ibn ammi amama Maniyya Nusayr jamal ash-shatt khamsa Hazza al-Majali Sabrin at-Turi mish nafi karr u-farr Salim al-Uwaywi Subhi Abu Zayd Bani Hilal Dubur Safeiha al-Atrash Sakhana Ateiwi Imsallam al-Alowna Jum‘a Hamdan Abu Sabha al-Owraydi Owraydat al-Hadobe Iz‘aylat Frayj Himayd as-Saddan Labbad at-Tassan mayil adl ar-Rahhei hagg Owlad Sa‘id Salama Abu Rubay‘a Subayh Abu Bilhan Kayidal-Atowna Salim al-Ubra al-Mu‘afat as-Sayyal Abu-l-Gi‘an Asad Karadma

267

Arabic ‫اخوّي‬ ‫ابن عمّي‬ ‫عمامة‬ ‫منيّع‬ ‫نصير‬ َ ّ ‫جمل‬ ‫الشت‬ ‫خمسة‬ ّ ‫هزاع المجالي‬ ‫صابرين الطوري‬ ‫مش نافع‬ ‫وفر‬ ّ ‫كر‬ ّ ‫سالم الع َويوي‬ ‫صبحي‬ ‫ابو َزيد‬ ‫بني هالل‬ ‫دبور‬ ‫ص َفيحة‬ ‫االطرش‬ ‫ساخنة‬ َ ‫عطيوي مسلّم العلَونة‬ ‫جمعة حمدان ابو صبحا‬ ‫االوريدي‬ َ ‫اوريدات‬ َ ‫الهدَوبة‬ ‫زعيالت‬ َ ‫فريج ح َميد الس ّدان‬ َ ‫الطسان‬ ّ ‫لبّاد‬ ‫مايل‬ ‫عدل‬ ‫الرحاي‬ ّ ّ ‫حق‬ ‫اوالد سعيد‬ ‫سالمة ابو ربَيعة‬ ‫صبَيح‬ ‫ابو بلهان‬ ‫كاندالعطا ونة‬ ‫سالم العبرة‬ ‫المعافات‬ ‫السيّال‬ ‫ابو القيّعان‬ ‫اسد‬ ‫كرادمة‬

268

Chap./Page p. 121 p. 122 p. 123 p. 125 p. 126 p. 128 p. 129 p. 131 p. 133 p. 134

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration Slaym Manasra Ayid Abu Ghanim Jarawin mufaddala ruhi li-zlamki Hilayyil al-Wajj Janabib al-Khiraynig al-Ugbi dakhil tanib tanab jar jira Miz‘an Wujuj Ibn Imtayr Kishkhar Abu Daya Faris Isa Wuheidi Da’ud Sa‘ud Ayn Husub Nasir Ibn Usban Umran Ghurayganiyyin Ma‘aza badwa adwa manshad magarr mamarr Talalga Abu Jaddua Abu Jabr Salim Hasan Faysal Dirdah Salim Sulayman Abu Hani

Arabic ‫سلَيم‬ ‫مناصرة‬ ‫عائد‬ ‫ابو غانم‬ ‫جراوين‬ َّ ‫مفضلة‬ ‫روحي لزالمكي‬ ‫الوج‬ ّ ‫هلَيِّل‬ ‫جنابيب‬ ‫الخرينق‬ َ ‫العقبي‬ ‫دخيل‬ ‫طنيب‬ ‫طنب‬ ‫جار‬ ‫جيرة‬ ‫مظعان‬ ‫وجوج‬ ُ َ ‫ابن‬ ‫مطير‬ ‫كشخر‬ ‫ابو داية‬ ‫فارس عيسا‬ ‫وحيدي‬ َ ‫داؤد‬ ‫سعود‬ ‫عين حصب‬ ‫ناصر ابن عصبان‬ ‫عمران‬ ‫غريقانيِّن‬ َ ‫معازة‬ ‫بدوة‬ ‫عدوة‬ ‫منشد‬ ‫مقر‬ ّ ‫ممر‬ ّ ‫طاللقة‬ ُّ ‫ابو‬ ‫جدوع‬ ‫ابو جبر‬ ‫سليم حسن‬ ‫َفيصل درداح‬ ‫سالم سليمان ابو هاني‬



Chap./Page p. 138 Ch 5 p. 141 p. 142 p. 143 p. 144 p. 150 p. 155 p. 156 p. 157 p. 159

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration Zanun Ameitil fadawi ulya wali baraka as-Saraya Abu Sakhna Sawakhna Faranja Watir Zuwayd al-A‘sam Asluj al-Akheidir Ya‘laq al-Mijrib Abu Talib Sulaf yistajir fi mayyitah al-fatiha Nabi Salih Rumaylat Abu Hurayra Malalha malayka mala’ika malak muluk al-ard hilliya al-haya fi-d-damm Id Imsa‘id al-Jabaliyya thagil khafif barid Qur’an anis Khamis gowt an al-mowt Mustafa Zabn Anayz abu Salim al-Urdi

269

Arabic ‫زنون‬ ‫ا َميطل‬ ‫فدوي‬ ‫أليى‬ ‫ولي‬ ‫بركة‬ ‫السراية‬ ‫ابو ساخنة‬ ‫سواخنة‬ ‫فرانجة‬ ‫وتير‬ ‫ز َويد‬ ‫االعثم‬ ‫عصلوج‬ َ ‫االخيضر‬ ‫يعلق‬ ‫المجرب‬ ‫ابو طالب‬ ‫سالف‬ ‫يستاجر في ميّته‬ ‫الفاتحة‬ ‫نبي صالح‬ ‫ر َميالت‬ ‫هريرة‬ َ ‫ابو‬ ‫ماللحة‬ ‫ملَيكة‬ ‫مالئكة‬ ‫َملِك‬ ‫ملوك االرض‬ ‫حلّية‬ ‫الحياة في الد ّم‬ ‫عيد مساعد‬ ‫الجباليّة‬ ‫ثقيل‬ ‫خفيف‬ ‫بارد‬ ‫قرآن‬ ‫أنيس‬ ‫خميس‬ ‫َقوت عن ال َموت‬

‫مصطفى زبن‬ ‫ع َنيز ابو سالم العرضي‬

270

Chap./Page p. 160 Ch 6 p. 169 p. 170 p. 171 p. 173 p. 174 p. 175 p. 175 p. 176

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration talag al-Dali Jarad Rashid Atayyig Dakhlallah Silmi Ayyad Lawami Fararja Imsa‘ida Imtaw‘a Ubaydat Shubaythat Gusar Nijm Nijmat Jubayl Jubaylat Salim Abu Zuwayr Imtawi Ubayd Ishaysh Lami Lawami Mu‘aysh Furayj Mughannam Arayda Zaydan Hasan abu Ali Sabah abu Mansur Sa‘d Jayyid al-Wa‘d Feiran Imrah diyit al-jidi gash khash Shawafin al-Hajj Salim Hukuk Ghawali

Arabic ‫طالق‬ ‫ال ّدالي جراد‬ ‫رشيد‬ ‫ع َتيِّق‬ ّ ‫داخاللل‬ ‫ِسلمي‬ ‫عيّاد‬ ‫لوامي‬ ‫فرارجة‬ ‫مساعدة‬ ‫مطاوعة‬ ‫عبَيدات‬ ‫شبَيثات‬ ‫قصار‬ ‫نجم‬ ‫نجمات‬ ‫جبَيل‬ ‫جبَيالت‬ ‫سالم ابو ز َوير‬ ‫مطاوع‬ ‫عبَيد‬ َ ‫عشيش‬ ‫المي‬ ‫لوامي‬ ‫م َعيش‬ ‫فريج‬ َ ‫مغنَّم‬ ‫عريضة‬ َ ‫َزيدان‬ ‫حسن ابو علي‬ ‫صباح ابو منصور‬ ‫سعد َجيِّد الوعد‬ ‫فيران‬ ‫مراح‬ ‫ديِّة الجدي‬ ّ ‫قش‬ ّ ‫خش‬ ‫شوافين‬ ‫الحاج‬ ّ ‫سالم‬ ‫حكوك‬ ‫غوالي‬



Chap./Page p. 177 p. 178 p. 179 p. 181 p. 182 p. 183 p. 184 p. 185 p. 185 p. 186 p. 187 p. 189 p. 189

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration Sagr Mansur Abu Baghdadi Isma’il Khedive Salim Salim al-Atowna Ibrahim Pasha Zalim Matar Sirhan al-Badan Sa‘ida ba‘at al-ayr min shan baruda Zaraba zarb qatal rahib batya Galola habla Bilayyat darwa Bani Wasil Gharandal Owda Salih Imbarak Imfarrij Idwit al-Ayn Shawama Fagir Zari Milayha Abu Argub Farahin Hanajra Abu Isma‘in Zaghaba Abu Uwayli Wadi Shari‘a Dudayn Ibn Busays Wadi al-Ghamr Ayn Ghadyan Wadi Yitam Karak dukhan

271

Arabic ‫صقر‬ ‫منصور ابو بغدادي‬ ‫اعيْل‬ ِ ‫إِ ْس َم‬ ّ ‫ُخد‬ ‫َيوي‬ ‫سالم سليم العطاونة‬ ‫ابراهيم باشا‬ ‫ظالم‬ ‫مطر‬ ‫سرحان البدن‬ ‫سعيدة باعت ال َعير بالبارودة‬ ‫زربة‬ ‫زرب‬ ‫قتل‬ ‫راهب‬ ‫باطية‬ ‫قلولة‬ ‫هبلة‬ ‫بلَيّات‬ ‫ذروة‬ ‫بني واصل‬ ‫غرندال‬ ‫عودة صالح مبارك‬ ‫مفرج‬ ِّ ‫عدوة ال َعين‬ ‫شوامة‬ ‫فقير‬ ‫زارع‬ ‫ملَيحة‬ ‫ابو عرقوب‬ ‫فراحين‬ ‫حناجرة‬ ‫ابو اسماعيل‬ ‫زغابة‬ ‫ابو ع َويلي‬ ‫وادي شريعة‬ ‫دودَين‬ ‫بسيس‬ َ ‫ابن‬ ‫وادي الغمر‬ ‫َعين غضيان‬ ‫وادي أيتام‬ ‫كرك‬ ّ ‫دخان‬

272

Chap./Page

index of arabic spellings

Transliteration

Arabic

p. 190 Tubuk Khan zan Amir ibn al-Tufayl Muzarrid p. 192 Wadi Rasif Harba Abu Sitta shinlash yilli akhadhnaki balash p. 193 dhabahnaku ba-l-ahrab u-tayyabnaku ba-l-aksas p. 194 Salih p. 195 shihada Ijbara p. 198 gasida felucca p. 199 Sabah Salih al-Ghanim Agayli Owwad Ibn Rifada Fuhayman p. 201 Imtayrat Ch 7 p. 213 Bani Sulaym Shammar ¯ rif Notes p. 223 Al-A Salim Husayn Agayli Marabda shaykh p. 224 Shuqayr p. 225 Musa Hasan al-Atowna Nutush Sulayman p. 226 Ayn Ghadyan p. 227 Jabal Raha p. 228 Faraj Abu Jarabia Mudhakkarati p. 236 Abdallah Darwish Basus Klayb ibn Rabi’a Jassas ibn Murra Mu‘attig

‫تبوك‬ ‫خان‬ ‫زان‬ ‫عمر ابن الط َفيل‬ ‫مزرد‬ ِّ ‫وادي رصيف‬ ‫حربة ابو ستّة‬ ‫شينالش‬ ‫يا اللي اخذناكي بالش‬ ‫ذبحناكو باالحراب‬ ‫وطيّبناكو باالكساس‬ ‫صالح‬ ‫شهادة‬ ‫جبارة‬ ‫قصيدة‬ ‫فلوكة‬ ‫صباح صالح الغانم‬ َ ‫عقيلي‬ ‫عوّاد‬ ‫ابن رفادة‬ ‫ف َهيمان‬ َ ‫مطيرات‬ ‫بني سلَيم‬ ‫شمّر‬ ‫العارف‬ َ ‫سالم حسين‬ ‫عقيلي‬ ‫مرابدة‬ ‫َشيخ‬ َ ‫شقير‬ ‫موسى حسن العطاونة‬ ‫نتوش‬ ‫سليمان‬ ‫عين غضيان‬ ‫جبل راحة‬ ‫فرج ابو جرابيع‬ ّ ‫مذكراتي‬ ‫عبداللة درويش‬ ‫بسوس‬ ‫كلَيب ابن ربيعة‬ ‫مرة‬ ّ ‫جساس ابن‬ ّ ‫معتّق‬

general index

Aram, 21, 96, 105, 139, 190, 211, 213, 224, 231 Assyria (Assyrians), 10, 107, 110, 190, 211, 235 Authors cited in text: —Abu Rabiya, Aref, 224 —Bar-Yosef, Ofer, 222 —Blau, Joshua, 87 —Burckhardt, J. L., 114, 222 —Chadwick, Hector and Nora, 192 —Cross, Frank, 173, 195, 197, 201–02, 211, 212, 214, 220, 228, 233, 234, 238, 239 —Danin, Avinoam, x, 53, 55 —De Vaux, Roland, 218, 239 —Doughty, Charles, 141, 150, 205 —Echols, Charles, 202 —Ephal, Israel, ix, 226 —Finkelstein, Israel, 37, 147, 215, 222 —Finkelstein, J. J., 225 —Freedman, Noel, 195, 201 —Friedman, Richard, 208 —Goldziher, Ignaz, 159 —Goren, Avner, 222 —Gottwald, Norman, 204, 214, 227 —Greengus, Samuel, 108, 113, 222 —Guillaume, Alfred, 220

Aaron, 40, 84, 103, 147, 148, 150, 211, 218, 220, 238 Abdon, 90, 182 Abimelech, 4, 15, 21, 48, 85, 119, 129, 138 Abimelech Ben Gideon, 88 Abner Ben Ner, 85, 86, 108, 114 Abraham, 4, 24, 66–67, 119, 146, 153, 176, 186, 236, passim Absalom, 81, 114, 118, 164 Abu Haddaf, Swaylim, 43 Abu Mu‘ammar, Owda, 81, 113, 125 Abu Zayd al-Hilali, 99, 100, 230 Achan, 87 Achish, 81 agriculture, desert, 6, 16, 21–33, 56, 168, 221 Ahab, King, 145, 146 Ai, 93, 112 Amelekites, 26, 78, 79, 92, 93, 146, 165, 177, 221 Ammon, 80, 92, 162, 190 Amnon and Tamar, 118, 164 Amorites, 7, 26, 89, 108, 113, 165, 174, 188, 225, 231 Amos, 18, 55, 57, 180 Araba Rift Valley, 14, 38, 186

273

274

general index

Authors cited in text (continued) —Halpern, Baruch, 198, 209, 222 —Haran, Menahem, 235 —Khazanov, Anatoly, 221, 222, 224, 235 —Knohl, Yisrael, 218, 239 —Lemaire, Andre, 21, 224 —Levenson, Jon, 229 —Levinson, Bernard, 226 —Liverani, Mario, 215, 222 —Malamat, Abraham, 108, 222, 225, 228, 231 —Marx, Emanuel, 224 —Mendenhall, George, 204, 214 —Meyers, Carol, 222, 226, 228, 239 —Milgrom, Jacob, 97, 148, 230, 232, 234 —Musil, Alois, 52, 66, 141, 205 —Niditch, Susan, 235 —Palmer, Henry, 40, 205 —Paul, Shalom, 117, 229 —Redford, Donald, 7, 152, 154, 209, 223, 230, 238 —Rendsburg, Gary, 235 —Rofe, Alexander, 214, 229, 235 —Rothenberg, Beno, 38, 217, 238 —Rowtan, Michael, 6, 8, 222 —Seale, Morris, 205 —Silberman, Neil, 147, 222 —Ska, Jean Louis, 214 —Smith, Mark, 239 —Smith, W. Robertson, 94, 139-40, 149, 152, 154, 157, 205, 233 —Sommer, Benjamin, 11 —Stager, Lawrence, 74, 205, 227, 239 —Tigay, Jeffrey H., ix, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234 —Wellhausen, Julius, 205 Babylonia and Babylonians, 10, 90, 108, 110, 145, 190, 225 Balaam, 129, 130, 161, 163 Balaq, 129, 145, 163 Barak, 80, 83, 196–97, 200, 201

Bedouin, antiquity of, 4–8 Beersheba, 14, 16, 21, 24, 48, 60, 126, 147, 148, 213 Bilhah, 88, 90, 180 blessings, 39, 89, 125, 141, 146, 147, 148, 161, 163, 197 blood, sacredness of, 39, 140, 149–56, 157–58, 183, 205 Boaz, 84, 98, 102, 182, 228 bread in desert diet, 5, 9, 10, 30, 40–45, 54, 67, 112, 137 bread, unleavened (Heb. matzah), 9, 10, 40–45, 67, 205, 207, 226 Cain, 87, 112, 113, 125, 207 Caleb, 15, 97, 104, 223 Canaan, 8, 9, 12ff, 34, 74, 91, 109, 165, 196–97, 204, 209–13 Canaanites, 10, 68, 82, 105, 119, 145, 172, 187ff, 213ff, 219, 220, passim circumcision, 10, 59, 94, 152–55, 217, 219, 226–27, 230 clans, tribal, 6, 61, 72, 74, 76–77, 79, 81, 83–102, 120 Covenant Code, 108, 231 Cyprus barometric depression, 15–16 David, 15, 80–81, 82, 85–86, 114, 127, 148, 157, 185, 235, passim Deborah, Song of, 48, 68, 80, 187, 190, 195–98, 200–03, passim Dinah, 96, 118–19, 155, 179, 182, 213 drought, 10, 17, 18, 19, 24–26, 77–78, 140, 175, 212, passim Edom and Edomites, 23, 26, 76, 92, 190, 218 Egypt and Egyptians, 7, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 40, 44–45, 209–12, 239, passim Ehud ben Gera, 178, 182, 189, 195 Elijah, 145 Elimelech, 97, 98, 100, 102, 146



general index

Elisha, 100 Elkanah, 90–91, 146 Ephraim (son of Joseph), 163 Erra, Poem of, 44 Esau, 21, 88, 91, 105, 129, 146, 163, 172, 229–30, passim ethics, desert, 140, 163–66 Ezekial, 28, 108, 145, 146, 165, 168 Feast of Tabernacles. See Sukkot food, forbidden, 10, 52, 57–58 genealogies, tribal, 169–72, 214, 235 Gerar, 24, 48, 224 Gezer, 32, 106 Gibeah, 67, 79, 119, 124, 127, 180 Gibeon, 161 Gideon, 74, 78, 80, 88, 90, 112, 145, 146, 147, 178 Hagar, 14, 60, 90, 103, 174 Hammurabi, 108, 113, 165, 225 Haran, 100, 212, 213 Hebrews (Habiru), 9, 59, 91, 211–12 Hebron, 22, 24, 27, 146, 206, 211, 213 Hezekiah, 25, 145 Hittites, 10, 47, 105, 110, 139, 146, 165, 180, 204 hospitality, 63–68, 122, 164, 181, 206, 216 Hyksos, 209–11, 238 Ibn Adaysan, Ayyad, 43 Ibn Amir, Muslih, 71–72 Ibn Hadhal, Jiday‘, 44 Ibn Jazi, Sulayman, 71–72 Ibsan, 90, 106 Isaac, 15, 24, 27, 31, 36, 91, 129, 147, 211, 221, passim Isaiah, 28, 95, 190, 207–08 Ishmael, 14, 60, 84, 86, 88, 103, 153, 172 Israel, definition of, 9, 204–11

275

Israelite tribes, 75 (map) —Asher, 80, 197 —Benjamin, 67–68, 79, 82, 93, 106, 147, 162, 188, 211, passim —Dan, 80, 176, 180, 197 —Ephraim, 79, 80, 83, 119, 178, 188, 211, passim —Gad, 36, 78, 211 —Gilead (tribal section of Manasseh), 79, 80, 89, 162, 182, 197 —Issachar, 197 —Judah (tribe and kingdom), 9, 50–52, 81–83, 106, 145, 162, 211, 215, passim —Levi, 125, 127, 172, 180, 211, 219, 220, 238, 239 —Manasseh, 36, 74, 78, 80, 97, 131, 163, 211 —Naphtali, 83, 196, 197, 200 —Reuben, 36, 74, 80, 197, 211, 215 —Simeon, 25, 74, 211 —Zebulon, 196, 197, 200 Jacob, 24, 28, 48, 74, 84, 89–90, 119, 145–46, 163, 211, 229, passim Jael, 36, 61, 68, 181, 188, 196–97, 200 Jephtah, 80, 83, 162, 178, 193 Jeremiah, 14, 26, 56, 98, 145, 190, 206, 208 Jeroboam, 82, 145 Jethro, 41, 68, 86, 130, 131, 154, 183, 212, 218, 239 Joab ben Zeruiah, 86, 108, 114, 126 Job, 10, 29, 53–54, 57–58, 148, 159, 207, 220 Jonathan, 129, 162–63, 177, 185, 193, 202 Joseph, 24, 26, 90, 91, 105, 163, 166–67, 177, 207, 209–11, passim Joshua, 77, 91–92, 93, 155, 161, 174 Josiah, 145 Judah (son of Jacob), 102, 103, 105, 146, 172, 180

276

general index

judges, Bedouin, 83, 101, 109, 122, 130–33, 135–36, 137, 178, 184, 233 judges, Israelite, 74, 78, 88, 90, 106, 162, 178, 182, 184, 196, 201 Kedar, 28, 35, 190, 206 Kedemites, 26, 28, 29, 78 Kenites, 36, 196, 197, 200 Laban (person), 27, 29, 40 Laban (place), 49–50 Lamech, 113, 179, 202, 207 law, desert, 66, 98, 101, 103, 107–38, 166, 178, 205, 221–22, 225, passim Leah, 88, 90, 99, 104, 182 Levi (person), 90, 119, 124, 179 Levites, 67, 74, 83, 100, 105, 131 litigation, tribal, 101, 112, 130–38 livestock, raising of, 6, 15, 18–29, 39, 57, 77, 140, 210, 212, 224, passim locusts as food, 52, 158, 197 Lot, 16, 36, 67, 84, 85, 95, 127, 176, 177 Malachi, 145 Mamre, 22 manna, 9, 54–55, 205 March, importance of, 16, 17–18, 58 marriage, 84–85, 128–29, 131–32, 146, 162, 208, 228, 229 Martu, 7, 8, 231 matzah. See bread, unleavened mediation, tribal, 103, 104, 112, 126–30, 137 Merneptah, Pharaoh, 209–12 mezuzah, 38–39, 125 Midianites, 37–38, 41, 44, 68, 86, 92, 130, 153–55, 178, 212, 217–21 migration, tribal, 6–7, 22–26, 34, 39, 167, 213, 221–22, 224, passim Miriam, 103, 187, 193, 203, 211 Moab, Moabites, 92, 100, 106, 125, 129, 161, 178, 188, 193, 227, passim

Moses, 26, 59, 83, 97, 130–32, 153–54, 211–12, 217–22, 230, 238, passim Moses group, 38, 211, 212, 217, 220, 239 Naomi, 97, 98, 100, 106, 146, 165 nawamis, 222 Negev, 8, 15ff, 23–24, 29, 47, 177, 205, 211–13, 223, 224, 236, passim Noah, 145, 146, 158, 179 nomads, definition of, 4–8, 12, 172, 204–5, 213, 214, 221–22, 225, passim oaths, 79, 91, 93, 100, 108, 116–17, 130, 133–35, 159–63, 234, passim Othniel, 15, 97, 104 Passover, 10, 33, 44, 152, 226 Pharaoh, 18, 32, 59, 85, 91, 106, 177, 187, 193, 209–10 Philistines, 4, 81, 112, 124, 129, 146, 162–63, 177–78, 193, 204, passim Pinehas, 211 place-names, desert, 45–52, 215, 223, 226 plants, utilization of, 30, 45–46, 53–56, 173, 205, 215 poetry, Bedouin and biblical, 43–44, 57, 99, 111, 113, 159, 167, 183–203, 206, 220, 236–37, passim Potiphar, 177, 209 protection —of kinsmen, 61, 72, 85, 86, 93, 99, 100, 120 —of outsiders, 3, 65–67, 87, 103, 123–27, 164–65, 167–69, 206 —of women, 98–101, 136 proverbs, the use of, 11, 167–71, 235, 236 Quail, 9, 49, 52–53, 205, 207 Rachel, 84, 88, 90, 99, 104, 182, 229 rainfall, desert, 5–6, 10, 14, 15–18, 19, 22ff, 24–27, 30, 32, 34, passim



general index

Ramses II, Pharaoh, 212 Rebecca, 21, 27, 63, 84–85, 89, 100, 104, 180, 213 Rehoboam, 81, 82 Reuben (person), 89–90, 182 revenge: —general, 65, 73, 86, 87, 95, 110, 126, 135, 161, 164, passim —as deterrence, 110–13, 230–36 —for murder or wounds, 89, 92, 108, 113–17, 168, 169, 192 —for violation of women, 92, 117–23, 232 Ruth, 84, 97, 102, 106, 125, 165, 172, 180, 228 sacrifice as main religious ritual, 10, 21, 28, 39, 67, 140, 151, 206 Samson, 112, 124, 146, 147, 177, 180 Samuel, 9, 22, 145, 146, 147, 193, 202 Sarah, 27, 85, 90, 119, 146, 174, 186, 202, 213 Saul, 22, 80–81, 82, 85–86, 106, 112, 146–47, 157, 162–63, passim Shasu, 7–8, 12, 152, 223 Shechem, 24, 88, 89, 94, 118–19, 153, 155, 179, 189, 213 Shechem ben Hamor, 103, 153, 179 Shilo, 79, 90, 162, 206 Simeon (person), 105, 119 Sinai, 8, 14, 16, 22, 29, 32, 37, 39–40, 45–52, passim Sisera, 36, 61, 68, 181, 188, 196–97, 200, 201 Solomon, 9, 81–82, 83, 106, 126, 145 Song of the Sea, 193, 198, 202 sons, importance of, 88–93, passim stars, use of, 32, 56–58, 92, 226 stories, tribal, 173–83, 193–203, 204–5, 211, 214–16 Sukkot, 32, 39, 49, 112 Tabernacle, Sacred, 37–38, 41, 67, 150, 225

277

taboos, 140, 155–59, 205, 217, 234 Tamar, the Canaanite, 102, 172, 180 Ten Commandments, 132, 135, 151 tents (general), 6, 7, 34–39, 196–97, 206–07, 208, 225, passim; (roofs of), 2, 34–35, 218, passim; (as sanctuary), 37–38 passim Transjordan, 9, 12, 14, 25, 28, 36, 78, 109, 139, passim tribal behavior, 11, 77–83 tribal confederations, 69–77 tribal groups mentioned (Bedouin): —Abu Bilayya, 1, 31, 105, 181, 224 —Aheiwat, 25, 69, 99, 128, 135, 142, 173, 174–75, 213, 239 —Alaygat, 69, 174–75, 199 —Amarat, 44, 77 —Aneza, 60, 66, 77, 213 —Atowna, 43, 80, 176, 177, 224, passim —Ayayda, 23, 36, 113, 142, 192, passim —Azazma, 1, 13, 15, 69, 81, 96, 103, 186, 192, 221, passim —Bani Atiyya, 25, 78–79, 189 —Bani Hilal, 99, 213 —Bani Ugba (also al-Ugbi), 25, 120, 122, 126, 159, 213 —Bili, 73, 86, 116, 181, 199 —Huwaytat, 66, 80, 99, 239 —Huzayyil, 43, 78, 80, 82, 186, 189 —Majali, 88, 192 —Malalha, 144 —Masa‘id, 13, 25, 126, 131, 183 —Muzayna, 46, 73, 101, 142 —Owlad Sa‘id, 114, 142–43, 147 —Ramadin, 92, 120, 160, 177 —Rumaylat, 144 —Suwarka, 69, 86, 115, 144, 175, 181, 182 —Tarabin, 15, 23, 71–72, 92, 141–42, 169–72, 175, 176, 184, 227, passim —Tawara, 143, 213 —Tiyaha, 23, 69, 82, 93, 101, 159, 169, passim

278

general index

tribal groups mentioned (continued) —Wuheidat, 92, 125, 126–27, 160, 177, 182, 213 —Zullam, 23, 69, 178, 181, 182, 183, 201 United Monarchy, 9, 36, 81–82, 125 Urdi, Anayz Abu Salim al, 159, 199

women: —bearing sons by, 90–91, 101–02 —ditties sung by, 191–93 —expected modesty of, 61, 62, 95 —inheritance by, 96–98 —status of, 65, 95–101

vows, 140, 159, 163, 205

Yahweh, 8, 10, 76, 206, 214, 216, 217–20, 238, 239

warfare, 92–93, 159, 185, 189–93, 202, 227, 236, passim water, scarcity of, 5–6, 12–15, 173, 174, 218, 223, passim witness in court, 130, 132, 234

Zelophehad, daughters of, 97, 131–32, 207 Zilpah, 88 Zippora, 59, 153, 154, 155, 183, 207, 219, 226–27, 239