In the absence of all other evidence, the Merneptah stele would lead us to think that a people group known to the Egyptians as "Israel" lived somewhere in late 13th-century Syria-Palestine, perhaps as far southwest as the coastal plain, perhaps as far northeast as the sea of Galilee and its environs. We would also think that Merneptah engaged at least some subset of this group in battle around 1210 BCE or shortly thereafter and inflicted at least a minor defeat on that group. That's as far as we can take the Merneptah stele itself. But again, since ninth-century Assyrian inscriptions refer to an Israel in roughly the same place 400 years later, I think it would be reasonable to conclude, on the basis of inscriptions alone, that Merneptah's people of Israel organized into a nation-state sometime between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 9th centuries BCE.

Labels: biblical studies