Determinación de la calidad de agua para riego

The only potentially relevant textual evidence for the emergence of ethnicity in early Israel is that in the Hebrew Bible and the Merneptah Stele. However, as mentioned above, the books of Joshua and possibly even parts of Judges, which deal with the Israelites’ occupation of the land and life prior to emergence of the monarchy, were written long after the events they purport to describe and reflect the world view of their authors who lived in the monarchic period or later.

The earliest and most secure extra-biblical textual reference to ‘Israel’ is the ‘Victory Stele’ of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, erected in Thebes in his fifth regnal year (ca 1207 BCE) to commemorate his victory over the Libyan tribes in the west. After listing several defeated peoples, the obverse of the victory hymn reads (Na’aman 1994:247):

Ashkelon has been overcome, Gezer has been captured, Yeno‘am was made non-existent;

Israel is laid waste (and) his seed is not.

The three Canaanite cities are well known from other Egyptian inscriptions; the name ‘Israel,’

however, does not appear in any other Egyptian source (Na’aman 1994:247). Evidence that the reference to the latter refers to a distinct ethnic group (which appears to have been located in Canaan, following the order of toponyms in the passage) comes from the fact that it is followed by the Egyptian plural determinative sign for ‘peoples’ and is obviously not describing either a kingdom or a city-state. In other words, somewhere in the land of Canaan prior to1200 BCE there was a people called ‘Israel,’ who were well-enough established to be a threat to the security of Egypt’s declining Asiatic empire (Na’aman 1994:247-248).

A partially preserved Egyptian relief from Karnak, previously attributed to Ramesses II (ca 1279-1212 BCE), portrays the conquest of three fortified cities and the defeat of a forth enemy in the open country. The name of only one city, that of Ashkelon, has been preserved in the accompanying inscriptions. Yurco (cited by Singer 1994:287) has suggested that the relief should rather be ascribed to Merneptah and that the other two cities are Gezer and Yeno‘am, while the enemy in the open country is Israel. Redford (1986:188-200), on the basis of the location of the reliefs and the adjoining inscriptions, has however rejected Yurco’s proposal regarding the dating of the relief to Merneptah and has also raised doubts about the historical reliability of the Canaanite list on the ‘Israel Stele.’ In his view, the Victory Hymn was plagiarised from the inscriptions of Ramesses II at Karnak, that the term/word ‘Israel’

was substituted for ‘Shasu’ and that it is possible that it describes nothing more than a limited and unimportant Egyptian expedition to Gezer. Regardless of the date of the relief, the

securely-dated information from the stele concerning the campaign to Canaan remains significant.

There is little consensus among scholars as to the location of Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ (or, for that matter, the character of the group ‘Israel’), although the location is usually identified with the area of Shechem, an important Israelite centre during the early monarchic period where several Iron I settlements have been discovered. According to Na’aman (1994:248-249), this (or any other suggestion) is little more than ‘guesswork’ and, without further evidence, ‘it is best to refrain from building on this isolated reference any hypothesis concerning the location and formation of Israel at that time, [since] the maintenance of a name of a social organization does not necessarily imply any other sort of cultural continuity’ (my insertion). Whitelam (1996:207) feels that, although it confirms that some entity called Israel was in existence at this time, it neither confirms nor denies whether it was ‘a tribal organization or

“geographically extensive,”’ while Thompson (1999:79) states that Merneptah’s Israel ‘does not correspond with the highland Israel or any biblical Israel’ and that the terms ‘Canaan’ and

‘Israel’ on the Stele are both ‘metaphorical parents of three towns destroyed by the Egyptian army’ (ie, Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yen‘oam; 1999:81).

Hasel (1994:53-54), using corroborative evidence from Egyptian military campaigns, has nevertheless concluded that the term ‘seed’ (prt), in the clause in which ‘Israel’ appears, means ‘grain’ (the destruction of grain was a common Egyptian military tactic). The phrase

‘his grain is not’ (ie, the food supply/subsistence has been destroyed) thus supports the identification of ‘Israel’ as a rural, agriculturally-based, sedentary socioethnic entity without its own city-state support system. Rainey (2001:57), on the other hand, is of the opinion that the citations used ‘do not really support Hasel’s contention that prt should be rendered

“grain,” and not “seed,” “fruit” (= progeny).’ Working with the Merneptah inscription, the reliefs at Karnak (which he attributes to Merneptah), a number of Ramesside texts (which utilise both prt ‘seed,’ ‘fruit’ and mnyt ‘root’ in the metaphors of destruction) and recently presented data of an archaeological and ethnographical nature (mainly that of Evelyn van der Steen 1996; 1997; cited by Rainey 2001:57-75), he concludes that the evidence from the Merneptah context contains nothing that suggests that the destruction of ‘grain’ is intended;

neither is there any indication that ‘Israel’ was - or was not - a sedentary, agricultural people (Rainey 2001:64,66). The expression ‘his seed is not’ is ‘clearly meant to indicate that Israel has been annihilated like a plant whose seed/fruit has been destroyed’ (Rainey 2001:74).