Where did Hebrews come from?

Answer 1

Tradition holds that Abraham, the first Hebrew, came "from beyond the river" and settled in the Land of Israel approximately 2000 BCE.

Answer

F. S. Frick (The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives, Israel as a tribal society) says that studies on Israel's origins tend to suggest 'emergence' or 'evolution' as the descriptions of the process whereby Israel made its appearance in Palestine. He says the 'Immigration' model has been largely abandoned, though the 'revolt' model still has its adherents.

J. W. Rogerson (ibid, Anthropology and the Old Testament) says that by the late 1970s a consensus was emerging among scholars that the Israelites or Hebrews had been peasant farmers in Canaan who withdrew or revolted from the influence of the city states and formed a new society w'ith a tribal structure and an egalitarian ideology.

Finally, H. G. M. Williamson (ibid, The concept of Israel in transition) says that recent writers now agree that 'lsrael' emerged peacefully within the land as an inevitable consequence of the economic and social decline of late Bronze Age Canaan coinciding with the development of new agricultural techniques which enabled increasing numbers to withdraw from the city states, located principally in the valleys, and to start settling in the hitherto sparsely populated hill country of Judah and Samaria.

In other words, the Hebrews were actually Canaanites who separated peacefully from the mainstream culture and, long after they had forgotten their origins, developed traditions about who they were and where their ancestors came from.

Answer 2

A:First of all, few biblical scholars accept the biblical story that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and that, before that, they were descended from Abraham, who came from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia.

The consensus of scholarly belief is that the Hebrews were themselves Canaanites who left the region of the coastal cities and settled peacefully in the mountainous Canaanite hinterland. There is no archaeological evidence of any conquest associated with the arrival of the Hebrews, so their arrival was certainly peaceful. Scholars have examined the possibility that the Hebrews separated as an internal revolt of poor rural peasants against the elite classes within Canaanite society, but this hypothesis has largely been abandoned.

The hinterland had previously been sparsely settled because of the poor soil and low rainfall. The arrival of the Hebrews is associated with new agricultural technologies that made farming possible in their new home. One was the introduction of terracing, which held more of the rainwater and provided level fields suitable for cropping. The second was the introduction of iron ploughshares. The bronze ploughshares formerly used in the rich coastal plains and foothills had been unsuitable for the stony ground of the mountainous inland.

The legends of Abraham, Moses, and a military conquest were developed long after the Israelites had forgotten their real origins.

Answer 3

A:

1. The Bible says that the Hebrew people could trace their ancestry back to Jacob, Isaac and then Abraham, who was from the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia.
2. The Egyptian Amarna letters do not mention the Hebrews as a nation in the early 1300's BCE, but they do mention some minor brigands who were called habiru, about whom the Canaanite kings complained to their Egyptian overlords. This has led to speculation that the Hbrews were descended from these brigands, but most scholars dismiss this hypothesis.
3. The early settlers of the Palestinian hinterland, from around 1250 BCE, arrived peacefully and had much in common with the Canaanites of the coastal cities and towns, including language. It was not until around 900 BCE that Hebrew had evolved into an identifiably separate language. All the evidence points to the early Hebrew people being disaffected Canaanites and were therefore from the land of the Canaanites.

A:They originally came from Southeastern Mesopitamia
Mesopotamia

Answer 4

It is believed that they came from Western Asia. One school of thought says they descended from the Canaanites.