Bedouin Culture in the Bible by Clinton Bailey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bedouin Culture in the Bible by Clinton Bailey Michael S. Moore clinton bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Pp. 278. $55. This book is a fascinating, well-meaning response from a layman admittedly "unfamiliar with the Hebrew Bible, which I had never formally studied" (p. ix) to the theories of George Mendenhall ("The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine," BA 25 [1962] 66-87) and Norman K. Gottwald ("Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?," BARev 4 [1978] 4) that the earliest Israelites were not desert-dwelling nomads but disgruntled Canaanite proletarians (p. 204). Concerned that the "nomadic origins" argument stands on a "sparse data base," B. here tries to shore it up by (a) providing "an in-depth ethnographic dimension" based on "observations acquired from firsthand contact with the Bedouin during forty-five years of research among them" (p. 205); and (b) juxtaposing these observations with the well-known proposal of Frank Moore Cross (From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998] 51) that earliest Israel consisted of a Moses-led group of escapees from the Sinai desert joining up with other עברים (1 Sam 14:21) among the ḫabirū already populating second-millennium Canaan. Methodologically, the book's primary presumption is that the "materials collected here constitute a cultural document that supplements material learned from other fields such as ancient Near Eastern history, biblical studies, archaeology, and anthropology" (p. 10). Adhering closely and consistently to this presumption, the bulk of the volume presents B.'s personal observations on contemporary Bedouin traditions about water, rainfall, livestock, migration, herding, agriculture, domiciles, food, locusts, quail, plants, stars, flint-stone, leather usage, nose rings, hospitality, kinship behavior, tribal behavior, clan behavior, the roles of women, matrimony, laws about vengeance/deterrence, revenge for the shedding of blood, revenge for the violation of women, conflict resolution, judges, witnesses, oaths, sentences, reconciliation, religious sacrifices involving blood, and related questions. The book's greatest strength is its absorbing discussion of Bedouin oral tradition— [End Page 302] poetry, prose, proverbs, and genealogies—much of it recycled from B.'s earlier book (A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004]). The Bedouin stories published on pp. 173-79, for example, constitute a rich resource for comparison not just with biblical stories but with Egyptian, Anatolian, Canaanite, and Mesopotamian stories preserved in epic myth. Analyzing Bedouin poetry in terms of expression, communication, and entertainment, B. first lays out the Bedouin tradition, then compares it with what the author considers to be the obvious parallels in Tanak. Nowhere, however, is any attempt made to compare or contrast these ad hoc observations with contemporary analyses of ancient Hebrew poetry such as those of James L. Kugel (The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]) or W. P. Brown (Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002]). Nor is anything said about that species of poetry called هجا ("satirical lampoon") which the nineteenth-century Arabist I. Goldziher intuitively compares to Balaam's משלים (Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, vol. 1[Leiden, 1896] 41-44). This is B.'s third volume with Yale University Press, the first two being A Culture of Desert Survival (mentioned above) and Bedouin Law in Sinai and the Negev: Justice without Government (2009), volumes generally well received by Arabists and other colleagues in Middle Eastern studies departments familiar with B.'s efforts to champion the needs of Bedouin trying to eke out a living in the Sinai and the Negev. Yet the problems in this third volume cannot be ignored, arising as they do from well-meaning but naive attempts to correlate contemporary Arabic observation with ancient Hebrew literature. Blissfully unaware of current debate, traditionalist commentary here replaces the academic discipline of articulating conflicting viewpoints before one's conclusions, one example being the unsubstantiated claim that "most of the Bible is written in stages somewhere between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE" (pp. 7-8), followed by Abraham Malamat's early dating of "the patriarchal narratives" (Mari and the Bible [SHCANE 12; Leiden: Brill, 1989] 4) as "proof...