Midian

Abstract

Midian was an ancient region located in northwestern Arabia. Compared with other peoples of the ancient Near East, knowledge about Midian and the Midianites is limited and restricted to a few and relatively late written sources, particularly the Hebrew Bible. The exact geographical location of the Midianites is unknown, and although the Midianite “heartland” is traditionally situated east of the Gulf of Aqaba, in some biblical texts the Midianites appear to be present in Transjordan and even invading Canaan itself. The chronological dating is also imprecise, but because biblical references to the Midianites concentrate in the Exodus and Wilderness wandering stories and are not mentioned by name in Neo-Assyrian and later Mesopotamian sources, they are usually considered to be one of the earliest Arabian tribal groups, traditionally dated between the late second and early first millennia bce—the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Syro-Palestinian archaeological periodization. In the Hebrew Bible there is an ambivalent approach toward the Midianites. While in the Patriarchal and especially in the Exodus/Wilderness traditions they are portrayed as close to the Israelites—even to the extent that according to mainstream biblical scholarship worship of Yahweh originated in Midian, this did not preclude military clashes between Israelites and Midianites at the end of the Wilderness wanderings and during the period of the Judges. Later classical, Jewish, and Christian writers located Midian east of the Gulf of Aqaba, connecting the region with the biblical theophany at Mt. Sinai. The Quranic and early Islamic traditions took the Jewish/Christian allusions to Midian and the Moses story, expanding them with ancient Arabian lore. Attempts to define a Midianite material culture in northwestern Arabia and southern Levant through archaeology remain a thorny issue because of the almost total lack of local written sources naming Midian and the few archaeological excavations carried out in northern Saudi Arabia.