There is little subject in biblical history which causes so much heat and so much due, sluggish scholarship as the beginnings of Israel. A single artifact or an overarching reconstruction is not the basis of one of the proposed missing links, but rather a pattern: the Levites appear over and over again unlike the other tribes, in the earliest poetry, both in names, and in the internal voices of the Torah.
In a number of passages of argument, the Levites are no longer referred to as a tribe among tribes but rather as a wandering priestly people whose shaping memories were made in Egypt, and then interwoven into the larger story of the origin of Israel.
1. The oldest victory song speaks of a people, not “Israel”
The Song of Miriam (Song of the Sea) has a high antiquity as one of the starting points. In the same poem the parting party is several times addressed as an am (people), no mention is made of Israel. Priestly and cultic emphasis is also given to the goal: the people are taken into the holy house of God and his miqedash, terms that naturally imply a congregation of sanctuary servicemen, as opposed to a congregation of land-owners. The horizon of this poem serves the purpose in this reading, of making Levites, who are later to have served in the temple, a tighter fit than a nation already visualized as a collection of twelve tribes holding the land.
2. Another early poem lists tribes but leaves Levi out
The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) is commonly approached as early biblical poetry and provides an insight into confederated tribes prior to a consolidated wholeness of the country called Israel resembling a nation. but Levi does not appear on the roll call. Such omission carries with it interpretive substance since the poem is otherwise engaged with naming engaging categories. Social location may be understood as a levite vacuum: either there were no levites as a territorial tribe, or they had a priestly caste which was not counted with the others when military and regional involvement was being recalled.
3. Egyptian-flavored personal names cluster around Levites
None of the names in themselves can be evidence, but clusters may indicate a lived contact. One of the most striking patterns found in the Levite-exodus model is that Egyptian etymologies are overrepresented among Levites and among such persons as Moses, Phinehas, Hophni, Merari, and others.
The occurrence of biblical names of Egyptian origin has been discussed, as have the instances of how the names appear in the genealogies and the stories of priests and the Leviate. The cumulative effect is that the Levites maintain traces of onomastic by far more frequently than they are found in other tribes of signature figures.
4. The Torah’s “Levite voices” carry the fullest Egypt-to-wilderness story
The work that is source-critical whatever one decides to believe about details of it has observed that large sections of the plagues-and-exodus story seem to have been most complete in selections which may well belong to Levite or priestly schools of thought. In the version given in a critical synthesis of the historical exodus question, the non-Levite narrative element is said to be relatively unconcerned about telling the whole story. It does not mean that the Torah is not unified in its present form, but that some sects were entrusted with an excessively elaborate, formative-of-identity Egypt narrative and to these sects belonged the Levite interests: priesthood, sanctuary, and mediated revelation.
5. Circumcision, tabernacle, and ark traditions show Egypt-facing parallels
A number of motifs linked closely to the texts of Levitism-priestly mode were compared to the Egyptian cultural forms. Circumcision is often prefigured in legal texts of the priest and is also a common practice in Egypt. Priestly passages give the tabernacle very special literary treatment, and it has been likened to the architecture of the military-tents in Egypt, and the descriptions of the ark have been placed in parallel with the processesions of the barks of Egypt. When these comparisons are put together they do not, in any simple sense, establish the direct borrowing; but they do set Levite tradition as the most uniformly Egypt-facing cultural channel of the Torah.
6. Ethics toward aliens and slaves are tied to remembered alien status
The frequency with which the reduction of the moral obligations into a remembered experience of being outsiders in Egypt grounds the corpora of various laws is one of the most tangible prints of a finger. In the paradigm that Richard Elliott Friedman summarizes and discusses in the BioLogos forum, sources related to Levite give several repetitions of the connection between treating the alien fairly and the refrain because we were aliens in Egypt, and a non-Levite strand as being not accentuated in this way. Whatever you will of authorship designations, the trend is there: the most powerful memory-ethics of alien status of the Torah is quite obviously, time and again, the same place where sit also the concerns of priestly-Levite.
7. Miriam’s prominence keeps the earliest memory close to Levite space
Miriam is not an unimportant character. In the works of literature concerning her role, it is emphasized that she is seen in the moments of turning: the story of Nile rescue, the post-sea triumph performance, and the test of the power of Moses. The fact that Miriam is a leader and that she also has a connection with the priestly family also keeps the earliest “song memory” near Levite space, although later tradition would make the exodus more expansive to a national charter. This is not to apply the tradition to a single family, but to observe the number of times the most archaic-liturgical material is kept within the circle of the priestly family.
Throughout the poetry, names, narrative emphasis, cultic language, Levites are constantly at a crossroad between Egypt and early Israel. The suggestion that a lesser people migration memory was an Egypt-to-Canaan one and that this people became the priestly caste of Israel provides one means of keeping together the strength of the exodus tradition with the confines of the archaeological record frequently remarked on by many. The Levites in that frame serve not so much as a supplement but rather as an intermediary: as a community whose own history was to have an influence on the manner in which Israel would later recount its own origins.
