History of the Jews by Paul Johnson

after Moses came down from the mountain. It is likely that, after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Mosaic Sinai remained a pilgrimage site for generations. But the tradition eventually lapsed and the site fell out of memory, and it is most improbable that the early Christians went to the right place. All the same, this dramatic place, with its fierce and terrible beauty, has poetic aptness. It is the right setting for the formative act of a revolutionary people who did not recognize the cities, power and wealth of the day, and who were able to perceive that there is a moral order superior to the order of the world. Later, in a dramatic passage, Deutero-Isaiah was to express the Jewish exaltation of powerlessness in the person of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, who in the end is victorious; and later still, a Jewish sectarian, St Paul, was to ask: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ and to quote the Scriptures: ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’ 118 But the spring of this tradition opened at Sinai. 119
    With their long experience of being strangers and sojourners, for the Israelites their exodus from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert and mountain country of Sinai were nothing new. But this episode, of perhaps half a century, tended to confirm their singularity, their antinomianism, their apartness. It is curious, as the Jewish historian Salo Baron has pointed out, that the God they worshipped, despite his epiphany on Mount Sinai, remained portable, as in Abraham’s days: he dwelt in the Ark, a kind of large, elaborate dog-kennel, or was present in the tabernacle in the tent, or operated through the casting-lots, Urim and Tummin. 120 This movable core was present even during the period of the Temple, and the idea that God has no fixedabode was easily resumed after the Temple fell and has been paramount ever since in Judaism. It fits more naturally into the Jewish notion of the universal and ubiquitous but invisible God. It reflects too an extraordinary adaptability in the people, a great skill in putting down roots quickly, pulling them up and re-establishing them elsewhere, an admirable tenacity of purpose irrespective of the setting. As Baron has put it, ‘The religious and ethnic power of perseverance, rather than the political power of expansion and conquest, became the corner-stone of Jewish belief and practice.’ 121
    Nevertheless, it must be stressed again that the Israelites, though inclined to restlessness, were not desert nomads, by origin or inclination. Even their Sinai wanderings were not truly nomadic. The bulk of the Exodus narratives, covering some thirty-seven years, centre on the conquest of Kadesh or Qadesh, which was rich and well-watered and was taken from the settled Amalekites. Some other sites mentioned in Exodus have been tentatively identified. But plotting the wanderings on the map, though often attempted and undoubtedly entertaining, can produce nothing more than conjecture. 122 One interesting theory is that the Levite tribe, to which Moses himself belonged and which soon claimed the exclusive right to the priesthood, was the first to settle in Kadesh and there elaborated the new religion. The other tribes were already in Canaan. The last to force its way into the Promised Land were the tribe of Joseph, from Egypt, and the Levites of Kadesh, who had been reformed by Moses as an instrument for the fervent worship of Yahweh. Under its dynamic impulse, the new Israelite society came into being, religion being the catalyst. 123 It is plausible but undemonstrable.
    With the entry into and conquest of Canaan, however, the pattern of historical events begins to clarify as more and more archaeological evidence confirms or illuminates the Biblical record. The Book of Joshua, called after the Israelites’ first great military commander, can now be regarded as essentially an