The Bronze Age Collapse: The Bible’s Invisible Catastrophe?

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Often, when people first start looking at the Bible through a historical lens, they look at the events mentioned in the Bible and try to line them up with the things that we know from history. Some things — the Kings of Judah, the Babylonian Captivity, the Herodian dynasty — are all clearly confirmed by the historic record. Others — the United Monarchy, the existence of the Patriarchs, much of Jesus’s career — are not directly confirmed, but fit plausibly into the historic context. And still others — the Deluge, the Exodus as described, the Massacre of the Innocents — are very difficult to square with the historic record.

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But there’s another way to look at things: you can start with what we know from history about the time and places described, and then see if the Biblical authors seem aware of the most important events, and if so, how those events affected their narratives. And when you do that, you notice something odd. If you add up the lengths of years of various events and reigns as listed in the Bible, it appears that Moses would have lived around 1300 BCE, David would have reigned around 1000 BCE, and the Conquest and Judges would have been in between. But in that general time and place occurred one of the most catastrophic events in human history... and it is not mentioned at all. It's what I call "the invisible catastrophe": the Bronze Age Collapse.

A little background. Ever since the beginnings of civilization, human society had grown more and more advanced, century by century. Great kingdoms were sometimes destroyed, but they were quickly replaced by greater kingdoms, more powerful, more technologically advanced, with new innovations that led to increasingly organized societies. This had been the progression of history for literally thousands of years. But then around 1200 BCE, in a frighteningly brief period of time, it all came crashing down. Many of the greatest empires of the world were utterly destroyed. In Asia Minor and Syria, the most advanced cities were sacked and left uninhabited for centuries. In the South, Egypt survived, but it went from being a superpower that utterly dominated the Levant to being an inward-looking region, a museum piece frequently ruled by outsiders. In the North of the Aegean, literacy was completely forgotten and had to be reinvented from scratch centuries later. It was a collapse so total that it makes the European Dark Ages seem like a brief inconvenience in comparison. The causes of this collapse are still debated, but what I want to note here is, the Biblical authors don't mention it. They don't seem to even know that it happened.

Before the Collapse, the Hittites were one of the most powerful and centralized empires in the world, and Egypt had a sprawling empire that included all of Canaan. After the Collapse, “Hittite” was more of a scattered ethnic group living in clusters here and there. Egypt was still wealthy and impressive, but it was far away and no longer invincible. And new peoples, such as the Philistines, had been resettled as Canaan’s neighbors. Even if the people of Canaan would never have a good grasp on the scope of the disaster, they should have known the parts that most affected them. They wrote eloquently about the post-Collapse reality, but there doesn't seem to be any awareness of Egypt having been a power in Canaan, of the Philistines coming in from outside, or of the Hittites as ever having been a centralized power.

What do you make of this? And are there any echoes of this disaster or its effects in the Hebrew Bible? What's your take?