This June, a month before his 81st birthday, George Mendenhall is scheduled to travel to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean for the 20th time. At least, he thinks it's the 20th. The professor emeritus of ancient and Biblical studies, one of the world's leading authorities on the Near East in the pre-Christian era, has made the trek so many times in the last 40 years that he's lost count.

And what he believes he's learned from the evidence he's literally unearthed has upset some religious, ideological and scholarly world views that are as zealously defended as those that were dislodged by Copernicus or Einstein.

"I'm as heretical as you can get," he chuckles in his grandfatherly way. Literal adherents to certain Jewish, Christian and Islamic versions of history are upset, he says, by some conclusions he's drawn from his research, including the following:

• "Abraham spoke an early dialect of Arabic, not Hebrew" and "Jews did not emerge as an ethnic group that adopted common religious beliefs" but as a religious community of diverse peoples Semitic, Indo-European and Hurrian who became united through their conception of a single deity, or monotheism. "The Shibboleth incident proves that they didn't even speak the same dialect of West Semitic," he says, alluding to Judges 12: 4-6, in which one tribal army determines which captive enemies to slay by asking them to pronounce "Shib-bo-leth" ("a torrent of water" is one of its translations). The 42,000 who said "Sib-bo-leth" were slain "at the passages of Jordan."

• "Conservative Christians have accused me of attacking the inerrancy of the Bible when I say things like Joshua did not conquer Palestine. The cities in that area remained polytheist till the time of David."

• "Arabic could not be a gift of the prophet Muhammad, as many Islamic clerics claim, since its origins are in the early Bronze Age," 3,000 years before Muhammad.

• What we now call Arab society did not arise among disparate tribes in the Arabian Desert around 1200 BC, but was carried there on a tide of migration from the fertile crescent region of northern Syria in the wake of massive social chaos.

• Biblical accounts notwithstanding, the Hebrew "conquest" of Palestine was achieved by religious conversion rather than military force, though they did have to fight to ward off foreign imperialists who wanted to be in control.

"Ever since the 19th century, scholars have believed that various Semitic languages came out of the Arabian Desert with successive waves of migration, that different tribes brought different languages, then settled in various parts of the fertile crescent," says Mendenhall. "What the evidence we have now points to is that exactly the opposite took place.

"That is," he continues, "the Semitic languages originated in the fertile crescent and, about the time of Moses, a group of tribes moved into the desert, taking their languages with them, and that's what became Arabic. Hebrew was the language that didn't move into the desert, basically a dialect that resulted from what linguists call 'creolization' or blending. The Indo-Europeans and the Hurrians couldn't pronounce the consonants of the Semitic languages, so they were simply dropped and the language itself, except in the desert areas, was simplified, becoming the language of the man in the street."

The "evidence we have now" largely results from the labors of Mendenhall and his colleagues. In the last 10 years, they have discovered, mostly in Jordan, a third of the 20,000 ancient inscriptions extant. The significance of the inscriptions lies not so much in their content ("Mostly just doodles," Mendenhall says) as in their form: the languages in which they are written, the writing systems they use and, especially, the personal names scratched on rocks.

Mendenhall was born in Iowa in 1916. He was an ordained Lutheran minister before switching to archaeology after cracking Japanese codes for the Navy in World War II. Since 1987, he has spent part of each year at the Institute of Archaeology of Jordan's Yarmouk University directing graduate students' MA theses, many of which have set forth similarities in the structure and vocabulary of about a dozen ancient languages of the region. A 1993 thesis, he says, "proved that about 34 percent of the personal names originated in northeast Syria—the homeland of the Amorites. 'Abram' is an Amorite name. The name 'Moses' is Egyptian, and his Midianite father-in-law had three different Pre-Islamic Arabic names in various sources, with 'Jethro' being the most familiar to us.

"Societies in remote areas preserve very archaic features, and the further you get from the places of origin, the more ancient are the traits," he explains. "Take, for example, the old Hispanic families of New Mexico. They can read 16th-century texts, whereas the Spaniards of today have to be educated to do it. Or the Germans of Milwaukee preserving 19th-century German. Or French Canadians and archaic French."

But a phenomenon that seems obvious when viewed contemporaneously—that "language preserves social history"—tended to be interpreted completely differently by historians. "All through history, it has been assumed that traits known to be ancient were the origin, rather than the late preservation, of pristine original traits," Mendenhall says. "Sanskrit is a good illustration of that. It's the most pristine form of Indo-European language, so everyone in the 19th century assumed it was the origin of all the languages. It's pretty clear that in what is now Turkey people had Sanskrit-type personal names during the Bronze Age. So the theory is now that people migrated from Turkey into India, taking an archaic form of their Indo-European language with them."

Words don't randomly travel to remote locations, Mendenhall notes, yet historians tend to doubt linguistic evidence that counters orthodox history. Scholars who dispute his theories, like Earl Axel Knauf and Diana Edelman, "don't pay any attention to it [linguistic evidence] whatsoever," he says. "They think Hebrew remained unchanged for centuries, which is the exact opposite of the truth. The farther back you go, the closer together Hebrew and Arabic are. The older the language in Biblical Hebrew, the higher the percentage of words that have Arabic cognates. By the time of the Persian empire, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the civilized world. Late Hebrew reflects that; it has a much higher percentage of Aramaic cognates and a lower percentage of Arabic."

Thus it is possible to recognize that the story of Abraham in Genesis 14 "is actually two different stories that have been blended," says. "The first part is late and has fairly good parallels in Babylonia. The second part is very archaic, very old, an indigenous Palestinian story, I think."

So how did ned (pronounced "nayd"), a word for "hill" or "heap" believed to be of Yemeni origin, get into Exodus 15? "Probably the Midianites brought it to Yemen, and Moses got it from his in-laws, who were Midianites," says Mendenhall. "In the time of Moses, all the urban population must have been multilingual. The languages of northern Syria and Palestine appear to have been about one-third Semitic, one-third Indo-European, and one-third Hurrian. Eventually, several dynasties included kings from all three groups."

The Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BC) was, for reasons that are as yet unclear, a time of widespread social breakdown. Most societies were "economically and ethically bankrupt," Mendenhall says. "It sounds contemporary to us: there was a complete lack of respect for authority." Socioeconomic chaos sent groups fleeing from the center of the civilization into the desert. (See "Against Florio," an article about the recovery of the cargo carried on a Bronze Age ship shortly before this collapse of civilization, in Michigan Today, March '96.)

"It must have been a horrible time in which to live," says Mendenhall. "The heartland of the Hittite empire was almost completely depopulated. The same seems to be true of northern Syria. Under these circumstances, which were characterized also by epidemic disease, people would flee to unpopulated areas."

These conditions also may be why the religion of the Hebrews was so appealing. Mendenhall cites Judges 8: 22-3. When various tribes of Israel ask Gideon to accept traditional hereditary rule over them, Gideon replies, "I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you."

Yahwism emerged as a sort of peasants' revolt, in Mendenhall's view. "It prohibited graven images. But what were they? They were images of pharaohs and gods, and the purpose of the gods was to furnish authority to the kings as the embodiment of the gods." The ancient Israeli treaty, or covenant, made directly between one God and the people who accepted him, meant that the arrangements between God and the people were immune to kingly authority.

"Despite the persistence into our own time of an essentially 19th-century view that Biblical narrative is basically historically accurate and supported by the archaeological evidence," Mendenhall says, "there never was a Hebrew conquest of Palestine. But there was a religious conversion to a monotheistic faith of the existing population.

"Now I think that almost everybody has given up that 19th-century theory, but they don't have anything really to substitute for it, whereas I think I do," he continues. "That is, that Moses and a small band came out of Egypt with a new mission and a new concept of God and religious community, one bound together by a voluntary covenant rather than a monopoly of force. When political systems and empires were being destroyed all over the Near East, it really offered a very welcome alternative to populations who no longer had a community or whose communities had been destroyed."

So what knit the growing Israelite community together was not so much ethnicity as attitude. Etymology reflects this fact, according to Mendenhall, in the word "Hebrew," which derives from West Semitic apiru, "a transgressor." Mendenhall says the term "Hebrew" originated as a pejorative term used by the Israeli tribes' foes. In more recent times, this naming process has resulted in terms like "the Seminoles" ("Runaways" in Creek); the Sioux ("Snakes" in Ojibway); and the Cheyenne ("People of Alien Speech").

"There never was any such thing as a distinctive Jewish population," he says. "The Apiru of the late Bronze Age were very much like the militia groups of the United States today—they were people who didn't recognize the existing government. Some of them were very violent. Others were simply withdrawing from society. That's why their enemies called the early Yahwists (followers of Yahweh, the one God) apiru or Hebrew.

"It's pretty clear that what we call ancient Israel was a federation of 12 tribes, 12 different groups that didn't even speak the same language. Jews did not become ethnic until about a thousand years later, at the time of Nehemiah, when he tried to force the Jews to divorce their non-Jewish mates. From that time on, they were regarded as an ethnic group. Someone once observed that Jews worldwide resemble the population with which they live more than they resemble each other. Eastern European Jews didn't even become Jewish until the 8th century AD."

The perception of Judaism's origins as "the unification of a diverse population on the basis of a covenant relationship to a single deity" is unpopular in some quarters. Mendenhall says that a few conservative Christian scholars have "practically foamed at the mouth at the suggestion." Why? "I just don't know," Mendenhall says. "Conservative Christians probably just adhere to the traditional view that the Israelites came out of Egypt, then slaughtered all the nasty Canaanites. They wants to follow the Biblical text as much as possible." But linguistic evidence shows that the Canaanites (now more commonly known as the Phoenicians) were non-Jewish Semites whose language was almost identical with Hebrew.

The literalism of certain religious adherents has pitfalls, Mendenhall says: "It's not the infallibility of the Bible that interests them, it's the infallibility of their ideas about it. As my teacher at Johns Hopkins, W.F. Albright, said, if we could produce an absolutely accurate translation of the Book of Job, a third of it would have to be blank because we don't really know what it means. Our version largely follows the ancient speculations from Greek translations."

In Mendenhall's view, risking the ire of those who are perhaps more committed to protecting their status than they are to increasing human understanding, or even finding the truth, comes with the historian's territory. "All through the history of scholarship, there's been a strong tendency to denounce as fakes anything that scholars don't understand," he says. "That was true, for example, of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Until recently, we just didn't know enough about the ancient world to make these connections. That's why it's so new and controversial." Although he is no longer a man of the cloth, Mendenhall says that "trying to reconstruct ancient history is a form of prophecy. You're predicting that future discoveries will prove you right."

And one thing he hopes he's right about is that in a time of wars, extreme imbalance in the possession of wealth, ethnic conflict, moral confusion and deep disagreement on values, human society may avert or recover from disintegration by forging once again a new covenant based on the best principles in the Biblical tradition.

Jeff Mortimer is an Ann Arbor freelance writer.