The first "Israel" ever written down is an Egyptian victory brag

In 1896 the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, digging in the ruins of a pharaoh's mortuary temple at Thebes, turned over a ten-foot slab of black granite. It carried a victory hymn for the pharaoh Merneptah, dated to about 1208 BCE, almost all of it about a war with Libya. Near the end, the poem sweeps through Canaan to say every enemy there is finished, and one line reads: "Israel is laid waste; his seed is not." It is the earliest appearance of the name Israel anywhere outside the Bible, and among the earliest anywhere at all.

The scribe left a detail better than the boast. Egyptian writing tags each foreign name with a silent classifier sign. Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam, named in the same lines, each carry the marker for a city-state. Israel alone carries the marker for a people. In 1208 BCE, whoever Israel was, Egypt's own records show them present in Canaan as a population without a capital or a king, which is precisely the world the opening of Judges describes: tribes in the hill country.

The stele is a birth certificate, not a biography. Nearly every Egyptologist accepts the reading "Israel"; what the line proves about where this people came from is argued in every direction. The pharaoh who announced that Israel was erased is now chiefly remembered as the first witness that Israel existed.