BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Milestones: Clinton Bailey (1936–2025)

Bedouin ethnographer whose research revealed biblical insights

Ethnographer Clinton Bailey devoted nearly 60 years—two-thirds of his long and productive life—to the lives of the Bedouin in the Negev and Sinai. Throughout his career, he documented their lives and worried about and advocated for their futures. But for readers of Biblical Archaeology Review, just as significant was the attention he paid to the past.

There was a time when Western researchers thought of historical and contemporary Bedouin groups as preserving ancient ways of life unchanged. Today, this idea is widely rejected. It often came from the unspoken assumption that change happens only in the West, while the East preserves antiquity intact. Bailey avoided that trap. He was well aware of the dynamism in Bedouin society. He traced changes in social structure and technology, the many ways in which the Bedouin had altered their ways of life over the course of centuries.

His core insight was that while people were dynamic, the desert was not. And so, in some ways, life in the desert always had to respond to the same pressures, always had to fit within the same limitations, and often led to similar bursts of creativity. By looking at how the Bedouin navigated these challenges, we could, Bailey suggested, also understand better the ancient Israelites who, at least for part of their history, did the same.

Bailey’s own life began as far from the deserts of the Middle East as one could imagine. Born Irwin Glaser in Buffalo, New York, Bailey made his way to Israel in the late 1950s through a series of unpredictable events. He ultimately completed his undergraduate work in Jerusalem and then returned to New York to do a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. In the late 1960s, a fortuitous meeting with David and Paula Ben-Gurion led him to teach English in Sde Boker, Israel, where he became increasingly fascinated by the residents of the Negev whom he encountered on a regular basis. The Bedouin would come to the town for periodic medical care and other needs, and soon enough Bailey was accompanying them back into the desert.

He became a fluent speaker of numerous Bedouin dialects of Arabic. Able to converse in the local language and ever respectful of Bedouin culture and way of life, Bailey in turn earned the respect and admiration of Bedouin leaders and families throughout the Negev and the Sinai. Bailey spent weeks on end traveling with various tribes, always with a tape recorder and camera. He documented discussions on tribal matters, collected proverbs, and recorded songs. Back in his home, first in Sde Boker and then in Jerusalem, he carefully transcribed what he recorded. He read widely on Bedouin life and society in multiple languages, and produced thorough monographs on poetry, proverbs, and justice.

Bailey’s last book turned his attention to a subject that had long interested him: Bedouin culture and the Hebrew Bible. To some extent, just putting both parts of the title together already suggests certain elements of the answer. When one reads about Abraham’s flocks and his tent, one is clearly reading a description of something tantamount to Bedouin life. The hospitality that Abraham shows the three strangers coming through the desert is exactly what one would find replicated thousands of times in any Bedouin existence. As Bailey explained, it’s a basic rule of survival in the desert. You must be hospitable to strangers because it’s likely that next time around, you’ll be the stranger and will need that hospitality.

The Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness is another area of the Bible that is readily illuminated by life in the desert. The quail that the Israelites consume in Exodus and Numbers can be seen in real life, as the same birds migrate annually from Europe to Africa and back, passing over the Sinai on their way south in the autumn and on the return trip in the spring. The Bedouin of the Sinai simply spread nets out on the ground and then gather up the quail that land on them.

Aspects of biblical law are illuminated by thinking about some laws in terms of tribal justice. The “blood avenger” persisted in Bedouin society down to the 20th century. The biblical innovation was not to allow for blood vengeance, but to limit it to one retributive killing in response to one unjust murder. The point was to prevent a descent into a cycle of violence. Thinking about ancient Israel as a tribal society in the Bedouin sense allows us to better understand what the biblical law was trying to accomplish.

Similarly, in an article in Bible Review, Bailey used Bedouin values to illuminate Simeon and Levi’s harsh treatment of the Shechemites (Genesis 34:25–31). He writes:

Only fear of vengeance and the reputation of the menfolk for relentlessness keeps other men away from their women. If a woman is indeed violated, it can only mean that the perpetrator considers her menfolk too weak to worry about; that is, the reputation of her menfolk is not sufficient to deter violation. No Bedouin can tolerate this. That is why Simeon and Levi felt obliged to avenge the rape of their sister so ruthlessly.

Bailey also turned his attention to biblical poetry. The Song of Deborah, which celebrates the coming together of Israel’s tribes to ward off a Canaanite enemy, is paralleled in many ways by Bedouin battle poems that celebrate the allies who came to their aid—and denigrate the supposed friends who failed to show up. The tribes might not have gotten along in normal times, but their unity in times of challenge is perfectly illuminated by a proverb that Bailey quotes: “I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the stranger.”

The tribe is of paramount importance. While they will form alliances to fight against other tribes, those alliances are fragile and temporary. Nothing is more important than the tribe itself. Bailey saw that aspect of Israelite society still operative in the narratives of the early monarchy. The Israelites were brought together under the charismatic leadership of David and forcibly melded into a nation by Solomon, but this quickly dissolved again into their own tribal affiliations when the unified political structure wasn’t working for them anymore.

At a finer level comes the clan, and loyalty to the clan is even more important than loyalty to the tribe. All this leads to an intense focus on genealogies in Bedouin society. It’s crucial to know who is related to whom. Whose son is that? Who’s his half-brother? Relationships up to five generations—down to what we would call third cousins—are binding. Those five generations are the khamsa, the tightest unit of mutual responsibility there is. Beyond that, familial ties start to weaken.

That same focus on genealogy also leads the Bedouin to privilege male children far more than female children. It’s the reflex of the rules of descent and protection. A girl’s children will belong to the clan of her husband, so investing in a daughter is not a good move for a family or for a tribe: If her children are not part of their khamsa, they will be of no help in the future. Biblical genealogies, too, are focused entirely on men. Jacob’s 70 descendants don’t even include his daughters. The rare exceptions prove that generalization.

Bailey’s understanding of the Bible was that it was eclectic in its intended readership. He didn’t think that any part of the Bible came from a Bedouin-like society, but rather that the biblical authors were appealing to “formerly nomadic Israelites” in an attempt to incorporate them into their semi-urbanized society. Such historical reconstructions continue to occupy scholars. For example, archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef has argued that the nomadic nature of David’s kingdom allows us to read biblical narratives, even very familiar stories, in new, exciting, and productive ways.

Bailey left behind a massive legacy, primarily of ethnographic work, that produced detailed knowledge about Bedouin society, values, and practices. There is much yet to do for biblical scholars who will turn their attention to his work and think creatively and innovatively about how it can help us make better sense of biblical history, literature, and culture.

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Aaron Koller is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University. He studies Semitic languages and history.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily and the BAS Library

Review: Bedouin Culture in the Bible

How Desert Culture Helps Us Understand The Bible

Bible Books

Book Review: Bible and Bedouin