262 MARK LEUCHTER imperial system still resonating in public consciousness among the populations that settled the highlands, associations between Egypt and the urban Canaanite elites of the lowland would have been inevitable, especially if elements of the latter (such as Sisera) engaged in acts to subdue the former (highland Israel). Indeed, other Biblical texts preserve this equivalency and express it in later legislative language. For example, the equation of Canaanite and Egyptian culture underlies Lev 18,1-2 : And YHWH spoke unto Moses, saying: Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them: I am YHWH your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their statutes. This passage is part of a law code that repeatedly reaches back into early Israelite experience, and bears witness to the depth of the Egypt-Canaan association in national memory 16. The phrase “ their statutes” applies to both Egypt and Canaan — they are placed in semantic parallel to each other, and in opposition to YHWH’S laws. The aforementioned passage from Leviticus carries forward an impulse underlying Judg 5,28 and its emphasis on Sisera’s chariot: for the poet, the lowland Canaanites whose culture was so deeply shaped by Egyptian hegemony had adopted their machinery of military conquest 17. Lev 18 is widely regarded as part of the Holiness Code, the origins of 16 which should be identified with the reign of Hezekiah in the late 8th century BCE, following the implications of I. KNOHL, The Sanctuary of Silence. The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis, MN 1995) 200-224. The final form of the Holiness Code, however, should be seen as the product of the Babylonian exile, a time that saw antique intellectual topoi deployed in the service of legal polemics; see M. LEUCHTER, “The Manumission Laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy: The Jeremiah Connection”, JBL 127 (2008) 635-653. Regardless of when one chooses to date the Holiness legislation, the p e r i o d of the late 8th c e n t u r y through the mid 6th c e n t u r y witnesses a resuscitation of ancient tropes in a variety of literary contexts, ranging from the redaction of early wisdom sayings in Hezekiah’s time (Prov 25,1) to the exilic prophet Ezekiel recalling the indigenous origins of Israel in the time before the mature emergence of the tribal league (Ezek 16,3). The author of Lev 18, then, would have lived at a time when the intellectual elite of Israel were well aware of the oldest traditions upon which later conceptual edifices were constructed. A similar sentiment is implied in Samuel’s denunciation of kingship 17 found in 1 Sam 8,11, where chariotry is identified as a hallmark of abusive