The Israelites


The people of Israel were a Semitic people, meaning that they belonged to a group of cultures that shared a common ancestry which can be established though similarities in language. The term Semitic means "from Shem", one of the three sons of Noah of the great flood fame, and consist of such nations as the Akkadians, Amorites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Israelites, Aramaeans and Canaanites.

Israelite writings trace the origins of their nation to a man named Abram (later taking the name Abraham), from the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, who was directed by God to travel to "the promised land" of Canaan, where his descendants would become a mighty nation. Prior t o Abram, Israelite history is well and truly founded in it's Mesopotamian beginnings. The garden of Eden is placed somewhere in that region, the flood of Noah occurred there as it does also in Sumerian writings, and the Tower of Babel was most likely an early ziggurat, a stepped pyramid shaped temple-tower common to the area.

It is difficult to precisely date events in Israelite history. From 1050 BC, in the reign of King Saul, dates can be cross-referenced with events documented by other cultures in the region, but prior to this we rely mostly on the writings of the Israelites themselves. We are given a clear timeframe from Abram to Isaac, Isaac to Jacob, Jacob to his family moving to Egypt, and the amount of time they stayed in Egypt until the Exodus, but the problem timeframe is from the Exodus to the start of the reign of King Saul.

The problem lies in the interpretation of the passage 1 Kings 6:1 in the Old Testament Bible. This passage claims that it was 480 years from the Exodus to the sixth year of the reign of King Solomon (966 BC). If we take this as a literal figure, then the Exodus occurred around 1446 BC and Abram was born around 2166 BC. Another argument is that the figure of 480 is simply a number representing twelve generations of a generic length of forty years, a practice found in other cultures of the time, and that the figure could be interpreted as simply saying "twelve generations" rather than 480 years. It is possible that the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert was also simply "one generation".

As an alternate date to 1446 BC for the Exodus, archaeologists have put forward a date around 1290 BC, as there is much evidence of mass destruction of cities in the mid thirteenth century BC that would have occurred with the Israelite invasion of Canaan. This later date also supports the notion that Rameses II was the Pharaoh referred to in the story of the Exodus (some have used Exodus 1:11 to further support this). On looking at the two dates I have chosen to go with the later rather than the earlier dates.

Abram was born around 2010 BC and lived in the city of Ur in Sumeria, just as the great Sumerian civilisation was collapsing under the weight of Amorite pressure. Abram was a Chaldean, a Semitic people of the region, and moved with his family to the city Haran on the upper Euphrates before travelling to the land of the Canaanites at the age of 75 after his father's death. Mesopotamia at the time had fractured into independent city-states ruled by various Amorite or Assyrian rulers, while Canaan consisted of a multitude of small independent Canaanite city-kingdoms.

Each Canaanite city had it's own king, so it was not unusual for five or six kings to band together to battle three or four others, as the numbers of fighters were probably relatively small. In one instance recorded in Genesis 14, Abram took 318 trained men and defeated the armies of four kings, the kings of Shinar, Ellasar, Elam and Goiim, to rescue his nephew Lot.

Abram, now Abraham, lived as a foreigner in the land of Canaan, followed by his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Due to a famine in the land of Canaan, Jacob and eleven of his twelve sons moved to Egypt around 1720 BC where the other son, Joseph, had risen to a position of power in the court of the Egyptian Pharaoh. This places the move to Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, a time where Egypt had been invaded by the Hyksos people from Palestine.

When the Hyksos people invaded Egypt, they pushed the Egyptian nobility south to Upper Egypt, while they controlled all of Lower Egypt to the Nile delta. The Hyksos where so impressed with Egyptian culture that they took on Egyptian ways, even to the point of calling their rulers Pharaoh. So it is quite possible that the Pharaoh in the story of Joseph was in fact not an Egyptian Pharaoh at all but an Hyksos invader.

During the 430 years that the Israelites lived in the land of Goshen in Egypt, the Egyptians successfully overthrew the Hyksos invaders and reunited Egypt once again under Egyptian rule. The Israelites, now seen as no more than foreigners living in Egypt, were eventually subjected to slavery as the Egyptians began mass building programs that marked the Egyptian New Kingdom period.

Around 1290 BC the Israelites, under the leadership of Moses, left Egypt for "the promised land" of Canaan in the Exodus. After initially refusing to enter Canaan, the Israelites camped in the desert for a generation before eventually invading the land of the Canaanites around 1250 BC. This was a very unstable period of time in the Near East. Egyptian and Hittite forces had fought to a stalemate at the city of Kadesh only a few years earlier, and by 1200 BC the Hittites had been defeated and the Egyptians confined to their own borders by various groupings of people know collectively as the Sea Peoples.

One group that belonged to the Sea Peoples were the Philistines. Although they had settled along the banks of the Mediterranean Sea in small numbers for many years, this period leading up to 1200 BC saw a large increase in Philistine numbers. Between the local Canaanite tribes, the Israelites and the Philistines, the land of Canaan was thrown into a series of wars that lasted until the Israelites finally established dominance of the area under the kings Saul, David and Solomon from 1050 BC to 930 BC. This was the golden age of Israelite history.

With the Hittites no more, the Egyptians confined to their own borders, and the rising Assyrian power restricted by the determined Aramaeans, Israel was free to develop and expand as a nation. This golden age, though, came to an end at the end of the reign of king Solomon when the kingdom fractured into two separate kingdoms, Israel to the north with Sumeria as its capital, and Judah to the south with its capital of Jerusalem.

The northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BC, its people removed from the land and dispersed and assimilated throughout the Assyrian empire, never to gain their identity again. The southern kingdom fell to the Babylonians in 586 BC, all but the poorest people being taken to Babylon, where in 539 BC they were liberated by the Persians, starting to return to Israel, as the southern kingdom now called itself, a year later to rebuild their nation.

During the period of Persian rule, which lasted until 330 BC, the Israelites were free to practice their religious beliefs with the high priests responsible for ruling the nation. When the Persians were defeated by the Greeks, little changed in Israel. When the Greek empire fractured into three segments, Israel was ruled by the Ptolemies of Egypt, until in 198 BC control of the region passed from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids of Syria. Unlike the Ptolemies, the Seleucids were fierce Hellenists, forcing Greek culture onto the Israelite people.

After years of Seleucid oppression where the ruler Antiochus tried to eradicate the Jewish religion, including placing the statue of Zeus in the temple of Jerusalem and sacrificing a pig to it, an elderly villager, Mattahias, and his five sons began a revolt in 167 BC that lasted twenty four years. The Maccabean revolt, named after one of Mattahias's sons who lead the revolt for a six year period, gave Israel a slightly unstable freedom until in 63 BC when the region was conquered, this time by Pompey for the Roman empire who layed a three-month siege of Jerusalem, at one point entering the Most Holy Place within the temple, a sacrilege that the Israelites would not forgive or forget.

During this time the Israelites were looking for their Messiah, someone they expected to liberate them from the Romans. Jesus, called the Christ, was born sometime around 4 BC and was crucified by the Romans around 29 AD on the request of the priests after three years of a teaching and healing ministry. After an uprising, the Romans destroyed the capital Jerusalem around 70 AD, destroying the temple and bringing an end to the Israelite nation until it's re-establishment mid way through the twentieth century.