The History of Ancient Israel according to the Hebrew Bible

The origin of the Israelites, like that of many ancient peoples, is obscure. According to biblical tradition, the Israelites were the descendants of Abraham and his wife Sarah, and of their son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob, to whom God promised the land of Canaan, plentiful progeny, and ultimately descendants who would become kings of Israel. The Bible gives only schematic information about when they might have lived, but it seems to place them somewhere in what modern scholars would reckon as the first two-thirds of the second millennium BCE. The book of Genesis tells us that Jacob and his family went to Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan. They settled there, grew into a people, and were later enslaved by the Egyptian king until God sent Moses to take them out of Egypt and bring them to the land He had promised them. The Bible reports that Moses was succeeded by Joshua, under whose leadership the Israelites conquered a large part of the land of Canaan. They settled there and, for the next several generations, lived as a loose confederation of twelve tribes. In times of military emergency, the tribes most affected would unite under the leadership of an ad hoc military chieftain (or “judge”) to repulse foreign invaders and conquerors.

Recognizing the need for a stronger and more permanent central government, the Israelites eventually established a monarchy, first under Saul, and then under David, who organized a standing army, established a national capital in Jerusalem, defeated neighboring enemies (Philistines, Transjordanian nations, and Aramaean states), and conquered their lands. David bequeathed the throne to his son Solomon, thus establishing the House of David, the dynasty that would last for more than four hundred years. In the biblical view, David’s empire reached the height of its power and prosperity under Solomon, who built a magnificent temple and palace in Jerusalem. In addition, Solomon engaged in massive construction projects throughout the country, strengthened the nation’s defenses, and established political alliances and trade relations with other states. After Solomon’s death, all of the northern tribes, resentful of the burdens that his construction projects had imposed on them, broke away and established an independent kingdom, with its own monarchy. The House of David was left with the tribes of Judah and Simeon and perhaps part of Benjamin. For the next two centuries, the two kingdoms coexisted, sometimes as rivals, sometimes as allies. The Southern Kingdom, ruled by the House of David, was known as Judah. The Northern Kingdom, the larger of the two in geographic area and population, eventually established its capital in Samaria and was known as Israel. It was ruled by a succession of kings and short-lived dynasties, thus lacking the continuity of the Davidic dynasty.

Military conflict with other nations was a recurring phenomenon in the history of both kingdoms, particularly with the Aramaeans of Damascus in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE and with the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires in the eighth to early sixth centuries BCE. The Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722–720 BCE and dispersed its population to Assyria and points beyond (see the map Exile and Diaspora Settlements), replacing them with other groups who had been deported from their native lands. The new population of the north eventually adopted the worship of the Israelite god YHWH and became the Samaritans of later times. Judah survived for another 130 years until it was, in turn, conquered and destroyed by the Babylonian Empire in the decade between 597 and 586 BCE. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, and many of Jerusalem’s elite, including the royal court and officials, soldiers, and craftsmen, were exiled to Babylonia, while others fled to Egypt. Although much of the population remained in Judah, Judah lost its status as an independent nation. With the demise of both the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom, Israel as a sovereign nation ceased to exist, not to be reborn until modern times.

The Persians, under the leadership of Cyrus, defeated the Babylonian Empire in 539–538 BCE. (They would rule the Near East for the next two centuries until their defeat by the forces of Alexander the Great in the late 330s BCE, ushering in the Hellenistic period.) According to the book of Ezra-Nehemiah, Cyrus permitted the exiled Judahites to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple. Judah, then consisting of Jerusalem and its environs within a range of fifteen to twenty miles, constituted a Jewish province of the Persian Empire, known as Yehud in Aramaic. Over the course of the next century, groups of Jews (though only a minority of the exiles and their descendants) returned, overcame local opposition, rebuilt the Temple (515 BCE)—albeit on a more modest scale—and resumed worship there. But there was friction between the returnees and the descendants of those who had remained in Judah and/or the Samaritans living in the province of Samaria, to the north, some of whom may have been descendants of northern Israelites who had not been exiled.

In the middle of the following century, according to Ezra-Nehemiah, two Jewish leaders arrived in Jerusalem from the diaspora. Their actions would shape Jewish life for the future. Ezra, a scholarly priest and scribe, came from Babylonia at the head of a large group of Jews with a commission from the Persian king to teach and enforce the laws of the Torah (the “Teaching of Moses”). At the people’s request, Ezra read the Torah to the public and then led their leaders in studying and interpreting it so as to apply its prescriptions. The people pledged in writing to follow it. Nehemiah, a Jewish member of the Persian court, was appointed as governor of Judah and was authorized finally to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and secure the city. In addition, he improved its economic conditions. He and Ezra opposed intermarriage with foreign women and forced the dissolution of such marriages, a position at odds with the inclusive attitude of the roughly contemporary book of Ruth.

Judah was reconstituted as essentially a religious community rather than an independent nation, subject to a foreign government but enjoying control over its religious affairs and with some degree of internal administrative authority. This became the pattern for Jewish life both in the land of Israel and in the diaspora for most of the next 2,500 years, until the reestablishment of the State of Israel in the twentieth century. The relationship between the Jewish community in Judah and Jewish communities of the diaspora was likewise a precedent for the future. Most Jews would henceforth live outside the land of Israel, but the diaspora Jewish communities would retain their ties with Judah as the center of their spiritual world, with the diasporas and Judah supporting and advocating for each other as the need arose.