The+Hebrews+and+the+Middle+East+2000-500+BC

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=The Hebrews=
 * History, Identity, and Place**
 * 2000 - 500 BC**


 * Read: Reilly: Pages 187-219**

__Terms to know for the midterm exam:__

Tanakh Ur Abram/Abraham Enuma Elish Moses Philistines King Saul King Soloman King David theocracy Assyria Kingdom of Judah the Babylonian Captivity Diaspora

The Hebrew Kingdoms

 * Major contributions to world history
 * religion, ethics, roots of Judaism, Christianity, Islam
 * A small nation, buffeted by strong powers
 * Bible relates major historical events
 * The Hebrew Bible, also known as the **Tanakh**, is a history. It puts forward a sophisticated philosophy of history. In this story, the events of history are the working out of a divine plan in which God has chosen the Israelites to act as an example of the good, obedient to the divine law. When the Israelites are successful, it is a sign of God’s blessing and pleasure with their acts. When they suffer defeat, plague, or disaster, it is a sign of God’s anger at their lack of regard for the law. This is thus a linear history where the events of the past are the key to understanding who the Hebrews are, and what led them to their special status.
 * It is also a key to the future, and the great hope of the Israelites for ultimate justification.

Migration of Hebrews
For the Hebrews, of course, History begins with the creation, but even this is the beginning of the story of how they came to be God’s chosen people. The national drama really begins with a resident of the city of **Ur**, in Mesopotamia, known as **Abram, and later as Abraham**. Abraham’s story begins with a migration out of the city of his birth - Ur of the Chaldees - and a long life of wandering in the middle east. He is considered to be the father of the Israelites in both a real and philosophical sense. According to the Tanakh Abraham literally fathers the men who will found the 12 tribes of Israel. His monotheism is also the theological underpinning for the Hebrew religion, and Hebrew nationalism. to Canaan/Palestine under Abraham, c. 1800 B.C.E.. Abraham journeyed first to Hebron, then to Egypt, and perhaps as far as Mecca, in the Arabian Peninsula. By the time of his life, between 2000 and 1700 BC, Ur was a multiethnic city, and so we can’t say much about Abraham except that he was probably culturally related to the semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and Arabia, and spoke and wrote a language that most could understand. Interesting to note that Abraham lived about 1,000 years after the Historical King Gilgamesh of Uruk, and so must have been aware of the stories of Sumerian culture, including the Sumerian creation myth, the **Enuma Elish** and the story of the flood as related in The Epic of Gilgamesh and other sources. He may have been, like many other Sumerians, looking for a more satisfying idea about life after death, as well.

Joseph and other sons of Isaac, c. 1550 B.C.E.
About 1550 BC a drought appears to have hit hard in the area of Palestine. Since this was the New Kingdom period in Egypt, and Palestine was to a degree under the control of the Egyptians, many people in Palestine went to the valley of the Nile - similar in a way to the way in which workers often follow the economy in the modern world. Not all Israelites went, and many returned at different times.

Prior to this migration, of course, Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery to the Egyptians, and as was not uncommon in this period, as a slave he had risen to become the Prime Minister of Pharaoh. This is considered in the Jewish tradition to be a working out of the will of God, in the sense that Joseph’s slavery turned out to be just what the migrating Israelites needed - he got them jobs that they needed to survive, and was thus seen as having saved the Hebrew nation.

Again, then, we can see the interpretation of events in this sense as part of a linear story of the development of the Hebrews as the chosen people of God. It is a part of their identity as the ones chosen to have a covenant with the creator. It will lead to later events that further deepen and cement that relationship - History as explanation, identifier, path to the future.


 * Exodus from Egypt, Moses, c. 1300 B.C.E. **

Eventually, the labor of the free Hebrews became the enforced labor of slaves under a Pharaoh obsessed with building (probably Ramesses II). This slavery became too heavy a burden to bear, but once again, according to the Tanakh, the Hebrews were delivered by God’s divine plan - this time in the form of **Moses**, a child of Hebrews who had been delivered, seemingly by chance, into the house of Pharaoh, where he achieved high status. Moses requested that the Pharaoh let the Israelites leave, but this did not occur until God had demonstrated His power by sending 10 great plagues. There is no record of this incident in the Egyptian records extant, and the Egyptians were normally quite careful record keepers. This suggests that the Israelites saw this as more important than did the Egyptians. Whether it occurred or not is not the point. The Israelites clearly saw this as a defining moment, when their delivery from slavery was also their confirmation as God’s chosen people, through a demonstration of God’s power that humbled the most powerful kingdom in the world. The purpose of Hebrew history is clear here.


 * Confederation of the Twelve Tribes Under Judges, 1200-1020 B.C.E. **

After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the Hebrews eventually came to the land of Canaan, which they proceeded to conquer in a series of swift, gory, and drastic - campaigns during which they claim to have toppled the walls of Jericho, put all of its residents, man, woman and child to the sword, and generally eliminated the Canaanites.* It is clear that such genocide was not as complete as the Hebrews put in their story - the Canaanites certainly survived, and the tribes, whose political organization was a kind of confederation with no center, learned much about agriculture and urban life from them.

Rise of Philistines
If the Hebrews had rivals for the conquest of Canaan to north, east, and south, a more formidable rivalry threatened from the west, where the **Philistines**, a people perhaps of Illyrian origin invaded the coastal plain toward the end of the thirteenth century B.C. It was they who gave their name to the land: Palestine is a modification of Philistia. They were pushing farther inland and acquiring control over the land of the Hebrews. This assault could not be met by a loose confederation of tribes who came together only when the spirit of Yahweh inspired some leader to summon them to conflict. Such a procedure was altogether too casual.*

Saul (1020-1000 B.C.E.), David (1000-961 B.C.E.), Solomon (961-922 B.C.E.)
Therefore, the seer Samuel agreed to anoint Saul, an inspired captain, as king. But Samuel himself had grave misgivings over this course and warned the people that the monarchy would impose on them exacting burdens. Even more serious was the foreboding that the rule of a king would compete with the rule of God. Israel up to this point was a theocracy. The very word **theocracy** was later coined by the Jew Josephus to describe this people ruled by God, whose will was made known to them by seers and prophets. In matters of war God's will was executed by inspired bands of warriors, like the band of Gideon, which was deliberately reduced in size to prove that God, not human prowess, had given the victory. In place of this system would come standing armies, taxes, and, worst of all in the eyes of the purists, foreign alliances, principally because they entailed religious alliances. Those who made military cove nants were expected to recognize each others' gods. The resolve on the part of Israel not to pay tribute to alien gods was to be for them a source of both inner division and outward isolation. The unbroken loyalty of the Jews to Yahweh throughout the centuries has been both their glory and their tragedy.*

Assyrians

 * Assyria** was an empire on the move in the 8th century BC. Located originally in a Northern area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, it had been easy to raid and so was not a leader in the early growth of the area we now call Iraq. However, the Assyrians had by the 8th century BC created a well organized army that could put up to 500,000 soldiers in the field, armed with weapons and shields of armor, chariots, and divided into various specialized units that made the army both flexible and fast. They conquered nearly everything around them until they reached the area of Palestine. Here they ran into the two kingdoms of the Hebrews united under a single king.

If King Solomon had been harsh - extracting massive taxes by whatever means necessary, his son Rehoboam was worse. Even so, the two tribes of Judah accepted him as their king because of his lineage from David. The Ten Tribes of Israel, though, expected the king to behave according to a kind of covenant, reflecting their relationship with God. They saw Rehoboam as too harsh, and believed he was not keeping the covenant, and so trouble began. As the Assyrians approached, around 745 BC, the tribes of Israel allied with Damascus to stop them. Judah and its king refused. Damascus and Israel then allied against Judah, and Judah called on the Assyrians for help. The Assyrians then overran Israel, and turned Judah into a subject kingdom in 722 BC. As was frequently Assyrian policy, the conquered ten northern tribes were subjected to mass deportation. They never returned to Israel.

Age of great prophets, 750-550 B.C.E.
During this time, prophets, who had long been a part of the way the Hebrews understood and followed the will of God, began to ask and answer one of the most serious questions of all: why has God subjected his chosen people to an ever-increasing, ever more devastating series of defeats? Isaiah, a prophet who lived roughly from 780 to 690 BC, suggested that it had to do with Israelites welcoming other gods in their kingdoms - Solomon, for example, for foreign relations purposes, had married non-Hebrew women, and built altars to their gods near Jerusalem.

Southern kingdom of Judah
Judah survived until the Chaldeans (also known as Neo-Babylonians) under Nebuchadnezzar, in the process of defeating the Assyrians and the Egyptians, destroyed Jerusalem and seized 15,000 captives. The Hebrews were removed to Babylon, and the Temple raised. The most important questions here were two - the last king of Judah had been a good king - who had cleansed the land of idols and foreign gods. He had been killed in battle, and the Ark of the Covenant lost. This could not be retribution for breaking the covenant. What, then, was it? Another prophet, also with the name of Isaiah, explained that, in a nutshell, Israel’s suffering might serve to help the other nations - through its suffering, the people of Israel and Judah were to be a light to the world, to show the true path. In this explanation, prophesy notwithstanding, we see again a sense of historic national mission - and one that now placed the Hebrews at the center of the world.

Babylonian Captivity, 586-538 B.C.E.
During the babylonian Captivity - of the Hebrews, enforced separation from the now destroyed temple combined with the fact that the priests were scattered to the winds meant that the Hebrews had to find new ways to maintain their faith. They did this through what would eventually become the synagogue, and through a careful study of the law of God as put forth in the Pentateuch: the first five books of the Old Testament. This law would eventually become codified as the Talmud, and understanding and following it would become a critical part of what was now called, because the people who created it came from Judah, Judaism. The people who followed this law came to be known as Jews, and they set up elaborate requirements for marriage among other things, including male circumcision, as ways of assuring that they stayed together with others of the same faith and past.

Persian Salvation
Cyrus, king of Persia, defeated the Babylonians, and following that allowed the Jews to return and rebuild of the temple at Jerusalem about 500BC. By the time the temple was rebuilt, strict adherence to Talmudic law, and descent from a Jewish family had become critical to members of the community, who now saw themselves as unique in history, and bearers of a crushing, but critically important burden in the world - the responsibility of acting as a beacon for people to world over to see the righteousness and might of their one God.

Hellenistic Greek and Roman rule after 322 B.C.E.
In brief, the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, conquered Palestine and the Persian empire after the Battle of Issus in 333 BC. Alexander was a student of history, and of cultures, and sought to blend the cultures of the Persians and the Greeks. He followed an active policy of Hellenization (Greek-ifying - in Palestine, Egypt, and Persia, and actively Orientalized - the Greek world.

The Romans eventually gained control of the Hebrews by conquest of Alexander’s empire, and set about turning it into a province under Roman law. This led the Jews to rebellion - under the table at first, and more openly later.

Romans
Suppressed Jewish rebellion. Various Jewish groups, including the Essenes, authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Sadducees, and the Pharisees, all became in one way or another activists against Roman rule. It was this political context into which Jesus was born around 6 BC.


 * Diaspora**, 70 C.E. - Eventually, the Romans decided to pacify the Jews, and ran a campaign that ended by forcing most Jews into exile. A small group held out in a fortress built by King Herod in the time before Jesus on a high plateau called Masada. There they were either slaughtered, or committed mass suicide as the Romans closed in.