Early History of the Jews: One of Defeat, Suffering and Strife? | Middle East And North Africa

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FIRST HEBREWS

The first Hebrews were a nomadic tribe of pastorialists who lived almost entirely off their herds of goats, sheep and cattle. They were Semitic pagan nature worshippers that wandered the deserts between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Some scholars state that Jews embraced monotheism because when they settled in Israel — a lush place before the time of Christ — where their survival was less dependant on the whims of nature, allowing them to focus their attention more on creating a unified civilization.

The Near East at the time of the first Jews was a time of chaos. The Bronze Age was ending and the Iron Age was emerging and the Near East was a patchwork of rival kingdoms that included the Israelites, Jebusites, Amorites, Ammonsites, Hittites, Horvites and Philistines. The Assyrians and Phoenicians were rising, Egypt was in a temporary state of decline, and the Mycenaeans were fighting the Trojans in the Trojan War.

Semitic tribes probably arrived in Palestine, known in the early days as Canaan (modern-day Syria. Lebanon, the West Bank, Jordan and Israel) at a very early date. Some scholars believe that Hebrews arrived in Canaan around 2000 B.C. Other scholars believe they arrived around 1200 B.C

Jewish History Websites: Jewish History Timeline jewishhistory.org.il/history Jewish History Resource Center dinur.org ; Center for Jewish History cjh.org ; Jewish History.org jewishhistory.org ; Internet Jewish History Sourcebook sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Bible and Biblical History: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks ; Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Origin of Judaism

Judaism was founded, if you go by the Bible and Torah, about 1300 B.C. by Moses when he brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai. It is said to have originated 3,800 years ago in Mesopotamia with Abraham, the founding patriarch of the tribes of Israel. Judaism. Abraham made an agreement with God to spread the doctrine of monotheism in return for leading Abraham to the promised Land of Canaan (Israel). The Torah of Moses is the source of most of the sacred texts. Jesus was a Jew and the sacred scriptures of Judaism are considered sacred by Christianity and Islam.

In the 5th century B.C. , when the Jews were ruled by the Persians, the priest Ezra and the leader Nehemiah worked together to rebuild Jerusalem and to reorganize and reform Jewish communal life. They urged the Jewish people to renew their covenant with God and rid themselves of foreign and pagan influences. Some regard their efforts as the founding of Judaism. For the next 250 years Judea was a vassal state of Persia ruled by a Jewish governor appointed by the Persian leadership and a religious leader in the form of a high priest.

The term Judaism is first found among the Greek-speaking Jews of the A.D. first century. (Judaismes, see ii Macc. 2:21; 8:1; 14:38; Gal. 1:13–14). Its Hebrew equivalent, Yahadut, found only occasionally in medieval literature but used frequently in modern times, has parallels neither in the Bible nor in the rabbinic literature. [Source: Louis Jacobs, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1990s, Encyclopedia.com]

Monarchical Period, David and Solomon

Before the Jewish kingdom was formed, the Jews were led by officers known as judges. Among these were the warrior Gideon, the great judge Deborah, and Samson, known for his long hair and feats of strength Threatened by the Philistines and resolved to renew their relationship with God, the Israeli tribes were unified under Saul of the tribe of Benjamin around 1023 B.C. Saul helped build a powerful nation and won many victories. His reign ended when he and his son Jonathon were killed in a battle with the Philistines.

According to the BBC: “This was the beginning of Judaism as a structured religion The Jews, under God’s guidance became a powerful people with kings such as Saul, David, and Solomon, who built the first great temple. From then on Jewish worship was focussed on the Temple, as it contained the Ark of the Covenant, and was the only place where certain rites could be carried out.” [Source: BBC]

At first the Hebrew monarchy was very powerful. The height of ancient Israel was between 1000 and 930 B.C. when David and Solomon forged the Hebrew tribes into a small but strong state. Then the Hebrew monarchy was split into two weaker kingdoms — Israel and Judea — which were conquered and ruled by Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians. The Jewish kingdom returned again between 162 and 48 B.C., until they were surmounted again, this time by Romans

Conquest of Jews by the Assyrians and Babylonians

After the death of Solomon in 928 B.C., ten of the Twelve Tribes of Israel — the 10 northern ones — broke off to establish the Kingdom of Israel. Solomon's son Rehoboam ruled over the southern Kingdom of Judah, which included only the tribes Judah and Benjamin and was relatively small in size compared to Solomon’s kingdom. The 12 tribes were said to have descended from the Patriarch Jacob. The ten ones in the north were the 1) Reuben, 2) Gad, 3) Zebulon, 4) Simeon, 5) Dan, 6) Asher,7) Ephraim, 8) Manasseh, 9) Naphtali and 10) Isaachar. They became known as the Lost Tribes of Israel when they disappeared after northern Israel was conquered by the Assyrians.

For more than three centuries the Kingdom of Israel was nearly constantly ridden by internal conflict and threats from external enemies. At times the rulers of the northern kingdom showed they were able military leaders, but they fell short when it came to moral and religious leadership,

The revived Assyrian empire, conquered Israel’s northern empire in 722 B.C. Sargon recorded: "The city of Samaria I besieged. I took. I carried away 27,290 of the people that dwelt therein." The Babylonian — more properly the Neo-Babylonians or Chaldeans — sacked Jerusalem in 598-597 B.C. Before that, the Babylonian army, led by Nebuchadrezzar (the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible) defeated the Assyrians and Egyptians at Carchemish in 605.

Exile of the Jews Under the Babylonians and the Beginning of The Jewish Diaspora

In 587 B.C. the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, the Jewish leadership was killed. This resulted in the exile of most of the Israelite nobility and leadership. Many Jews were sent into exile in Babylon.

In 587 BC, the Neo- Babylonians (Chladeans), under King Nebuchadnezzar II, destroyed Jerusalem, the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, and the Temple of Jerusalem — the "House of God" — built by King Solomon, as the centrepiece of Jewish faith. The Biblical books of 2 Chronicles and 2 Kings describes how the Neo-Babylonians took the elite of the Jewish people into captivity. Psalm 137:1 records the anguish of the captives: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion". After the Neo-Babylonian empire was defeated by the Persians from modern Iran, the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah led a minority of Jewish exiles back to Jerusalem, motivated by an ancient version of Zionism. [Source: Huffington Post, February 3, 2015]

In 539 B.C., the Persian king Cyrus, who had defeated the Neo-Babylonian armies, gave the exiles permission to return. Many, however, remained in Babylonia, which, together with Egypt, where Jews had also voluntarily settled, became the first community of the Diaspora. Those who did return found a Temple in ruins and, according to The Bible, a dispirited people, without spiritual leadership, who had turned their backs on the laws of the Torah and had mixed with non-Hebrews and adopted some of their non-monotheist religious practices.

The Jews that stayed in exile marks the beginning the Jewish tradition of the Diaspora —living away from Israel. It was also apparently during the Babylonian Exile that the institution of the synagogue as a house of prayer began to emerge. During the centuries that followed the conquests by the Neo-Babylonians, the Jewish state fell under the auspices of various empires such as Persia, Hellenistic Greece and Rome. It was a bit like an ethnic state like Turkmenistan or Armenia in the Soviet Union, or a colony like pre-World War II India or Algeria.

Is the Old Testament So Compelling Because It’s a “Loser’s Tale”

Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is, perhaps, unique on the planet inasmuch as it is, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests in his new book, “Why the Bible Began”, so entirely a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world — persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated — and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened.[Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023; Book: “Why the Bible Began,” by Jacob L. Wright (Cambridge)]

“The easiest explanation is that it happened this way because that’s the way God wanted it to happen. But this does not lessen the need to say how it happened. Or, as Edward Gibbon wrote, in one of the most perfect of sentences, explaining his ambition to provide a rational account for the rise of Christianity, “As truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes?”

“The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable. Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow. Defeat usually compelled other ancient peoples, as it does us, to invent rationalizations for what happened. (Yes, we failed to pacify Afghanistan, but nobody could have done so.) In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.

History of the Jews — A History of Defeat and Suffering?

Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: The Hebrew Bible was mostly composed — composed, recomposed, and redacted, by many hands at many times in many places — during the millennium before the Common Era, and the defeats endured by the Jews, having settled, probably peaceably, in the Egyptian-dominated land they called Canaan, are still astonishing to itemize. The most significant of these took place in the middle centuries of that millennium. First, the Assyrians, around 720 B.C., conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported and enslaved its people. [Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023; Book: “Why the Bible Began,” by Jacob L. Wright]

“Then, around 600 B.C., the Babylonians — led by the impressively named Nebuchadnezzar — laid siege to Jerusalem and ended the southern Kingdom of Judah and perhaps its temple as well, resulting in another massive forced migration. So began the “Babylonian captivity,” which lasted, by legend, until the Babylonians, in turn, were conquered by the Persian King Cyrus, who issued an edict, in 569 B.C., allowing the Jews to go back to Jerusalem. After that came the Seleucid Greeks, who ran things briefly, only to be kicked aside by the Romans, who were running everything in those days. It was in putting down the First Jewish Revolt, in 70 A.D., that the Romans laid waste to Jerusalem, destroyed its temple, and saw its people once again scattered, this time for good.

“All these historical details are controversial: the mass expulsion of the Jews to Babylon may have involved only a select number of the élite; the edict of Cyrus may have been, as Wright suspects, a retrospective invention giving a particular name to a more general Persian practice of religious toleration. Even the First Temple, the so-called Temple of Solomon, may have been nothing more than a tabernacle tent, turned by retrospective memory into a marvel of cedar and gold and columns. Yet a legacy of losses seems hard to deny.

As an apologist, Wright suggests... that the Jewish stories have a special virtue for having been forged in the smithy of suffering. “One cannot help but wonder: if neighboring peoples had not only admitted defeat but also made it central to a new collective identity, as the biblical scribes did, would they too have produced corpora of literature that continued to be transmitted for generations?” he asks. Yet the Judaean cause isn’t necessarily vindicated by the scale of the suffering, or by the lyricism of its lamentations, since the essential lesson conveyed isn’t the lesson one would wish for — the thought that nobody should conquer other people or throw them into slavery and exile — so much as the thought that it was bad luck it happened to us. The Lamentations can be universalized, but they are limited, in the first instance, to us and ours. [Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023; Book: “Why the Bible Began,” by Jacob L. Wright]

And is the poetic potency of defeat so purely a Jewish discovery? Homer, certainly, found greater pathos in the Trojans’ downfall than glory in the Greeks’ victory, and made the humane family man Hector at least as attractive as the triumphant Achilles; and we ourselves volubly commemorate losses, from the Alamo to 9/11. “Here’s to the losers, bless ’em all!” Sinatra sang, and, often enough, we call down God’s blessing on the losers, since they so clearly do not have man’s.

Divisions Within the Jewish Kingdom

Jewish history was shaped almost as much by internal rivalries as it was by threats from the outside. Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: The southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, which we might have imagined as agreeable sister kingdoms, were, in the centuries around 900-700 B.C., warring adversaries, though a single deity, one of many names, was shared between them. The oldest deity, El — “Israel” is usually interpreted to mean “One who struggles with God” — got replaced over time by the unnameable deity Yahweh, who originally had a female companion, and then by a more metaphysical maker, Elohim. [Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023; Book: “Why the Bible Began,” by Jacob L. Wright]

In “Why the Bible Began,” Wright traces the narrative rivalries and divisions that formed the Hebrew Scriptures. Wright stresses the extent of the disruption that occurred when Israel was subjugated by the Assyrians while Judah maintained self-rule for more than a century afterward. (A blink in Biblical time, perhaps, but it’s an interval like the one that separates us from the Civil War.) It was during this period, he argues persuasively, that a fundamental break happened, leaving a contrapuntal discord in the Bible between the southern “Palace History” and the “People’s History” of the dispossessed northern scribes. The Palace History conjured up Saul and David and Solomon and the rest, still comfortably situated within a “statist,” dynastic Levantine court; the People’s History, by contrast, was aggressively indifferent to monarchs, real or imagined, and concentrated instead on popular figures, Moses and Miriam, the patriarchs and the prophets. The Jewish tradition of celebrating non-dynastic figures of moral or charismatic force — a practice mostly unknown, it would seem, in the rest of the ancient world — begins in the intersection of dispossessed Israelites and complacent Judaeans.

The northern and the southern narratives were, Wright says, constantly being entangled and reëntangled by the Biblical writers, as a kind of competition in interpolation. So, for instance, Aaron the priest is interpolated latterly as Moses’ brother in order to align the priestly court-bound southern caste with the charismatic northern one. Again and again, what seems like uniform storytelling is revealed to be an assemblage of fragments, born from defeat and midwifed by division.

Different Narratives from the North and South

Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: This process is perhaps not as strange as Wright seems to think, and not even unknown within the nearer confines of American history. The defeated Southerners of our Civil War also made a popular myth-history out of very different material from that of their Northern brethren. The Southern scribes, too, favored non-dynastic folk heroes, such as Davy Crockett, and fictional romantic figures, such as Rhett Butler, over the Presidential luminaries whose names bedeck Northern cities. The compass directions are reversed, north to south, but one is very much a people’s narrative, the other a palace narrative. Indeed, the Western, that peculiarly American contribution to the world’s store of epic and saga, often depends on the tale of a defeated Confederate at large to enforce virtue, someone whose heroic individualism is counterpoised with the superficial discipline of the federal troops. The beloved figure of the outlaw, still haloed by Bob Dylan and others, with Jesse James (a onetime Confederate guerrilla) at its center, is that of a Southern soldier who won’t give up after defeat, so that he crosses into a subversive and (in Wright’s terms) an anti-statist role. A people’s history is not always an admirable one. [Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023; Book: “Why the Bible Began,” by Jacob L. Wright]

Wright is both an analyst of Biblical texts and an apologist for them. His analysis is often brilliant and persuasive, leading us to see ideological fractures in texts that we thought we knew. And though much of the textual history will be familiar to scholars who have gone deep into the weeds, or the bulrushes, Wright does a terrific job of bringing it forward for his readers. He explains, for instance, that the great opening pages of Genesis are an interpolation of the Babylonian period, and a conscious, studio-notes-style rewrite of a violent Babylonian creation myth in which a female spirit is slain by a male one, and only then the world begun. Against this, the Jewish writers post the more placid, word-centered creation tale of Elohim; in a culture where words are all that is left as weapons, it’s words that make the universe.

“North and South never managed to overcome their rivalry,” Wright tells us, identifying traces of it everywhere in the text. Genesis, he stresses, exists on several sedimentary levels. One level focusses on the doings of the Creator; another gives us a more familial version of the creation story. This story, rooted not in Elohim and his acts but in Abraham and his progeny, emphasizes continuity, and the idea that the Israelites had always lived in the promised land. The Mosaic account, in Exodus, is a sharply different and imperial alternative. “Whereas the patriarchs make peace with the inhabitants of Canaan,” Wright observes, “the Exodus-Conquest Account presents the newly liberated nation taking the country by force.” In his view, the tension between the “ecumenical and conciliatory” political model and the “particularist and militarist” model defines the character of the whole. At the other end of the Bible, Wright, having so neatly delineated the wars between the north, which was centered on Samaria, and the south, which was centered on Jerusalem, makes our encounter with the southern fable of the Good Samaritan suddenly hair-raising. Revisiting Jesus’ tale about a traveller, beset by robbers, who was left untouched by a Levite (i.e., his own southern people) but rescued by a kind Samaritan (i.e., a northerner), we realize that the parable contains within it a thousand years of contentious Jewish history. One people, divided in two, should again be one people.

Impact of the Jewish Narrative of Suffering on Christianity

Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: Yet Wright’s meditations on the inspirational power of Jewish loss lead one, as does that Madison Avenue poster, to a larger contemplation of the “successor” faith. How much losing is there, really, in Christianity? At first glance, the Christian story appears to reverse the polarities and make a tale of universal triumph out of the old Jewish stories of particular defeat. But is this really so? Debates still rage over whether the Jewish figure of the “suffering servant” presaged the Christian example. [Source: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 21, 2023]

Whatever scholars conclude, though, the force of the Christian example surely lies in the extremity of the deity’s abasement, tortured to death in the most humiliatingly imaginable way and left to be buried as a criminal. The Christian fable potently compresses the Jewish stories of suffering into a single story, unfolding over a single year. Indeed, doesn’t the emotional appeal of Christianity rest on its very Jewish ritualization of extreme suffering and humiliating defeat as a prelude to divine favor? Consider the number of images of Crucifixion (Jesus dying) in Italian churches as opposed to those of the ascension (Christ rising). Christian art centers on a moment of anguish and defeat, and this is in essence a Jewish idea.

Image Sources: Wikimedia, Commons

Text Sources: Internet Jewish History Sourcebook sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); “Old Testament Life and Literature” by Gerald A. Larue, New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Wikipedia, National Geographic, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Times of London, The New Yorker, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, and various books and other publications.

Last updated February 2024