Turning to the internal geography of the Promised Land, the northern part containing the crossroads of the world was called Galilee, or ‘Galilee of the Nations’ because of its international flavour. The southern part, Judaea, was more mountainous and isolated from the rest of the world, encouraging a more distinctively Jewish culture with the capital of Jerusalem at its centre.
The Promised Land is about the same size as Wales, but it includes every kind of climate and scenery. Wherever you live, there is somewhere in Israel that is just like home. The place most like England is just south of Tel Aviv. Carmel in the north is known as ‘Little Switzerland’. Just 10 minutes from Carmel you can sit down among palm trees. Prominent in the land is the River Jordan, which rises on Mount Hermon and runs north to south within the rift valley mentioned earlier, through the Sea of Galilee and down to the Dead Sea. A fertile plain surrounds its course.
All the flora and fauna of Europe, Africa and Asia can be found in Israel. Scots pine trees grow next to palm trees from the Sahara. In biblical times the wild animals in the country included lions, bears, crocodiles and camels. It seems as if the whole world was somehow squeezed into one small country.
History
Having made ourselves familiar with the general geography of the Old Testament world, we now need to consider an outline of the history of the Old Testament. It may sound daunting to have to cover 2,000 years or more, but a simple chart will help us to grasp the basics (Geography).
The Old Testament covers over 2,000 years of history before the time of Christ. Genesis 1–11 covers the ‘prehistoric’ part – the creation of the universe, the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden, the Flood and the Tower of Babel. The focus here is on humankind in general, though including a ‘godly’ line. But we can chart the history of Israel itself from 2000 BC, when God calls Abraham (though it would be centuries before the nation was formed).
The Old Testament period can be divided into four equal parts of roughly 500 years each. Each period has a key event, a prominent person and a type of leadership.
In the first period the patriarchs led Israel: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. In the second period Israel was led by prophets, from Moses to Samuel. In the third period they were led by princes (kings), from Saul to Zedekiah. The fourth period saw the priests take the lead, from Joshua (a priest who returned to Judah from exile under Zerubbabel’s rule) to Caiaphas in the time of Christ.
None of the leader types was ideal and each individual brought his own flaws to the task. The nation needed a leader who was prophet, priest and king, and they found him in Jesus. Each stage, therefore, was a foreshadowing of the ideal leader who was to come.
This time line is broken by two 400-year gaps. The first comes between the patriarchs and the prophets around 1500 BC and the second after the priests at 400 BC. During these two sets of 400 years God said nothing and did nothing, so there is nothing in the Bible from those two periods. There were some Jewish books written in the second of these two periods, known collectively as the Apocrypha, but they are not part of the Bible proper because they do not cover the time when God was speaking and acting. Malachi is therefore the last book in the Old Testament of our standard English Bibles, then there is a 400-year gap before Matthew’s Gospel.
It is especially interesting to note the events in world history which took place during these two gaps. The Egyptian, Indian and Chinese cultures developed during the first gap, while in the second Greek philosophy developed through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Other great figures of this time include Buddha, Confucius, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. So much happened which historians regard as important, but it was of little relevance to God. It was his history with his people which really mattered.
A brief overview of the books
Genesis 12–50 covers the first period of Israel’s history when the nation was led by the patriarchs (see the table given above). It is possible that the book of Job was written at this time, since there are parallels with the sort of life the patriarchs would have lived.
Relatively few books cover the next quarter. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were all written by Moses. The books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth continue the history of that period.
There are more books associated with the third quarter: Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, plus the poetic books: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. During this third quarter and after Solomon’s time there was a civil war when the 12 tribes divided into two parts, the 10 tribes in the north calling themselves Israel, the two in the south Judah. This is the end of the united nation. There were prophets during that time – Elijah and Elisha – but they didn’t have their own books.
Finally there are a large number of prophetic books associated with the Exile (the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, then the tribes in the southern kingdom of Judah were forced into exile by the Babylonians). Some contain prophecies from before the Exile, some during it, some after, and some have a mixture because the prophet overlaps more than one phase. This tells us something of the importance of this event to Israel’s history. It meant the loss of the land God had promised them and struck at the heart of their identity as a nation.
Prophets warned the people that they were going to lose the land and prophets (sometimes the same ones) comforted them when they did lose the land. There were prophets urging them to rebuild the temple when they returned to Judah after 70 years away. The books of Daniel and Esther are written from Babylon itself. The prophets Ezra and Nehemiah helped to rebuild Jerusalem and renew the people once they had returned.
This brief outline is enough to demonstrate that the books of the Old Testament are not always in chronological order. The ‘history books’ are fairly accurately arranged, but the prophets are organized according to size not chronology. Hence it can be confusing to know who was speaking when.
The rise and fall of a nation
There is another aspect of the chart given in Geography which is worth underlining. The chart shows a dotted line representing the fortunes of the nation, which reach their height under David and Solomon. The line’s gentle rise indicates the progress up to this point, with a sharp drop once the peak is reached. Every Jew looks back to that period and longs for it to return. It was the golden age. They look for a son of David to restore their prosperity.
The last question the disciples asked Jesus before he ascended to heaven was about when he would restore the kingdom to Israel. They are asking the same question 2,000 years later.
The line continues its descent until Israel is exiled by Assyria in 721 BC and then Judah by Babylon in 587 BC.
Following the 400-year gap John the Baptist arrives, the first prophet for a long time. Then comes the life and ministry of Jesus. The New Testament covers 100 years compared to the 2,000-plus years of the Old Testament.
The order of the books
We have noted already that the chronology of Old Testament history is different from the order in which the books appear. There is also a big difference in the order of books as included in the English Old Testament compared with the Hebrew Bible. The English Bible is arranged in terms of history: Genesis to Esther, then poetry: Job to Song of Solomon, then prophecy: Isaiah to Malachi. The prophets are further split into the major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and the minor prophets: Hosea to Malachi. However, the descriptions ‘major’ and ‘minor’
