alone. The Hebrews were concerned with knowing God and his will for them, not philosophical speculation.
The Hebrews believed that although God was sovereign over all of his creation, he endowed human beings with a free will. Each individual was not only empowered with the ability to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, but obligated to do so: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life …” (Deuteronomy 30:19, ESV). God alone was the source of what was right or wrong, good or evil. Choosing to obey God's will resulted in blessings; choosing to disobey resulted in death:
If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you … But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish.
(Deuteronomy 30: 16‐18, ESV)
The Hebrews had an explanation for the existence of evil. It was not the result of the capricious or whimsical will of finite gods who were themselves subject to fate. Rather, evil resulted from the willful choice of the individual to reject God's moral law and act as if autonomous.
Just as the nation of Israel was God's chosen people bound to him by a covenant, so too was the individual. According to the covenant between God and Abraham, the Hebrew people were to make God's moral law known to all the nations of the world by their obedience. There is both parochialism and universalism implied in the covenant. On the one hand, it is a covenant between God and his Chosen People. On the other hand, it is a covenant between God and all humanity. The prophet Isaiah gives a vision of a time when all the nations (i.e. all people groups) of the earth will come to the mountain of the Lord (Isaiah 2:2).
The Hebrew prophets reminded the people that because they were chosen to know God's Law, they had a responsibility to be on the side of justice. They reminded the people that tolerating injustice violated God's Law and would bring upon them God's righteous wrath. Injustice violated the dignity of the individual (both male and female) who bore the image of God, and injustice was therefore an affront to God himself. By reminding the people that their freedom of will impacted the present and the future, the prophets held out the vision of a messianic age free of poverty and injustice. The belief that human beings were able to construct a better world order became one of the core values of Western Civilization.
The worldview of the ancient Hebrews differed dramatically from that of all the other civilizations of the ancient world. It is a “mechanistic” view of a universe that operates by discoverable natural laws, not random chance. Time is understood to be linear with both a beginning and an end not an endless repetition of cycles. There is meaning and purpose for both history and the individual. All this is known by human beings through reason. Because there are moral absolutes implicit in the universe, and because human beings possess a free will, individual choices and actions influence the flow of history. When blended with the worldview of the ancient Greeks (see Chapter 2) and later certain Germanic traditions (see Chapter 4) the result is what is called Western Civilization.
Later Empires
The first of the later empires to arise as the invasions from the north subsided was Assyria. By c. 750 BC, the Assyrians had conquered the whole of Mesopotamia. The northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BC. The Assyrians scattered many of the Hebrews throughout their empire. Thus, the ten northern Hebrew tribes that made up the northern kingdom of Israel after the division of Solomon's kingdom disappeared as they blended in with the inhabitants of the areas in which they settled. The Assyrian Empire expanded until it eventually included Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. It contributed nothing of value to civilization, and its people are remembered primarily for their extreme cruelty.
The Assyrian capital of Nineveh was captured and burned by the Chaldeans in 612 BC. The Chaldean, or Neo‐Babylonian, Empire succeeded the Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia. The empire reached the height of its power under King Nebuchadnezzar II (634–562 BC). Nebuchadnezzar II was a great builder. He transformed the city of Babylon into one of the most splendid cities of the ancient Near East. “In addition to its size,” Herodotus wrote, “Babylon surpasses in splendor any city in the known world.”
Nebuchadnezzar II invaded and conquered the southern kingdom of Judah in 597 BC. After taking Jerusalem, he deposed Jehoiakim (c. 635–598) and placed on the throne, a new king of his own choosing, Zedekiah (b. 618). When Zedekiah revolted and made an alliance with Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar II invaded and laid siege to Jerusalem. After an 18‐month siege, Jerusalem fell. The city and Solomon's Temple were razed to the ground. Zedekiah and several thousand prominent citizens were taken captive to Babylon. Zedekiah died in prison, but those who were taken captive with him endured 70 years of exile in Babylon. The period of the “Babylonian Captivity” became a defining moment in Jewish history.
The Chaldean Empire, impressive as it was, lasted less than a century. In 539 BC, a force of Medes and Persians led by a brilliant military strategist, Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 BC), brought the curtain down on the Chaldean Empire with the capture of Babylon. Cyrus issued a decree allowing the Hebrew exiles to return to Judah. Many made “the return to Zion” over the next 110 years, where they enjoyed a measure of autonomy under Persian rule. When Cyrus' son Cambyses died in 522 BC, having added Egypt to the empire founded by his father, all of western Asia was under Persian rule. Darius the Great (550–486 BC) abandoned any further conquest, concentrating instead upon transforming the vast conquests into what many call the world's first modern empire.
Persia under Darius was the first empire to be administered by a royal bureaucracy. Darius divided his empire into provinces under the rule of royal officials known as “satraps.” Commerce was encouraged by a state‐issued coinage, an idea borrowed from the Lydians. Lydia was a wealthy kingdom in west‐central Anatolia (modern Turkey). Many believe that the Lydians were the first to mint coins. Cyrus the Great conquered Lydia in 546 BC. Along with the standardized coinage went a common system of weights and measures. A system of roads, including the Royal Post Road, which stretched from Ephesus on the Aegean Sea to Susa near the Persian Gulf, encouraged commerce and unified the empire. A canal linking the Red Sea with the Nile River, originally dug by the Egyptians but since allowed to fill with sand, was reopened. Aramaic became the official language throughout the empire. Zoroastrianism, a dualistic religion that stressed ethics while rejecting blood sacrifices, polytheism, and temple worship, became a universal faith, transcending both the state and the people that gave it birth, thus further unifying the Persian Empire.
The expansion of the Persian Empire through Asia Minor to the Aegean coast brought the Persians into contact with the Greeks. The so‐called Persian Wars between 499 and 479 BC, and the subsequent conquest of the Persian Empire by the youthful Alexander the Great of Greece, spread Greek culture throughout the ancient world from Egypt and Greece in the west to the Indus River in the east. It remained for the Romans to complete the mission by unifying the whole of the Mediterranean world, and then pass both the Judeo‐Christian and Greco‐Roman traditions on to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in AD 476.
References
1 Dell'Amore, C. (2009). Nefertiti's Real, Wrinkled Face Found in Famous Bust? Science News. http://esciencenews.com/sources/national.geographic/2009/03/31/nefertitis.real.wrinkled.face.found.famous.bust (accessed 18 October 2019).
2 ‘Fake' claims over Nefertiti
