is a clean‐shaven Egyptian with darker brown skin. The visitors from the east (Canaan?) are the six figures to the left of him. They have lighter brown skin, beards, and some colorful tunics. One thing such images make clear is that the people who dwelled east of Egypt looked more like the contemporary inhabitants of the Middle East and Africa than the light‐skinned inhabitants of North America and Europe. Indeed, not only were ancient Israelites non‐white, but the ancient world lacked an exact correlate to modern concepts of race.
The “land of Israel” where most biblical events take place is actually relatively small. As you can see on Map 1.1, the Sea of Galilee is only 30 miles from the Mediterranean Sea, and the Dead Sea is only 60 miles away. The distance from the area around Shechem in the north to Beersheba in the south is about 90 miles. This means that the main setting of biblical history, the area of the central highlands (thus excluding the non‐Israelite coastal plains), is about 40 miles by 90 miles – not much bigger than many large metropolitan areas. This tiny area is the site where texts and religious ideas were formed that would change world history. Notably, this highland area also encompasses many areas most in dispute in the contemporary Middle East, areas that are variously designated as “the West Bank,” “occupied territories,” and “Judea and Samaria.” Before 1967 these regions were not part of the modern nation of Israel, but they were seized by Israel from Jordan during the 1967 war, and their status is one major issue in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
This conflict is the latest chapter in thousands of years of struggles between different groups for control of this narrow strip of land. In ancient times, the land of Israel occupied a strategic location along the “Fertile Crescent” extending from Egypt in the southwest to the Mesopotamian empires of Assyria and Babylonia in the northeast. Because much of the area east of Israel was impassable desert, the major roads between Egypt and Mesopotamia had to cross the narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the desert (see Map 1.2). Israel lay right along those roads and often got run over by the armies of its more powerful neighbors. The various empires of the ancient Near East were almost always laying claim to Israel and the surrounding areas, and the peoples of Israel got caught in the middle.
MAP 1.2 The major routes of the ancient Near East. Note how the major routes move from Egypt on the left through Judah/Israel near the Mediterranean to Syria and Mesopotamia to the northeast and east. Redrawn from Yohanan Aharoni and Michael Avi‐Yonah, The Macmillan Bible Atlas (revised edition). New York, Macmillan, 1977, map 9.
Major Periods in the Biblical Drama
The major turns in biblical history can be seen in this context. The Egyptian empire dominated the area of ancient Israel from around 1450 to 1200 BCE, the years when most scholars think the biblical exodus may have happened. Then a series of catastrophes ended Egyptian rule over the area and inaugurated a power vacuum in the land of Israel. This is when we first see identifiable archaeological evidence of a “people of Israel.” This people settled in small villages in the hill country of Judah and Israel during the pre‐state tribal period (1250–1000 BCE, including the time of the chieftain, Saul). At the outset of the first millennium, the figures David and Solomon establish what might be termed a proto‐monarchy in Jerusalem that rules Israelite tribes for several decades (around 1000–930 BCE). In the later ninth century, the tribes of Israel form a monarchy of their own, and we see a period of neighboring monarchies where there are two kingdoms in broader Israel: a kingdom of Israel in the north, and a kingdom of Judah in the south (930–722 BCE).
AD, BC, BCE, and CE
The older expressions for dates, BC and AD, are explicitly Christian in orientation. BC comes from “Before Christ,” and AD comes from the Latin anno Domini, which means “in the year of the Lord.”
Over the past decades, scholarly works have tended to use the more neutral terms BCE and CE, which refer to “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era,” respectively. The year references are the same, but the labels are not specifically Christian.
This Introduction uses the standard scholarly BCE and CE abbreviations.
This window of freedom from imperial domination, however, was not to last. Especially in the late eighth century (745 BCE and onward), the Assyrian empire, based in what is now northern Iraq, gained control of both Israel and (later) Judah (see Map 1.3). This empire completely destroyed the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and dominated the kingdom of Judah for decades. Indeed, from 745 to 586 BCE, Israel and Judah were dominated by a series of brutal empires – Assyria, Egypt (for a couple of years), and Babylonia (based in middle Iraq). Though Judah enjoyed brief independence between domination by the Assyrians and the Egyptians, the nation was dominated and eventually destroyed by the Babylonian empire, which reduced Jerusalem, along with its Temple, to rubble in 586 BCE (destruction of Jerusalem, ending a period of Judah alone, 722–586 BCE). Thus began one of the most important periods of biblical history, the Babylonian exile (586–538 BCE). At the outset of this period, most of the elite who had lived in Judah were forcibly deported to Babylon, and in many cases neither they nor their children ever returned. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of documents from the perspective of these deportees and their children, such that biblical history is now usually defined (from their point of view) in terms of “pre‐exile” and “exile.”
MAP 1.3 The reach of three of the major empires that dominated Israel and/or Judah: the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires.
Redrawn from Successive World Kingdoms: Persia, Babylon, Assyria 640–500 BC, www.bible.ca, Abingdon Press, 1994.
The story of Israel and empires, however, was not over. Just decades later, the Persian ruler, Cyrus, conquered the Babylonian empire, ushering in a period of Persian rule of Judah that lasted from 538 to 332 BCE (the Persian period, the beginning of the post‐exilic period, starting in 538 BCE). The Bible records a number of ways in which Cyrus and his successors helped former exiles in Babylonia rebuild the Temple and rebuild their community. Later, Alexander the Great conquered the area in 333 BCE, beginning a period of Hellenistic rule, and it appears that he and his successors generally continued the Persian policies of support of Jerusalem and its leadership during their rule of Judah and Jerusalem (Hellenistic period, 332–167 BCE). Nevertheless, in the late second century (starting in 167 BCE), there was a major crisis in Judah, precipitated by the efforts of some elite Judeans to turn the city of Jerusalem into a Greek city. This crisis eventually led to the formation, for a brief period, of another monarchy in Judah, this one led by a priestly family called the Hasmoneans (also known as the Maccabees). This Hasmonean monarchy continued from 142 to 63 BCE, when the Romans took control of the area, which they named “Palestine” and put under control of a series of governors. The year 63 BCE represents the beginning of the Roman period in Palestine.
