LITMIR.BIZ

      MAP 1.1 The land of Israel and its surroundings. Redrawn from Adrian Curtis (ed.), Oxford Bible Atlas (4th edition). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

As you start your study of the Bible, it is particularly important to get an understanding of the different parts of the land of Israel and the peoples who lived there. Though people often apply the term “Israel” to this entire area, this term often refers more narrowly to the peoples who settled in the northern highlands described above (“Hill Country of Ephraim/Israel” on Map 1.1, with Shechem at its center) along with parts of the Gilead of the Transjordan. For much of biblical history, this area and this people are to be distinguished from “Judah,” which is located in the southern highlands of the map (“Hill Country of Judah”; Hebron is a Judean city). Note that Jerusalem lay between Israel and Judah and was not “Israelite”/“Judean” until David conquered it by stealth at the outset of his monarchy. This distinction between “Judah” in the south and “Israel” in the north is important for much of Israel’s early history. Later on, the term “Israel” came to encompass Judah as well, and the narratives of the Hebrew Bible – many of them written later – project that picture onto the earliest history of the people. Therefore, the word “Israel” has at least two major meanings in the Bible: a narrow sense referring to the ancient tribal groups settled in the northern highlands and a broader sense referring to Judah along with those other tribal groups. When people refer to the “land of Israel” or the “people of Israel,” they are usually using the word “Israel” in the broader sense, but there will be numerous times in this Introduction when it will be important to remember the narrower sense of “Israel” (in the north) as opposed to “Judah” (in the south).

Those are the scholarly terms for the region and its inhabitants. As we move forward, it is important to distinguish such terms from contemporary designations for the land. In particular, it is important not to confuse the word “Israelite,” which refers to ancient inhabitants of the land of Israel, and the word “Israeli,” which is a modern term referring to citizens of the contemporary state of Israel. Note also the use of the term “Palestine” to refer to the same area from the Roman period onward. This term is now used by Palestinians and many others to refer to the same land area that Jews and others refer to as “Israel.”

      Visualizing (the Possible Ancestors of) Ancient Israelites

These ancient Israelites were different in important ways from all contemporary peoples, including Israelis. Unfortunately we do not have contemporary representations of ancient Israelites. The best we can do are images like Figure 1.1 (a relief painting from an official’s tomb at Beni Hasan), which is an Egyptian depiction of visitors to Egypt from the east, perhaps from the region of Canaan. As we will see in the next chapter, the Israelites likely descended from Canaanite peoples, and so this representation gives us an image of what the ancestors of ancient Israelites (or their near-neighbors) looked like.

      FIGURE 1.1 Ancient visitors to Egypt from the East (Canaanites?).

      On the far right of the picture there 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 took 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 was often 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 were 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 (eds.), 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 many 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 (BCE), David and Solomon established what might be termed a proto-monarchy in Jerusalem that ruled the Israelite tribes for several decades (around 1000–930 BCE). In the later ninth century, the tribes of Israel formed a

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