LITMIR.BIZ

      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 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.

With this, “Palestine” joined much of the surrounding world as part of the Roman empire. This is the time when Jesus lived, the early church formed in the wake of his crucifixion by the Romans, and the Christian movement spread across the Mediterranean Sea to cities around the Roman empire. This was also the time of multiple Judean revolts against Roman control that eventually led to the destruction in 70 CE of the Jerusalem Temple (destruction of the Second Temple [earlier rebuilt under the Persians]) and the complete destruction of Jewish Jerusalem in 135 CE. Thus the Jewish temple state was completely destroyed. The main form of Jewish life to survive this catastrophe was rabbinic Judaism, which grew out of the Torah-centered scholarship and leadership of the earlier, popular movement of the Pharisees. As we will see, the early followers of Jesus offered a different way forward in the wake of this disaster – belief in the resurrected Jesus as the expected messiah and divine Son of God.

      Later chapters of this Introduction will give details about these historical periods, correlating each of them with biblical texts. The aim here is to give a sense of how much Israelite history was shaped by relationships with various empires. Though “Israel” (and “Judah”) emerged as recognizable peoples and states during an imperial power vacuum (1200–745 BCE), the books of the Bible were largely written during the periods of imperial domination by Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires. We gain a deeper understanding of the Bible the more we see how diverse biblical pictures of the “empire of God” were formed in response to domination by these powerful empires in the ancient world.

      Multiple Contexts, Multiple Methods

      Reading biblical texts in relation to their original contexts can make many aspects of them come alive, but the reason such texts are read now is that they have remained meaningful to diverse communities in much later contexts. These texts are in the Bible because they have transcended their origins. This Introduction will discuss both aspects of the Bible: its origins in the ancient Near East and its later interpretation by Jewish and Christian communities today. Knowing more about the Bible’s early contexts gives some perspective on contemporary differences in interpretation. The more you know about the antiquity of the Bible, the more you may appreciate both the care and the creativity with which it has been read and reread over time by different communities.

This can be illustrated through a brief look at how different methods of biblical criticism might look at Israel’s “exodus,” the story of Yahweh’s (see the Special Topics Box on “The Name of Israel’s God: Yahweh/the LORD”) liberation of the people from Egypt that is now found in the first chapters of the book of Exodus (Exodus 1–15). To start, some scholars try to reconstruct whether and when this exodus actually happened. Such academic study of the history of Israel uses biblical texts as one among multiple sources for the reconstruction of “what probably happened.” So far, the results of such study have been inconclusive. On the one hand, many scholars believe some sort of exodus out of Egypt happened, probably during the centuries just before the emergence of the people of “Israel” as a distinct group in the highlands of Canaan. On the other hand, most academic scholars of the Bible also believe that the written texts of the Bible are so far removed from the events that they describe that they are not useful for precise retelling of what actually happened back then: who said what, how many and who were involved, etc. The biblical texts are not reliable for such details because they have been filtered by centuries of oral retelling and written expansions by later Israelites. Imagine a game of “telephone” where hundreds of people over a period of five hundred years retell stories about an event important to them (e.g. of the exodus from Egypt), continually adapting such stories for new situations and audiences, and then imagine trying to use the end result of this complex process for historical analysis. Because biblical texts are so shaped by time, scholars studying the history of Israel attempt to reconstruct what happened through analyzing them and comparing them – where possible – with archaeological records and non-biblical historical sources.

      The Name of Israel’s God: Yahweh/the LORD

      The name of Israel’s God in Hebrew is Yahweh, but you will not see this name written out in most English translations of the Bible. Instead, most translations have “the LORD” where the Hebrew manuscripts have a strange combination of the consonants for Yahweh (YHWH) and the vowels for the Hebrew word “lord.” Why this combination?

      The consonants are earlier, since the earliest Hebrew Bible manuscripts were written in all consonants. When Jewish scholars started producing manuscripts with vowels, the divine name Yahweh had become so holy that they did not pronounce it out loud. (This is still true for many Jews.) Therefore, they added the vowels for “lord” in every place where

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