Judaism
The Bible and History
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
History in the Pentateuch
The first thing to do when reading the history of the Jews in the Jewish scriptures is not to believe it. If you are, by inclination or upbringing a believer, then you must try only to half believe it. If you can get that far, then you are not doing too bad because the stories in it are sometimes half true. The trouble is that you have to know some real history, geography and anthropology to have any idea what is true and what is not, or only half true.
Genesis
According to Genesis, Israel was the brother of Edom, and the cousin of Moab and Ammon. There is truth in this. It shows that the authors of the Jewish scriptures understood these four peoples to have been closely related or the same stock. They had closely similar cultures, with similar national gods, simply having different names. Israel was the immediate neighbour of Edom, which extended south and westwards towards the border of Egypt. The bible suggests that these people were Aramaeans from Nahor, but these will actually have been some of the people who colonized Judah under the Persians, bringing some of their own native myths with them. It also suggests some connexion with the the Kenites, Amalekites, and Midianites, but no one knows who these people are. They might as well be mythical, but probably are allegorical. Kenites could be Canaanites, and Amalek and Midianites Persians and Medes. The actual language of Israel’s neighbours was Canaanite, the same language as that of the Phœnicians, but by the time Jewish history began, they spoke Aramaic, as did most other people thereabouts. The scriptures, however, suggest that in some sense the Canaanites had been enslaved by the Jews.
Exodus
The scriptures suggest the Asians of Palestine, in the distant past, had emigrated into Egypt. Such an emigration did occur, and Asians eventually ruled Egypt, or substantial parts of the Delta for several centuries before they were expelled around 1500 BC. The bible records a romance that was plainly meant to be this same event, although it was romanticized considerably. In the scriptures, instead of being rulers, they were slaves, and instead of being driven out by resurgent Egyptians, they escaped from Egyptian slavery. The biblical Pharaoh, whichever one it was, had consented to the exodus and had even forced it on, but then changed his mind. An Asian national hero, Moses, at last saw a chance of deliverance.
At a time when Egypt was scourged by plagues, the Asians left en masse one spring and fled into the Sinai wilderness, an unpleasant place, but where God lived. It was a secret flight of 2,000,000 people into an empty wasteland, according to the romance. Pharaoh, now determined that the slaves had to stay, gave chase, but was washed aside by a wave, and the slaves were saved. It was God’s providence. The Asians of history who had ruled in Egypt fled back to Asia and disappeared, absorbed by the Asians already there. In not many years, the Egyptians turned the tables, and colonized the lands the Asians had fled into. They remained Egyptian colonies for many more centuries. So the Asians were slaves of the Egyptians, but in their own lands!
The scriptural romance is different. The two million Asian escaped slaves spent about 40 years at Barnesh Kardea on the northern edge of Sinai without leaving any heaps of quailbones or coprolites as evidence, then stormed into Palestine via Moab, whom they had helped to stave off an invader. Moses never got into the land in the myth, and his death is reported in it from a considerable time in the future, as can be inferred from the author who was comfortably writing in the land itself. Yet the tradition is still, quite impossible though it is, that the story was written first hand by the dead Moses himself!
Conquest or Infiltration?
The land, in one tale presented, was conquered by force of arms, but a different version has it that the Asians, now called Israelites, infiltrated and took over the land relatively peacefully. Either way, the archaeology does not really agree. The culture remained essentially the same throughout the period supposed to have been when the invasion or infiltration happened, around 1200 BC. It is the local culture with possible minor variations that could suggest some inflitration, albeit far from a dominant one, and might equally be simply local developments caused by an ameliorating climate bringing marginal land into use, with the concomitant technical changes necessary.
Israel
The romance has it that the local native population were superior in culture, arms and numbers, yet the Israelites still took control of them, a story meant to show the power of the Israelite God. The local people were Canaanites still, and the former slaves absorbed them and called the land Israel. The name Israel, seems to appear on a stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah, around 1200 BC, though the interpretation agreed by most Egyptologists is far from clear. In any case, the stele does not say Israel is a land, but a people in someone else’s land, all comfortably in agreement with the romance. The only fault is that the stele says that the Pharaoh wiped out the Israelites!
Foundation Myths
The purpose of the romance is religious. It is a foundation myth of the Jewish people, but there were several others, which the Jewish scriptures have sought to merge and harmonize. The message of the scriptures is that Israel’s sense of national unity was religious. It was the faith that “Yehouah is the God of Israel, and Israel is the people of Yehouah”. Moses is represented in the foundation myth as uniting a disparate band of Asian slaves trapped in Egypt, making them into a nation and marching them into a land promised by Yehouah, God.
Other foundation myths in the scriptures are that the founder was a man called Abraham who was urged by God to leave Harran, and establish himself and his family in Palestine. The scriptures deal with this one by making it precede Moses, and the descendents of Abraham are the ones who go down into Egypt to become slaves. Another is that a shepherd called David was called by Yehouah to become a great unifying king who gathered together the disparate people, defeated their enemies on all sides, particularly the Philistines, and set up an independent kingdom between Egypt and Assyria. His son, Solomon became a king of sublime wisdom and enterprise who established the model kingdom that Jews could expect to have if they remained righteous. Yet another was that the Jewish people came into Palestine from Babylon, where they had earlier been exiled, and set up a new nation under their God, Yehouah, newly burnished. These were dealt with in the scriptures by loading them in sequence into the romanticized history.
Cyrus the Persian
In all these myths, Yehouah directed each step. Moses was by tradition the author of the saga in which he took the lead, impossible though it was, but who really had written the stories and when? The scriptures end in the Persian period, that is the time when the Persians under Cyrus, then Darius the Great built and consolidated a great empire stretching from Asia Minor to India and the Caucasus to Nubia. In the center of this, more or less was Palestine, and the scriptures were plainly written when the Persians ruled the land of the Jews, as the writings themselves confirm internally. The writing did not end there though because there were numerous additions and refinements and harmonizing editings after the Persian period ended in 331 BC.
Is it History?
So, is the history of ancient Israel as told by biblical writers exact in any comprehensive way? This history can be split into several succeeding periods, the period of the patriarchs, the time of the exodus, the Israelites travelling in the desert for forty years, the conquest of Canaan, the heroic exploits of the hero-judges of Israel, the period of national greatness under David and Solomon, impending disaster under the kings of Israel and Judah, the exile, and the Persian period. This history ends with Ezra’s promulgation of the Torah, the Law of Moses, in front of the assembled inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah. Has this anything to do with real history?
Problems with Biblical History
In real history, the scriptures of the Jews in which these myths appear were unknown before the third century BC. So, the extended history they relate cannot be confirmed by any direct and solid evidence before then, dispite the antiquity the scriptures profess to describe. Thomas L Thompson and John Van Seters showed that there never was a patriarchal period. It has nothing to do with history. The exodus passed from history into fiction a long time ago. It never happened. Neither did the conquest. From an historical point of view, the Israelites could not have conquered Canaan by destroying Canaanite forces, simply because the Egyptians still ruled Canaan when Joshua is supposed to have conquered it around 1200 BC. No foreign immigrants left any archaeological mark, and the biblical account about the conquest is so contradictory, it cannot hold water (compare Joshua to Judges 1).
Herodotus, the Greek writer is called the “Father of History” and wrote in the fifth century BC, yet Moses, if the Jewish legend is to be believed wrote some time around 1200 BC or 300 years before that, if the “slaves” escaping from Egypt were really the Asian kings, the ones called the Hyksos. Moses then would have been the father of History, if anyone had ever heard of him, but even Herodotus, had not, and he had made it his business to find out every interesting fact about the Persian enemies of the Greeks and the lands and peoples they had under their rule. Herodotus even described the people who lived in Palestine. None of them were Israelites or Jews.
The Persian God was Ahura Mazda, and it is curious that the slaves of the Egyptians were led out of their captivity by two brothers one of whom was Moses and the other was Aaron. Aaron Moses is curiously like Ahura Mazda, especially as “Mazda” was often rendered “Mazas” in ancient texts. Moreover, Moses was written up as a lawmaker, having brought God’s law down to the Israelites on tablets of stone. The Persian for law is “Dat” and their God was Ahura Mazda, so “Dat Ahura Mazda”, or an expression close to it, is “the law of God”. From this expression, of no meaning in the language of the Jews, but impressed on them as of the utmost importance, so important that it was to be read out in their temples, came the Jewish word for law, Torah. Of course, the Jewish God was Yehouah so Torah Mazas still meant nothing to them until they took Mazas to have been the great prophet who had taught them their law. The Jewish scriptures are clear who Moses really was because they describe the real Moses reading the law to the uncomprehending Jews, who wept when they understood what it meant. Their ancient traditions, their Canaanite ones, had been replaced by a Persian law. Moses was really Ezra.
The Torah, the holy administration of law, was the center of the cult. In the legend, Moses took his inspiration from a priest of Midian, Midian being an unknown place and people but supposed from biblical clues to have been in Arabia to the east. The closest approximation to Midian in reality is Media, the home of the Medes, who, with the Persians, comprised the ruling people of the Persian empire. A Priest of Midian looks like a hardly disguised, if anachronistic, allusion to a Median Priest—a Magus. That is what Ezra was. The law of Moses was the law read out by Ezra, the law imposed by the Persian king, in the scriptural legend, called the anointed of Yehouah—God’s agent on earth. The law was God’s law but it was administered to the Jews by God’s anointed, the Persian king. People had to be righteous, that is they had to obey God’s law, so the worship of God was incidental to the duty to obey His law.
The composed history of the Jews, to which we have alluded, began to be written to show what the consequences of disobedience of the law had been in the past. The people were depicted as constantly backsliding, falling into apostasy from the law, and being punished by God for their disobedience. Each time a righteous remnant were saved to perpetuate the race, only for their descendants to fall again into sin, a failure to obey God’s commands through His law. God was impressed on the people as an all seeing spy in the sky checking that people obeyed. It was a great ruse for the Persian king, so great in fact, that rulers have used it ever since.
The problem with the story of Moses as it appears in the myth is that Moses initiates the law and the worship of Yehouah in the distant past, but subsequently, even in the scriptures themselves, Moses’s teaching and law frequently disappear. In reality, so far as can be determined from archaeology, and contemporary texts that have been found, the Israelites were no different from other Canaanities, or they had no difference from them that could not be explained by the narrowness of the world then, when communications were poor and local customs could persist. The assumption that the history of Israel commenced with the law, and that for centuries it continued to be the ideal root out of which that history continued to grow is simply not backed up by any evidence. The law cannot in any sense be regarded as the starting point of subsequent Jewish history as the myth makes out. If it was the work of an ancient Moses, then it remained dead for centuries, and, according to the mythical history itself, only became operative in the national history through Ezra. Within the Pentateuch (Torah), the historical tradition about Moses must be separated from the legislative, although the latter often appears in narrative form. The story of Moses has been composed to explain the presence of the law.
The giving of the law at Sinai (Exodus 19ff) is significant as drama, in its proper sense of religious theatre. It is meant to appeal to the imagination. The name of the holy mountain is not consistent in the various arms of the myth, and it ends up being Zion, a hill that Jerusalem sat on. Sinai might be a variation of Zion. The pre-existing sanctity of Zion/Sinai was why it was selected for the giving of the law, not conversely. The occasion was doubtless celebrated as an annual festival for many years, and the description suggests that theatrical noises and lights were used, just as they were elsewhere.
If the legislation of the Pentateuch could not have been so early as a second millennium BC Moses, then nor could the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue:
- According to Exodus 34 the commandments which stood upon the two tables were quite different
- The prohibition of images was unknown so early, and is contradicted immediately when Moses himself made a brazen serpent which the mythical history says was worshipped at Jerusalem as an image of Yehouah until Hezekiah’s time
- The periods of the judges and the kings from Deborah, who praised Jael’s treacherous act of murder, to David, who treated his prisoners of war with the utmost cruelty, belie an unusually moral and peculiarly and anachronistically universal religion in Israel. The true spirit of religion at the time is had from Judges 5 rather than from Exodus 20
- Monotheism, pre-supposed in the Decalogue, could not and was not—as the scriptures themselves repeatedly prove—the foundation of religion. It was imposed artificially by the covenant between the God of the universe and Yehud alone, and the God of the universe was Ahuramazda, the god of the universal empire of the Persians.
The story of Exodus 12:1f is a mythos of frequent recurrence elsewhere, to which no further significance is attached, for that Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians is vouched for by no earlier authorities than Philo and the New Testament. According to the Old Testament tradition his connexion is with Jethro’s priesthood or with that of the Kenites.
Exodus 22-24 describes the revelation of a cult to the Israelites in the desert by their God, a cult they continued thereafter to practise, albeit stumblingly, through the period of kings, through the “captivity”, and through the “return”, and, of course, still do practise it, in a necessarily modified way since the temple is no more. It is inconceivable that a desert people could begin observing a cult which presupposed a settled existence of gardeners, and a social structure. They did not. They were Canaanites all along. The Lord God worshipped by the Canaanite peasants was the giver of their corn, wine, and oil, the Baal whom the Greeks identified with Dionysus. Baal, the god of the land of Canaan, and Yehouah, the biblical god of Israel, were from the same root, if they were not the same god. The earliest instance in the Jewish scriptures of the feast of the ingathering, afterwards the chief feast of the Israelites, is celebrated by the Canaanites of Shechem in honour of Baal (Judges 9:27).
Joshua makes the conquest of Palestine as a common undertaking of all the tribes together. It is contradicted by the shorter but more historical story in Judges 1, which is parallel with Joshua. Joshua was the leader of Joseph and Benjamin only, albeit allied with Issachar, Zebulon, Dan, Naphtali, and Asher. Judah had already settled and a sensible view would be that from Kadesh Barnea they had moved directly north across the Negeb which was occupied by the friendly Kenites, said in the scriptures to have no connexion by blood with the Israelites. Later, David incorporated the Kenites of the Negeb into Judah with Hebron their capital.
The narratives in Judges about the heroic exploits of the Israelite judges were conditioned by the wish to show how Israel should deal with its enemies, the Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines and Aramaeans—all idolators standing for the apostate Jew. Moab, Ammon, and Edom, Israel’s nearest kinsfolk and neighbours, were monotheists in the same sense in which Israel itself was. They had a favoured god, or rather a god that favoured them, they imagined, but the god was a Canaanite god, not at all like the later Jewish god. In Judges 5, Yehouah continued to live in the wilderness of Sinai, only occasionally coming to Palestine. The stories about the judges of Israel belong among the genre of heroic tales that show how the people of Israel had to assert themselves and, more importantly, their God in the face of opposition. It would make any later Jew inclined toward apostasy feel guilty at undoing the work of their ancestors, and tend to bring them back into line. They are really allegories of the troubles of the early colonists, who had a difficult time, until Ezra and Nehemiah.
The empire of David and Solomon believed to have existed in the tenth century BC is fictional. In the tenth century BC, Jerusalem was at most a village or a small town. In the period of the kings, although the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah are historical facts, albeit successively, not concurrently, little knowledge about them to match the scriptures has been discovered.
Knowing Jewish History
Earlier than about 850 BC, nothing definite is known. The early kings, those of the imaginary United Kingdom and several of the early kings of the so-called divided kingdoms, are mythical. Jeroboam I is Jeroboam II written back in history. Israelite history began from about the time of Omri, but even the books of Samuel, and Kings do not preserve proper history. The books of Kings begin to, and the names show it, being generally theophoric in Yeho. The reason is not that these Israelites came from Egypt, but that they came from Babylon after the Persian conquest. Earlier kings were predominantly mythical, and the personae of Judges were colonists, the book being an allegory of their initial disorganized struggles with the locals, the poor and ignorant Judahites who had remained on the land. They were the earlier disorganized, pre-Nehemiah colonists. These people brought the legends about the patriarchs and primitive times—the origin of which cannot be assigned to an early date—and so they followed in real time the stories about their founders, but were written back in the biblical chronology. J Wellhausen notes that even the Yehouistic narratives about the patriarchs belong to the time when Israel had already become a powerful kingdom.
Omri founded the first dynasty in Israel, and gave it a permanent capital in Samaria. The authors of Kings confess history is not their purpose for writing. King Omri is dismissed in a few verses (1 Kg 16:16-28). He assumed power by a coup d’état, he ruled Israel for twelve years and built Samaria. He sinned against Yehouah. Though the Jewish scriptures say little about him, Omri was a great king. After his death the kingdom carried his name for more than a hundred years—for the Assyrians “the kingdom of Omri” was the ordinary name of Israel. The history of Omri is superfluous to the purpose of the author of Kings. He tells the interested reader to look for it in the Book of the Chronicles of the kings of Israel (1 Kg 16:27). Omri is of no interest to him, yet in the inscription of Mesha, it was he who subjugated Moab. From 1 Kings 20:34, he was not successful against the Damascenes, to whom he had to concede privileges in his own capital. Omri’s accession was about 900 BC. The date is reasonably precise, if the battle of Karkar (854 BC) was near the end of Ahab’s reign, and take the servitude of Moab, which lasted forty years, to have ended with Ahab’s death.
Interest in 1-2 Kings should not be limited to finding historical information that might only be present in bits. Attention should be directed to the purpose of this literature—that it was composed to impress people in the author’s present, and not merely to save memories of the past for nostalgia’s sake. The past was not interesting except for the examples of good and bad behaviour it provided to condition people’s future behaviour. The past justified present arrangements as legitimate or natural.
The history of the small states, Israel then Judah, as told by biblical historians is not totally devoid of historical information. The people who wrote the historical narratives of the Jewish scriptures knew some facts about Israelite and Judaean history. The difficulty occurs in trying to verify biblical events that cannot be checked by external evidence. How do we solve this problem without ending in the notorious hermeneutical circle? One way would be to approach ancient near eastern history in general to see how it worked and how far it can be trusted.
One step is to recognize the genres of historical writing in the Near East in antiquity. Two genres dominated the field—the year-chronicle system that lists for every year its most important events in a tabular shorthand, and the more extensive royal inscriptions including Assyrian royal annals of the conquests of Assyrian kings.
Sometimes the authors of 1 and 2 Kings refer to the Chronicles of Israel or of Judah. There are now no such chronicles. Were there ever? In ancient times, authors sometimes put in fictitious references, but these chronicles would have been of the shorthand type, if they were genuine. They could not have been detailed reports or contained much narrative. The biblical author invented the reference. Its name was copied from the Chronicles of the Chaldean Kings now in the British Museum, and if that is so, the Chronicles of the Chaldean Kings was used as a source of the bible. He wrote in an anachronistic style to suit his purpose.
The chronicles of Assyrian and Babylonian kings are literature—fiction and invention—at least as much as history, and so too is the bible. Royal literature of the kind found in Assyrian inscriptions often contain war reports, but the acts of the king are embellished. Defeats are hardly acknowledged. These reports are composed to impress the gods, who were to approve the acts of the king, and particularly his people. It was propaganda! It was written by the “returners”—the Persian colonists, and they used the Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. D J Wiseman has rendered a part of the Chronicles of the Chaldean Kings—626-556 BC, in the British Museum:
In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against the city and captured the king. He appointed there a king of his own heart, received its heavy tribute and sent to Babylon.
This is taken to be a reference to the defeat of Jerusalem in 597 BC because it ties in with the biblical account (2 Kg 24:8-17; 2 Chr 36:9-10). We take it that the king of Chaldea, Nebuchadrezzar, is here the king of Akkad. The captured king is not mentioned here and nor is the substitute king, though we gather they are mentioned elsewhere, and Judah is called Hatti-land, something that is presumably well known to scholars if not Jews and Christians. Why is it not possible that these events, known to someone familiar with the Babylonian Chronicles, could not have been used by the authors of the Jewish scriptures as the bogus reason for their “return” to Judah? It was, in short, lifted mutatis mutandis from the Babylonian Chronicles, by the Persians deporting the colonists into Yehud around 420 BC as the bogus basis for their “return”. The Hatti were the Hittites, and the Hittites never held Palestine, or did only briefly in campaigns against the Egyptians. It was in the northern Levant that the Hittites held several small Aramaean countries as colonies, and whose people remained with the name Hittites long after the Hittite empire had gone. The people of Yaudi were Hatti but not the people of Judah! Curiously, the part of the Babylonian Chronicle referring to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC is missing!
Although minor sections of Kings may have an annalistic background in royal chronicles, most of the literature there neither belongs to this genre nor to that of the royal inscriptions of the Assyrian and later Babylonian type. The authors of Kings used some extant annalistic information but only selected what suited their purpose. Kings is not written to praise the institution of kingship in Israel and Judah or to establish an exalted position for their kings. Their selection was dominated by the wish to create a generally negative impression of the period of the Israelite kingdom—to show that it is a departure from the just rule of God and that its human exponents were hardly heroes of the Yehouistic faith. Few of the kings of Judah are praised for their piety—all of the kings of Israel are condemned. Royal laudatory inscriptions would simply be the wrong type of literature to quote and are hardly present among the narratives of 1 and 2 Kings.
Jews and Persians
Rather than tracing non-existing historical events, the goal of an investigation would be to find out whether some kind of a pattern can be found. Already several years ago scholars realized that the biblical books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are dominated by a series of stereotypical scenes, each of them having a special purpose—either to recommend a king loved by God or reject a godforsaken king.
The Persian period is territory in the historical map of Palestine that no one cares to explore, and until recently have actually deliberately hidden:
Archaeologists skipped over this time. They rarely published pottery from this period. Sometimes they did not even bother saving their finds, instead digging down to the earlier periods that dealt either with the emergence of Israel in Canaan or with the so-called golden era of David and Solomon.Amy Dockser Marcus, Rewriting the Bible
Only from about 1980 did it enter the consciousness of scholars that the Persian period was at all important, and now, while honest archaeologists are unearthing a mass of fascinating material, and a new view of the ancient history of Syro-Palestine, biblicists are fighting a rearguard action against the painful truth—the Persians created Judaism! The biblicists, who never once think it is remarkable that invisible shepherds could have written histories, psalms and odes, suddenly think it is impossible that the Persian and Persian colonists could have written anything.
Biblicists suffer from a desire to date everything as early as they can feasibly entertain, and often whether it was feasible or not, and seem not to understand that in the second half of its existence, the Persian empire was effectively a new Babylon. Darius II was half Babylonian and preferred Babylon to Susa and Ecbatana. Ostraca meant as dockets for produce destined for Babylon are not necessarily from the period of the Babylonian empire, but might be later. The Babylonians administered Judah for 50 years and the Persians for 200. Which should have made the more significant mark? Examination of Persian period constructions shows them with natural enough objects like wine and olive presses, loom weights, tools and pots said to characterise the Babylonian period, once it was evident enough in the ground. Some Greek artefacts are found among them.
The Persians made the most significant mark in inventing Judaism, but also hid this from the world by inventing the Jewish scriptures, which Jews and Christians have believed ever since, despite the idea being as full of holes as a colander. The untold story was along the following lines.
Darius the Great came to the throne faced with rebellion in Babylon led by descendents of Nebuchadrezzar. He suppressed them vigorously. At the end of his reign, the Egyptians rebelled under Khabasha, and Darius died (486 BC) while preparing the punitive expedition. Xerxes led it, and put down the rebellion with difficulty in 483 BC. The satrap of Babylon and Abarnahara, Zopyrus, then rebelled and Xerxes defeated him, wasting Babylon as a punishment, inluding the Tower of Babel, some say. It was at this point only, that Abarnahara itself became a satrapy. Xerxes died in 465 BC to be succeeded by Artaxerxes Longimanus, who had to fight another Egyptian rebel, Inaros. Arsames, satrap of Egypt, aided by Megabyxos, satrap of Abarnahara, suppressed the rebellion only in 455 BC. In 445 BC, Megabyxos himself rebelled over the dishonourable treatment, at the wish of the queen, of the Greek prisoners he had promised to spare. Artaxerxes could not crush Megabyxos, but had to make a peace with him and his sons. Megabyxos lost office, but apparently was never disgraced.
At some stage in all this, it is possible that Jerusalem was again destroyed. If not, it had never been rebuilt after the Babylonian destruction, and so must have been left in ruins for 150 years! The letter of “accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem” suggests the Judahites had been complicit in some anti-Persian adventure, and punishment was to be expected:
And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, wrote they unto him an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.Ezra 4:6
The letter begins:
Be it known unto the king, that the Jews which came up from thee to us are come unto Jerusalem, building the rebellious and the bad city, and have set up the walls thereof, and joined the foundations.Ezra 4:12
The mention of Jerusalem as a “rebellious and bad city” cannot have been empty rhetoric. It suggests that those who had first gone to Jerusalem and started to rebuild the city had been involved in a rebellion, and the rebellion of Megabyxos or the Egyptian rebellion are possible. This was about the time that Nehemiah was sent to the city to take the province in hand, and a batch of deported people followed to re-establish the city and Judah as a temple state.
Archaeologists noted that a string of fortresses appeared in Judah and in the Negev in the fifth century, and the walls of Jerusalem were repaired at just this time too. The reason seems clear. Egypt rebelled in mid-century with Greek support, and even some Canaanite support as well—the seaport Dor was involved—such as Egyptian sympathisers in Yehud. Evidence is that ten similar fortresses were built in commanding positions, were maintained for a few decades and then were abandoned when the danger was past. The Egyptian sympathisers will be depicted in the Jewish scriptures as the Am ha Eretz, the native inhabitants of Yehud who opposed the incoming colonists when they ignored their legitimate rights of possession of the land.
Nehemiah, in this somewhat confused story, seems to have organized the rebuilding of the city, walls, temple and social structure, with official approval, doubtless as a consequence of the revolt, and fresh colonists. Ezra, who seems to have been a senior Persian official, was sent from Babylon to officiate at the opening ceremony and to impose a the law! The bible seems confused about the relationship of the two officials and their dates, but the trend over succeeding years seems to have been to eliminate Ezra from Jewish history as a non-Jew, and an anachronism, once Moses was made the mythological Jewish law-giver. The disruption of the Maccabean war spoiled this trend.
Instead, Ezra became the great hero of post-exilic Judaism. The bible says his father was killed by Nebuchadrezzar’s general, Nebuzaradan, in 587 BC, thus implying Ezra was approaching 200 years old when he arrived back in his putative homeland sometime between 450 and 400 BC. Such an error does not invalidate the historical reality of Ezra, but it shows he was being mythologized. He is being made to fit the paradigm of “exile” and “return” when the reality was colonization by deported people. The intended reader in antiquity could not have known that Ezra lived 150 years after the occupation of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, and even people who do know today ignore it!
Thus, Yehud was set up as a temple state (Yehud medintha). A telling point is that this is when the Jewish scriptures effectively stop purporting to tell Jewish history. All the books of the bible stem from this date, but the only ones that extend Jewish history to later times are apocryphal. Whatever was written at this early date, besides the law (Deuteronomy), provided the historical outline of the detail that came later.
Conclusion
The biblical picture of ancient Israel is contrary to any image of ancient Palestinian society from contemporary or local sources, and cannot be reconciled with the historical past of the region. Pre-Hellenistic history of the region cannot be constructed from the Jewish scriptures. It is a fictional history that refers little to things that happened or existed.
From an historian’s point of view, ancient Israel is a monstrous creature, sprung out of the fantasy of biblical historiographers and their modern paraphrasers.Niels-Pieter Lemche
