Judaism
Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 2.4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
Abstract
Ancient 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 of 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 deatb.
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 aa 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 the 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 Hitties 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.
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 suggets 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
