Canaan

The Historical and Archaeological Background of the Old Testament

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 15: Canaan. This is the first of ten episodes of this podcast that will be devoted to the Old Testament, or Tanakh. The Bible is many things to many people. But whatever your perspective or your reason for reading it, devout or skeptical, religious or academic, I think we can all agree on something. The Old Testament came together in a place. This place has had many names – Yehud, Judea, Palaestina Prima, Jund Filastin, Acre, Old Yishuv, Palestine, Israel. Before any of these names, before all the cultures associated with them, before Baal, El, Ashera, and Yahweh, this place had a different name. And when I first read the Bible, amidst all the strange and exotic names – the nephilim, Jehoaz, Pul, Jezebel, Eliphaz, Habakkuk, the one that stuck in my mind the most was the name Canaan.

The Old Testament is so important to the evolution of world literature that I’m giving it extra special treatment. Before we even begin the Book of Genesis, I have two episodes planned. In this episode, I am going to tell you about the history of Canaan – not just as it’s told in what we call the Deuteronomistic history of the Old Testament, but also as it’s told in archaeological discoveries, and ancient stele and tablets. In the next, I’m going to take some time and talk about what the Old Testament is – its general structure, how it was compiled and where, and the contents and organization of the different Old Testaments used by, for instance, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and so on. But this show, again, is about Canaan, a strip of land in the Eastern Mediterranean, about the size of New Jersey, where there most influential book in the world was born.

This will be an episode full of many historical facts and a fair number of names. If you’re like me, you may remember at most three percent of them. But that’s fine. We’re people, not hard drives. The important thing is that you listen to this story and get an understanding of the general flow of what happened in Canaan from the Late Bronze Age until about 600 BCE. I think too many people pick up the Bible and start reading and never make it past the first five books. As though you’re going to be able to smoothly and joyfully read through a two thousand page, non-linear, culturally alien anthology of extremely heterogeneous Iron Age writings over tea and Corn Flakes. No, inconveniently, the Bible is a bit more demanding than that. But, whether you’re looking for a deep spiritual message, or you’re just curious about a really, really important book, the Bible is more than worth the effort. And for all of us, religious, secular, and other, I think that the history of Canaan is a good, and fairly neutral place to begin our long journey through the Bible. Understanding this history is indispensible if you want to understand what the Old Testament is, and where it came from, its geographical and historical references, its terrifying darkness, and its resilient hope. [music]

The Inland Hill Communities of Canaan

The story of Canaan, the land inhabited by the ancient Israelites and many other peoples, doesn’t have a clear beginning. I have to come up with a time, and a place to start the story. The time that I choose is the spring of 1207 BCE. And the place is the central hill country of the region, about twenty-five miles north-northeast of Jerusalem along valley floors. This is a place of uncountable microclimates, where the dry air of the Negev Desert and Sinai Peninsula to the south meets the moister air of the Coastal Plain to the west. In the rain shadows, bare sedimentary rock and hard packed soil are home to small insectivores and shaggy trees called Athel pines. But where there are springs, and where alluvial fans have settled water into aquifers, trees flourish in bunches – oaks, pistachios, carobs, Mediterranean cypresses, and olive trees, with their gnarled, resolute trunks, slender pale leaves, and precious green fruits. In the shade, varanti irises spring up, their pedals a misty lavender color, and elsewhere, bright yellow garland chrysanthemums blossom, their thin leaves the hue and shape of fresh rosemary. In places, the soil is fertile, giving life to cyclamens, lilies, and vernal crops of grass. In others, even the austerity of the exposed sedimentary rock is beautiful, eroding in slow crescents or forming into strange shapes like the heads and shoulders of stone men being born from the earth. This is a magic place, where one might traverse into an adjacent valley and happen upon new birds and vegetation, where summer is long, and winter gentle, where one can climb a dry ridge and see the dome of the stars and smell the secret world of bats and owls. It’s a place that fosters pluralism, its geographical barriers creating a honeycomb of discrete ecosystems, where settlers might settle, and nomads roam, and goods and languages and theologies percolate and wash into one another. It’s a place where a wanderer might settle with his flock, worship his ancestral gods, and, beneath wooded ridgelines and out of the sun and wind, live gladly outside the flow of time.

But to the east, just eight miles over rugged rises and falls, lies the Jordan Valley. You might walk there from the shelter of the hills north of Jerusalem in half a day at a good clip. Cresting a few final boulders, you’d look out over the lowlands and see birds. Even long before the settlement of Canaan, the birds told the story of what kind of a place it was and would be. Over the Jordan Valley, 500 million birds are making their way north along the migratory flyway, passing over the four thousand long scar called the Syrian-East African Rift, a rift which cuts northeast from the Red Sea, all along the Jordan River, through Lake Galilee and deep into the mountains of Lebanon. Over the Jordan Valley fly cranes, geese, and eagles, some 500 species that begin and end at many destinations, but all pass over the land of Canaan along the way.

The diverse lands of Canaan – the deep southern desert, the damper coastal plain, the central hill country and arable valleys, the freshwater lakes and rivers and springs – they have since early Paleolithic times been inhabited. But climate and natural resources, at least in the ancient world, made Canaan less stable, and less settled than its monolithic neighbors to the south, north, and east. Erratic rainfall was the primary hindrance to population growth. A whole generation might experience seasonal abundances of water and strong crop yields. The next might face dearth and famine, and, in desperation, migrate along desert roads to the Nile Delta to the south. Such variances in Canaan made for a smaller, more scattered population than in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Hattusa, with their more reliable abundance of river water. By the spring of 1207 BCE, great empires had formed along the Nile, along the Tigris and Euphrates, and in the foothills of central Turkey. But Canaan remained, for millennia, a network of seminomadic settlements and small city states. The power of its various regions – Ammon in the east, Moab in the southeast, Edom to the south, Aram to the north, and Philistia to the west, waxed and waned according to the vagaries of the seasons and the invasions of foreign opportunists.

The latter – invading armies, I mean – was the other overarching cause Canaan never quite managed to become a major power player in the Ancient Near East on the scale of its neighbors. Large scale city building had begun in Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3,000 BCE. These civilizations hardened their weapons with wars and made advancements in science and industry earlier than the peoples of Canaan. And the peoples of this small land in the eastern Mediterranean experienced, over and over again, being caught between massive armies, brokering alliances in a bid to try and survive, sometimes enjoying rises in power, but more often being enslaved, resettled, killed, or, perhaps at best, assimilating into the civilizations of their conquerors.

This was Canaan in 1207 BCE, a beautiful, ecologically diverse strip of seacoast land, the balmy back end of the Mediterranean, a territory with many biomes and many peoples. During the remainder of its history, Canaan would be the knot at the center of a rope tugged by greater powers – Egypt and Assyria, Assyria and Babylon, Babylon and Persia, Persia and Greece, Greece and Rome, Rome and the Sassanids, the Sassanids and the Islamic Caliphates, the Caliphates and the Crusaders, and back and forth and on and on. Canaan would be the anvil on which the single most influential book in human history would be produced, century by bloody, chaotic century. But let’s leave that book on the shelf for a bit, and talk about the origins of the people who created it. [music]

The Merneptah Stele

In 1207 BCE, the date I mentioned earlier, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah returned from his campaigns abroad. Merneptah's capital was Thebes, a city halfway down the Egyptian Nile, 700 miles to the southwest of Canaan. Pharaoh Merneptah’s capital, Thebes, was a grand city, with colossal statues and vast temples, honoring the past two millennia of Egyptian civilization. Across the river from Thebes lay the Valley of Kings, where a hundred years earlier, the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun had been cut from living rock and sealed, not to be opened for 3245 years.

This Pharaoh I mentioned, Pharaoh Merneptah, returned to Thebes victorious from wars abroad. When he landed in Thebes, he did what many ancient strongmen did after a military campaign. Merneptah had his achievements recorded in a stone carving. The Merneptah Stele, a 10 foot high slab of black granite, is as chillingly matter of fact about mass killing as many ancient royal inscriptions. It first records Merneptah’s wars in the west, with the peoples of modern day Libya and their northern allies. “Great joy has arisen in the Black Land [of Egypt],” the Merneptah Stele announces, “and shouts of jubilation come forth from the towns of Egypt. They are talking about the victories which Merneptah. . .achieved over the [Libyans]. How beloved he is, the victorious ruler.”¹ The stele describes Merneptah’s decisive victory over the marauding westerners, and then, almost as an afterthought, describes a brief campaign in the land of Canaan.

Canaan, in 1207 BCE, was rattling under the yoke of Egyptian imperial power. Merneptah’s father, Ramesses II, was the greatest and most famous of all of Egypt’s pharaohs, and had exercised tight control over the lands of Canaan. When Ramesses II died in 1213, and Merneptah assumed leadership, the lands of Canaan, once subjugated into client kingdoms of Egypt, evidently began vying for greater power in the region. It was therefore important for Merneptah to quell any insurrections in the lands to the northeast. He needed to show that he had the same military prowess and long arm as his father, and he did this by extending his military campaign against the Libyans, crossing the Sinai and Negev deserts, and waging war on the small city states to the north.

The Merneptah Stele, again, carved in 1207 BCE, concisely records Pharaoh Merneptah’s victories in Canaan. “Now that [Libya] has come to ruin,” it announces, “the Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe: / Askalon has been overcome; / Gezer has been captured; / Yanoam is made nonexistent. / Israel is laid waste; his seed is no longer.”² You did catch that last one, didn’t you? “Israel is laid waste; his seed is no longer.” That, folks, is the first historical mention of Israel that we know of outside of the Old Testament. Etched into a chunk of black rock, 700 miles from Canaan, at the turn of the twelfth century BCE. It was discovered by the pioneering British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1896, and when he found it, he knew that it would be the most important discovery of his career.

Canaanites and Egyptians in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages

For my listeners who are totally unfamiliar with the Old Testament, let me pause for just a minute and explain why this piece of black granite found along the Egyptian Nile was such a big deal. The Israelites are the main protagonists in the Old Testament. Isra-el means “He who struggles with God,” and the Old Testament is, to put it absurdly briefly, about the people of Israel making covenants with God, breaking those covenants, and being rewarded and punished accordingly. The Old Testament, unlike the New Testament, is about a specific social and ethnic group, associated with the lands of ancient Canaan, whose latter day descendants are called Jews. I realize that the kind of person who listens to an educational podcast almost definitely knows this. But just in case. The Merneptah stele of 1207 is a big deal because it’s the first piece of definitive archaeological evidence that we have, outside the Old Testament, that a people called the Israelites existed in the Late Bronze Age in ancient Canaan.

Now, if you’ve read the Old Testament, or even just dipped into the first couple dozen pages, you know that Canaanites frequently had unpleasant dealings with Egyptians. Let’s continue to keep the Bible closed for now, and talk about the archaeological record of the relationship between Canaan and Egypt. This relationship had been going on long before the Merneptah stele was carved. Egypt was almost always more powerful, and more stable. The center of the Nile Delta lies a little over 500 miles from the Canaanite highlands where the earliest Israelites seem to have lived. This was a route that, in 1207 BCE, ancient Egyptians knew well. The road that led from the lush Nile Delta, over the present day Suez Canal, across the arid expanse of the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert of southern Israel, was called the Ways of Horus. This road was a well designed network of forts, wells, and stocking stations, each one a day’s march from the next, so that even huge armies could cross the desert and stay stocked with provisions. The Ways of Horus was Egypt’s interstate freeway north, a string of garrisons designed to control traffic across the desert.³

A tomb discovered near the modern day town of Beni Hasan contained well preserved wall paintings dating between the 2000s to the 1600s BCE. One of these displays a series of figures dressed in Semitic garments, thought to be Hyksos in origins - in other words from Canaan or the lands around it. To biblical literalists, the Beni Hasan tomb is evidence of a broad Israelite presence in Middle Egypt during the Middle Bronze Age, a time around which Rabbinical history dates the life of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. To archaeologists, the tomb simply shows a record of an unusual period of foreign leadership in Egypt in the Middle Bronze Age.

The Ways of Horus had been built, however, long before 1207 BCE. On one occasion, and one occasion only, Canaan reversed the long historical pattern of subjugation in the region. An entire dynasty of pharaohs, in power between 1670 and 1570 BCE, were Canaanite in origin. They came to power at a site called Avaris, and they were called the Hyksos. Archaeological excavations of Avaris demonstrate a slow swelling and spreading of Canaanite burial customs, pottery, and building practices there. The Hyksos, through a gradual process of immigration, gained power in Egypt, bringing with them northern military tools like the composite bow, the horse, and the chariot. Canaan, for this brief time, exercised control over Egypt. It was the high water mark of Canaanite power. And it would never happen again. [music]

Canaan and the Amarna Letters

Egypt had too many monolithic reminders of its cultural past to suffer under foreign leadership for long. Around 1570, the Canaanite leadership of Egypt was forcibly exiled, and the Ways of Horus were built to monitor immigrant traffic and buffer invasions from the north. Centuries passed, and the Middle Bronze Age trickled into the Late Bronze Age, and Ancient Egypt for a time became the most powerful empire in the Western World.

Two hundred years after the Canaanite Hyksos pharaohs ruled over the Nile, we have substantial evidence of the power Egypt exercised over Canaan. The famous Amarna letters, found at the capital city of the heretic monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten at the turn of the twentieth century, tell of what was going on in Canaan during the earliest days of the Israelites. By the mid thirteen hundreds, Canaan was totally dominated by Egypt. The days of the Hyksos, and the apex of Canaanite civilization, were long gone. Canaan in 1350 is outlined vividly in the Amarna letters. Its tiny city-states, Shechem, Megiddo, Hazor, Lachish, and Jerusalem, were little more than unwalled settlements – small palaces and temple compounds with outlying administrative buildings. Canaan’s population, in comparison to its long armed imperial neighbors, was tiny and powerless. Egypt’s presence in Canaan in 1207 was broad based and carefully administrated. A military capital at Gaza controlled the region, and strongholds monitored strategic geographical areas.

So let’s return to the Merneptah stele, and the first mention of Israel. By this year, Canaanites and Egyptians knew one another quite well. Canaanites had been in Egypt. Egyptians had been, and continued to inhabit Canaan. Before and after the year 1207, traffic continued along the Ways of Horus. The peoples of Canaan had deep-set cultural memories of migrations down to Egypt. Sometimes, in decades of low rainfall in Canaan, the region’s inhabitants crossed the southern desert and went to the lands of Nile Delta, where food was more plentiful. At other times, they journeyed to Egypt as traders. At still other junctures, Canaanites were captured as prisoners of war and compelled to work on pharaonic building projects. In 1207, to the hill dwelling Semitic speaking people we know as the Israelites, Egypt was the bronze fist that hung over the highlands west of the Jordan River. Only, something happened that’s come up a number of times in this podcast so far. Something almost apocalyptic, a perfect storm that changed the balance of power in the civilized world. Without this something, the Israelites would have remained another highland tribe lost to history, and the Bible never would have been written. This something was the Bronze Age Collapse.

The Bronze Age Collapse and Its Impact on Canaanite Highlanders

The Merneptah stele, which records his victories against the Libyans to the west, shows optimism about Egypt’s continued regional power, and the king’s capacity to subjugate his foes. But less than a century later, Egypt was on the brink of annihilation, having fallen deeply into what Egyptologists call the Third Intermediate Period. What happened that sent this imperial juggernaut on a path to destruction? How could the most powerful empire in the ancient world at the time be hobbled in less than a hundred years?

Multiple forces broke the strength of Egypt during the 1100s BCE. Most importantly, successive waves of westerners and northerners invaded that historians have traditionally called the Sea Peoples. The 1207 Merneptah stele describes how the Libyans weren’t alone in their saber-rattling against the Egyptians. With them were peoples whose names are probably unfamiliar – the Ekwesh, possibly from mainland Greece; the Shekelesh, possibly from Sicily; the Lukka, from southwestern Turkey, and others, whose origins are even less certain – the Shardana, Teresh, and Troas. Of the later migrant-marauders, the Tjeker, Peleset, Denyen, and others, we have bits and pieces of information on the historical record – names and variants of names across the region. Collectively, the Sea Peoples swept in from the west and north. By the time the successive waves of militarized migrants had fully washed ashore, unaffiliated city states of the western Fertile Crescent were burned and broken. Only Assyria, far inland and to the east, survived relatively intact. Egypt survived, but it would never again be as powerful as it was in the days of Merneptah.

There are many theories as to why the Sea Peoples invaded at the end of the Bronze Age. Several of them hold widespread credibility. Climate change was almost certainly part of the picture. The semiarid country of the eastern Mediterranean, always sensitive to years of low rainfall, likely experienced exceptionally low crop yields over successive years. Studies of core sediment samples from around Galilee and the Dead Sea in Canaan show that a severe drought plagued the region around the beginning of the Bronze Age Collapse. Famine during the period is widely recorded, and would have driven oceangoing raiders eastward in search of provisions and stable living conditions.

Another well regarded theory is often called the “systems collapse.” In the main power centers of the ancient world, a premature degree of specialization – in crops, trading networks, metallurgy, and irrigation – was crudely superintended by heavy handed kingships. These kingships were always vulnerable to assassinations, coups, and succession disputes. When this already imperfect system faced rapid systemic change as a result of population growth, evolution in military technology, sudden famine, and strongly motivated raiders and migrants from the north and west, civilization as humankind knew it collapsed. Much of the ancient world fell into a dark age.

Now, that’s plenty to remember already. Lots of region wide trends and multinational power politics. But from here on out, things are going to be simpler. For the rest of this show, we’re going to stay in Canaan, and, again, imagine ourselves in that pivotal year of 1207 BCE, twenty-five miles north-northeast of Jerusalem. Pines and shrubs rise out of shaded ravines, and pale rocks tower like ramparts on the heights. Flocks of goats chomp on tough native bushes, and kestrels hover overhead in the cloudless sky. Nearby, an olive tree has dropped its fruits down to a twiggy world of bugs and rodents, and the fragrance of flowers and fermentation passes over the rugged landscape. At dusk, the stalks of dry grass hold the fading light, each one like a little candle as the sun plunges into the Mediterranean to the west. Why do I keep describing the geography of this land?

Because the remote hills and highlands of Canaan, I think, must have been a pretty decent place to be during the end of the world, during this cataclysmic event that we call the Bronze Age Collapse.[music]

The Rise of Canaanite Hill Tribes in the Early Iron Age

Whatever defeat the Israelites suffered from Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BCE, they recovered. And over the next century, as you, or your children, or grandchildren stood on that sequestered spot twenty-five miles north-northeast of Jerusalem, you’d have seen smoke if you looked north and westward. The cities of Canaan’s upper coastal plain bear archaeological evidence of mass destruction. Seventy-five miles to the north, the prosperous city of Lachish fell to foreign invaders, not to be resettled for two hundred years. Fifty miles away from the sheltered highlands, the coastal cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon were destroyed and repopulated by Philistine conquerors. Even closer, less than forty miles distance from our quiet spot in the highlands, the city of Megiddo also burned. In the distant north, large cities in present day Syria and Turkey fell to the sea people – Carchemish, Alalakh, Aleppo, and beautiful, civilized Ugarit.

If you lived in the quiet hills, twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, as the some of the earliest Israelites did, you would not be safe over the course of the apocalyptic 1100s BCE. But in comparison to your coastal neighbors, with their dense population concentrations, their wealth, and their provisions, you and your family would not be a principal target. You’d quietly tend to your herds and scattered fields, be on the lookout for marauding patrols, cultivate your small vineyards and olive groves, and try to protect and provide for your family and clan. It’s what any smart, self-respecting seminomadic people would do in such dangerous times.

Two Main Phases of Biblical Archaeology

What, you might ask, about Adam, and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Samuel, Joshua, David and Solomon? Doesn’t the Old Testament provide a perfectly clear summary of the origins of the earliest Israelites? And to this question, I’ll just say, let’s leave those folks until a bit later. Today’s story is about archaeology of the ancient lands of Canaan, and not the scriptures of a single subgroup of its population.

Keeping the Old Testament closed for now is a decision I’m conscientiously, and respectfully making, and it’s a decision that has plenty of precedent. In the 1960s, a new phase of archaeology began in the hill country of Canaan. The whole story of biblical archaeology is a long transition between two phases. In the first phase, scholars and archaeologists would pinpoint a verse or chapter in the Bible, then, shovels and picks in hand, hurry out to a dig site to try and prove that they’d found conclusive material evidence of this or that event in the Old Testament. There have been over 170 expeditions to find Noah’s Ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat, and they continue into the present day, evidence that this first phase of Biblical archaeology is still alive and well. And in the second phase of Biblical archaeology, which commenced just fifty years ago, scholars and archaeologists have begun to simply conduct broad surveys of huge swaths of the Canaanite countryside and carefully catalog their findings. These kinds of surveys don’t set out to find Samson’s jawbone, or David’s sling, or Deborah’s chariot. They simply dig stuff up. They might say, “We found eighty-six pottery fragments here, along with a female fertility figurine, human and animal remains, a shell necklace, and some stone tools.” Or, “We found four ostraca, covered in mostly unreadable Aramaic dated to the Omride period, an iron bit of Hittite design, and stone etching that seems to be of Baal’s sister Anat.” This systematic, stringently empirical approach, which we can call “survey archaeology,” is maybe less exciting and spectacular than sending another expedition of guys to find Noah’s Ark, but its results are more systematically produced and less liable to hopeful conjecture.

Using techniques of survey archaeology in the central hills of ancient Canaan, archaeologists, beginning with the pioneering work of Yohanan Aharoni, slowly uncovered more than 250 communities scattered amidst the hills north of Jerusalem and southwest of the Sea of Galilee.⁴ These communities, each home to about fifty adults and fifty children, added up to about 45,000 people, all told. These highlanders were able to weather the Bronze Age Collapse due to their remote location, and their self sufficiency. As the established world trade networks broke during the 1100s, the hill dwellers of central Canaan remained sturdily self-sufficient, and modest in their means of living. They had no palaces, no centers for food storage, no public halls, almost no luxury goods, and their structures were, on average, some 600 square feet in size. Their villages, unlike the towns on the coastal plains to the west, had no fortifications, and no weaponry. These unassuming highlanders, sheltered from the Bronze Age collapse by the obscurity of their location, are thought by modern archaeologists to have been the first Israelites. Again and again, I’ve mentioned the hills twenty-five miles north-northwest of Jerusalem, the site of the northern city of Shiloh. If the spread out villages of the earliest Israelites had a geographical center, this might have been it. [music]

The highlands of Canaan had long been inhabited by similar peoples. Long before Egypt raised its first pyramid, seminomadic settlements thrived there, in the highlands of Canaan. And communities of highlanders thrived not just to the north of Jerusalem, but to the east and south of the Old City, in the lands of Ammon, Moab, and Edom. The cultures of these various highland regions were largely interchangeable. Archaeology shows that they worshipped conventional Canaanite deities, among them El, the distant patriarchal god of the Levant, symbolized by a bull and later incorporated into Biblical Hebrew names like Bethel (house of God), Elohim (God or Gods), and Israel (He who struggled with god). There was, however, a difference discovered between the Israelites and their hill dwelling neighbors. For whatever reasons, the inhabitants of central Canaan did not keep or consume pigs. The Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites all did. But over five hundred years before the Priestly restrictions against pork were set down in Exodus and Leviticus, the Israelites disdained the husbandry of pigs. They were, then, by 1207 BCE, a people for whom we have a named historical instance, archaeological evidence, and, most importantly, a people who considered themselves culturally distinct from key neighbors. Let’s talk about what happened next.

The Growth and Diversification of Pastoral Communities in Early Iron Age Canaan

The Bronze Age Collapse shattered Egypt’s control over Canaan. Granted, other peoples migrated and settled along the coast. But if you were an Israelite living in the 1100s, the Bronze Age Collapse obliterated your ancestral boogeyman, the long imperial arm of the Egyptian pharaohs. Egypt retracted from its imperial provinces and withered, and its former vassals suddenly had room to breathe and stretch their legs. There was, in Canaan, a power vacuum, and it began to draw people down from the highlands. The population of the hill-dwelling Israelites swelled. They expanded westward, beyond the inner valleys of the east. In the centuries between 1200 and 1000, archaeology shows an increasing degree of specialization in the early Israelites. Slowly, they transitioned from self sustaining communities of a hundred or so villagers each to interknit networks based on trade.

The process was similar to the one we saw in early Greece. Your village might own a fabulous olive grove on some dry slopes, but lack fertile lowlands to grow grain. But the guys on the other side of the ridge had just the opposite, and so you traded with them. Then there were those other guys who lived up north whose goats produced that really tasty milk, and so you traded them some olives in exchange for goat milk. A few generations of this sort of thing, some intermarriage, growing genetic diversity, some fine tuning of cultivation techniques, some mass exchange of collective knowledge, and maybe a couple of families rolling in from Mesopotamia or Anatolia and sharing ideas and technologies with you, and you had the start of a civilization. It was happening all over Canaan. The Edomites to the south, the Moabites to the southeast, and the Ammonites to the east, now the Egyptians were gone, were all free to grow and prosper. The Bronze Age collapse turned scattered hill communities into distinct and growing city states.

Even before the Bronze Age Collapse booted Egypt back to the Nile, the hill communities of central Canaan – the future Israelites – had long been loosely divided into two regions. By 1,000, the Israelites had congregated into ecologically and geographically distinct areas. In the north, their capital was Tirzah. In the south, the regional centers were Jerusalem and Hebron.

The northern kingdom, early on, was far more populous and prosperous. In the north, fertile valleys provided farmland, and regions of the northern kingdom lay on the overland trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia. The greener pastures of the north received more rainfall, and, abutting the cosmopolitan world of southern Syria, they had more diversity in population and economy.

The south was a different story. Jerusalem, Hebron, Beersheba – these were arid, sparsely populated lands. The terrain in the south was steeper, rocker, and harsher. Olives and orchards might be managed, but always at the risk of climatic fluctuations. Because we’re going to be dealing with these two lands extensively, we need to have names for them. The names we’ll use are the ones that the Old Testament gives us. In the Bible, the northern kingdom is called Israel. And the southern kingdom is called Judah. It’s a little bit confusing to the newcomer. “Israelites” is used to describe the citizens of Israel and Judah together, as the followers of a shared set of cultural practices. “Judahites,” on the other hand, always means the inhabitants of the southern kingdom.

So if you’re new to the Old Testament, then, heads up, let me repeat. Much of the Old Testament tells, or makes reference to the story of two kingdoms. Again, the northern one is Israel. And the southern one is Judah. These two kingdoms will come up again and again in this and coming episodes. Over the next twenty or thirty minutes, I’m going to tell you about these two kingdoms – first the rise and fall of Israel, and then the rise and fall of Judah – what archaeologists have found at dig sites there, and, occasionally, why the Bible is particularly concerned with certain monarchs in the north and south. If you need a pneumonic device, just remember that “I” comes before “J,” just as Israel was north of Judah on the map.

The Rise of the Northern Kingdom

Excavations at northern and southern kingdoms, again, Israel and Judah, show that they developed on radically different timeframes. The northern kingdom, far sooner than the southern one, departmentalized agriculturally and commercially. Archaeologists found stone administrative centers in the north that date to the early 800s, two centuries before such buildings were constructed in the south. The northern capital, Samaria, became a center of operations over a century before Jerusalem emerged in the late 700s. Industrial olive oil production took place in the north two hundred years before it did in the south. As long as the northern kingdom of Israel was standing, its southern counterpart Judah was always in second place. In fact, through the 800s and 900s, Judah had just around twenty villages, ringed with herders and wandering bands of desert raiders.⁵

Now, during the 900s, the fragile populations of Israel and Judah experienced something which would happen again and again in the history of Canaan. Egypt, knocked out for three hundred years after the Bronze Age Collapse, was on the loose again. The pharaoh Sheshonq invaded and conquered cities in the north – Megiddo, Taanach and Shechem. He left the south relatively unscathed, but the assault was a grim reminder that Canaan was, unfortunately, a small place ringed by huge, powerful neighbors.

The Omride Dynasty

Then, in the early 800s, something momentous happened in the north. A dynasty began which would see the northern kingdom expand to its greatest geographical extent. This was the dynasty of Omri, an Israelite general who became king. A stone monument three hundred years younger than the Merneptah Stele, called the Mesha stele, found in the remote regions of modern day Jordan, indicates that Omri’s kingdom stretched from the southern reaches of Damascus and deep into present day Jordan. Omri and his son, Ahab, built and expanded the northern capital of Samaria, which for a time would be a real power in the region. Ahab married a Phoenician princess in order to consolidate diplomatic relations with the coastal cities to the west. In addition to having a shrewd political conscience, Ahab didn’t shy away from war. He went knuckle to knuckle with the Assyrians from the east, and in what is the first extrabiblical mention of an Israelite king, a stone monument found in the Assyrian capital records how “Ahab, the Israelite [had] 2,000 chariots [, and] 10,000 foot soldiers.”⁶

The sons and grandsons of Omri, which include Ahab, Ahaziah, and Jehoram, saw the northern kingdom into a period of unprecedented prosperity. The Omride dynasty left behind huge building projects – the city of Samaria, a compound of structures in Israel’s Jezreel valley, palaces in Megiddo, and strong fortifications at the city of Hazor. The palace at Samaria, built with well carved ashlar blocks and capped with beautifully ornamented stonework, showed cosmopolitan architectural influences and sophisticated engineering techniques. Samaria and its sister cities in the north were complete with underground water channels carved from bedrock. Excavations in the Jezreel valley compound during the 1990s showed distinct archaeological features common to Samaria, Megiddo, Hazor, and a distant city on the fringe of Moab. The Omrides, it seemed, were responsible for the monumental construction projects once attributed to the Biblical Solomon.⁷
[music]

The Aramaic and Assyrian Invasions of the North Kingdom

By the early 700s, the northern kingdom of Israel had around 350,000 inhabitants. Its rich natural resources fed its sizable population. It was a multiethnic civilization, with ties to the Phoenecians on the coast and Syrians to the north, in which many religious practices persisted. It was not culturally insular, but instead absorbed the languages and ideologies of neighboring regions. It was wealthy, productive, and organized. And its neighbors, at the end of the 800s and the beginning of the 700s, had begun to notice.

To the north of Israel, centered in Damascus, there existed a civilization called Aram, which spoke a language called Aramaic. During the years between 835 and 800, Aram invaded and occupied some of Israel’s regional centers. Four cities were conquered and occupied, and the Syrians may have even besieged the capital. But no all out war followed. The Aramaeans retained their territories, and across Israel, pottery and other artifacts thereafter show Aramaic writing alongside Hebrew. The northern kingdom continued to be, as it always had been, a diverse mixture of peoples.

But then, to the east, a civilization caught wind of the rising kingdoms of Canaan. The Israelites had met them once before, under King Ahab, and survived. But over the next century, no power in Canaan, and no confederation of powers in the ancient world, would be able to stand up to the terrifying strength of the Assyrians.

If you read the tablets and stone inscriptions that record the achievements of the Assyrian kings, it is possible to walk away with the impression that they were a whole civilization of psychopaths. In the previous episode I read you a testimony of Tiglath-Pileser, who bragged about flaying rebellious chiefs and covering a pillar with their skins, who bound severed heads to tree trunks, who impaled victims on pillars of spikes, who dismembered, mutilated and burned alive citizens of conquered cities. It’s difficult to know the full extent of such persecutions, but suffice it to say that when the Assyrians arrived at your city gates, with their huge chariots and technologically advanced weaponry, you could either surrender unconditionally, or die horribly. There seemed to be no middle path. The Middle Assyrian Code, a set of laws developed during the late 1000s BCE in the ancient Iraqi city of Ashur, show that the Assyrians were just as harsh with one another as they were with subject kingdoms. Punishments included an encyclopedia of mutilations and dismemberments, with cutting off noses, ears, fingers, genitals, rape, impalement, and gouging out eyes all par for the course.

Assyria came to Canaan at the end of the 800s and went straight for Damascus. The Aramaen capital surrendered. The kingdom of Israel held its breath and waited for the hammer to fall, but it didn’t. Instead, Israel became increasingly prosperous. The northern kingdom meshed with Assyria’s trade routes. Archaeologists have found large olive presses in the hills of Israel, and pottery fragments with Hebrew writing on them recording oil and wine being shipped en masse to the capital city, Samaria. Far from being disemboweled by Assyrians, the elite of Israel found themselves enjoying, more than ever, the fruits of a commercially advanced, cosmopolitan civilization.

Under King Jeroboam II, the Hebrew and Aramaic speaking citizens of Israel saw more public building projects, and the elite palace culture of the Samaria enjoyed an opulent lifestyle. Archaeologists have found beautifully carved ivory plaques and fine furniture in the palace of Jeroboam II, and even a royal seal bearing the name of a courtier who described himself as “Shema, the servant of Jeroboam.”⁸
The earliest of the biblical prophets, Amos and Hosea, were subjects of Jeroboam II’s kingdom, and they disdained the luxuries of the king’s court.

When Jeroboam II died in 747, a rapid succession of rulers followed him, and changes in leadership were occurring in Assyria as well. A king called Tiglath-pileser III, (the Bible calls him Pul) assumed power. In the next decade, this king placed fierce new economic demands on Canaanite cities. Unable to meet them, the Israelite king at the time, Pekah, attempted to form a consortium with the coastal cities and Damascan rebels in the north, but they forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with the superpower of Mesopotamia. You don’t kill Assyrians. Assyrians kill you. [music]

The Fall of Samaria and the Northern Kingdom

Canaan’s military efforts against the Assyrians were futile. The northern part of Canaan faced wide destruction. Several biblical records of Assyrian destruction are fully supported by archaeological evidence. Syria, Damascus, and its king fell first. Israel was next. Only the core region of Samaria was left semi-sovereign. Meanwhile, neighboring Megiddo was made the center of Assyrian power in the north. The regions of the kingdom of Israel, which had once spanned a wide territory under King Ahab and Jeroboam II, had shriveled into the tiny core of Samaria and its vicinity.

The final king of Israel, Hosea, came to power by assassinating his predecessor. In the 720s, Hosea saw what he believed was a golden opportunity. The Assyrians were transitioning between kings. There was the very real possibility of a dynastic dispute. While Hosea continued paying his tribute to the Assyrians, he secretly formed an alliance with Egypt. His strategy would be to pit the two world powers against one another. Assyria might be mired in leadership squabbles, and this was Hosea’s only real chance to win sovereignty for himself and put regional power back in the hands of Samaria. Hosea ceased his tribute payments and waited for the clash to unfold, expecting a slow, poorly coordinated response from the east. Only, he forgot that rule of dealing with the superpower of Mesopotamia. You don’t kill Assyrians. Assyrians kill you.

The new king of Assyria, seeing that the tribute from Israel had ended, moved in and destroyed Samaria. Assyrian records tell of the massive victories, and the forced resettlement of tens of thousands of Israelites into various regions of Mesopotamia. In turn, Assyrians settled thousands of their own peoples into the fertile regions of Israel. This was the end of Canaanite leadership in the north.

But it was not the end of a Canaanite citizenry in the north. Although Assyria did deport huge numbers of Israelites, the majority of them stayed behind. Assyrian conquerors knew that it’s bad policy to depopulate a country of its harmless and productive peasantry. And so the always cosmopolitan northern region of Canaan, now populated with outsiders from a wide range of eastern cities, became even more cosmopolitan. The ideologies, stories, and religions of faraway kingdoms in modern day Iraq and Turkey now had free reign to circulate amidst the Israelites, along with those Aramaeans, which had already been there for other a century, and those of the Egyptians, which had been there for thousands of years.

But this new, even more international state was no utopia for the conquered Israelites. The terror and butchery of the Assyrian conquests of the 720s, together with property confiscations and new resident aliens, drove the subjugated Israelites south, out of the green expanses of Samaria and the Jezreel valley, and into the dry hinterlands of Judah. And finally, after the fall of Israel in the north, in the last decades of the 700s BCE, the city of Jerusalem would begin to rise, and over the course of the next century, a new faith involving exclusive devotion to Yahweh above all other Canaanite deities would be born. [music]

The Rise of the Southern Kingdom

In 700 BCE, refugees were flooding into the previously marginal kingdom of Judah. It was now Judah’s time to shine. Its population swelled, and as new knowledge flooded into the province, Judah’s trade networks expanded. The refugees and their newfangled ways mandated the adoption of weights and measures, and through the 600s, for the first time, writing appeared on pottery.

Jerusalem itself had been a named settlement since at least the 1300s, but it wasn’t until the 600s that the settlement grew into a city. Immigrants swelled the population from 1,000 to as many as 15,000 citizens, and fortifications were built around the town. Farms blossomed all around the growing city, and neighboring settlements all swelled in size. On the whole, the regional population of Judah increased from 20,000 or 30,000 to around 120,000. The southern kingdom experienced a shift from village subsistence farming to cash cropping, and the exiled northerners helped solidify trading arrangements with the Assyrian economy and Arabian trade routes.

As had happened a century earlier in the northern kingdom of Israel, the economic prosperity of the southern kingdom of Judah led to the rise of an upper class. Over this upper class, from the 720s until around 690, there reigned a king named Hezekiah. The Bible has much to say about Hezekiah, and his descendants, and we’ll best leave the details of these stories until later. The main thing to remember here is the overall story of Canaan’s history, which is essentially a story about minor fledgling kingdoms trickling into the power vacuum left by the Bronze Age Collapse, only to suffer repeated conquests by larger neighbors. The story of Judah, the southern kingdom, is no exception to this general pattern.

In a sad parallel with what had happened in the north just fifteen years earlier, in 705 the ambitious southern king Hezekiah saw the Assyrians going through another transition in leadership. Hezekiah’s kingdom of Judah had undergone a meteoric rise in power and wealth. He decided to rebel against the Assyrian empire. First, he secured an alliance with Egypt. The Bible and archaeological record are in general agreement that Hezekiah built up fortifications around Jerusalem and neighboring cities. Archaeologists discovered a tunnel dug a third of a mile out from Jerusalem to connect with the spring that was the city’s main water source. Hezekiah knew what he was facing, and made extensive preparations. Only, Hezekiah, also, forgot that rule of dealing with the superpower of Mesopotamia. You don’t kill Assyrians. Assyrians kill you.

The inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, together with archaeological evidence, suggest the ferocity of the Assyrian retaliation to Judah’s rebellion. Jerusalem’s thriving sister city, Lachish, was leveled. Archaeologists discovered a mass grave nearby stuffed with some 1,500 men, women and children. The Canaanites in the south were no match for the Assyrian military. King Hezekiah of Judah was captured. Assyrians moved in and began dominating, but, as had happened in the north, Judah was not entirely decimated. Evidently the Assyrians recognized Hezekiah’s capacities as an administrator and leader, and allowed him to pass his kingship down to his son Manasseh, who collaborated with the Assyrians and, over the course of a 55-year-long reign, from the 680s until the 640s, kept cosmopolitan Judah in relative prosperity.

Manasseh, Josiah and the Centralization and Codification of Religion in Jerusalem

Although it was still under the shadow of Assyria, the southern kingdom of Judah expanded in all directions during the middle of the 600s. Satellite towns around Beersheba spread deep into the southern desert. And during this period Judah became what its northern neighbor Israel had once been – a full fledged state, wired into regional trade networks, a junior partner in league with monolithic neighbors. Archaeological evidence from the mid 600s shows extensive governmental presence in the lives of the citizens of Judah. Seal impressions and administrative seals, and written records on tablets and pottery fragments, attest to the spread of a literate bureaucracy. Although the Bible has nothing good to say about him, Judah’s king during the mid 600s, Manasseh, was probably a competent leader who steered his little country through a tricky era of history, and by the mid-640s, Judah was a promising young nation.

At the end of Manasseh’s long and successful reign, his son briefly ruled, and then his grandson came to power. Manasseh’s grandson Josiah, who ruled from around 640 to 609 BCE, is the last king I’ll mention in this episode, and, by all rights, Josiah one of the most important people in human history. Why is this so? It’s simple. During the reign of King Josiah, particularly during the 620s, Biblical scholars generally agree that a huge portion of the Old Testament was written. King Josiah, like his great-grandfather King Hezekiah, believed in the exclusive worship of Yahweh. Like his great-grandfather Hezekiah, Josiah wanted the Jerusalem temple, and not any other place in the kingdom of Judah, to be the site where animal sacrifices were made to Yahweh. In a general movement that had been growing since the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel, King Josiah wanted the Canaanites to abandon their polytheistic ancestral traditions and bow to a single god. The geography, the historical references, and the anachronisms of the Old Testament all generally suggest that much of it was composed in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah. He is spoken of in glowing terms, as a king prophesized to deliver Judah from its wayward tendencies. Josiah is praised more highly than any other king in the Bible, except perhaps for David.

In the 620s and 610s Josiah was at the helm of a growing nation, a cosmopolitan nation, but one which nonetheless had a large store of people who identified themselves as descendants of the ancient hill tribe called the Israelites. Josiah was a religious figurehead, probably spearheading purges against the old Canaanite religions. And somewhere in his court, a writer, or enclave of writers, were recording the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and producing and making changes to ancestral oral traditions passed down between generations of Israelites. Josiah himself is a main protagonist in these stories, a sort of climax that all of Canaan’s bloody history had worked to produce.

The 620s, the 620s, the 620s. Oh, man, the 620s. Jerusalem must have been an electrifying place in the 620s. The book of 2 Kings tells of the discovery of a scroll of law in the Jerusalem temple which was read aloud to a listening public, a scroll which scholars generally concur was a nascent version of the Book of Deuteronomy. Just as importantly, during the 620s, Judah’s arch-nemeses, the Assyrians, were suddenly floundering. Nomads were pouring into Assyria from the north, and wars with peoples in the far eastern reaches of Mesopotamia – peoples called the Medes. Assyria, gouged by raids close to its capitals, fell into civil war. On the streets of Jerusalem during this decade, amidst Josiah’s loyalists, it must have seemed that the king’s new monotheist zeal, now scaffolded by powerful new written texts, would finally bring Canaan into the big leagues. The meticulous laws of Deuteronomy would spread, in written form, throughout the kingdom of Judah, and create a loyal, devout citizenry deserving of never ending prosperity. The stories of Israel’s patriarchs in the Old Testament, and their ever-postponed conquest of the whole of Canaan, were products of the manifest destiny of King Josiah’s court. Pious Josiah, the Biblical authors decreed, would throw off the yokes of foreign leadership once and for all, and the righteous worshippers of Yahweh would center their new religion in the temple at Jerusalem for ever after.

The Fall of the Southern Kingdom

Only, this doesn’t fit with the story of Canaan’s history, does it? Canaan, even in the boom times of King Josiah, even with its cadre of brilliant scribes and historians, was still a tiny place, a sturdy little fish surrounded by sharks. Egypt, long dormant and cowed by Assyrian dominance, sniffed blood in the water. By the time Assyria’s capital fell in 612, Egyptian armies had poured into Canaan. And in 610, something unimaginable happened to the kingdom of Judah. Josiah was killed by Egyptian forces. Josiah, to the inconceivable disappointment of his followers, was no luminary to guide them into peace and prosperity. He was just another sad moment in the history of Canaan. And the story would soon grow much sadder.

There’s just one more group in the broad cast of characters that concerns us today. This group is called the Babylonians. Once a subject kingdom of Assyria, Babylon, about fifty miles south of present day Baghdad, rebelled and proved to be the coffin nail of the faltering Assyrian state. Then the Babylonians turned their attention to the west.

Once again, little Canaan was stuck between Egypt to the southwest and Mesopotamia to the east. The tiny kingdom of Judah watched uncertainly as Egypt fell to Babylon. In the wake of great King Josiah’s death, four Judahite kings ruled in quick succession. One of them rebelled against Babylon, and in 597 BCE, Babylonian forces swept through Canaan, destroying the coastal cities. A decade later, Judah’s best cities had fallen, and the Babylonians turned their attention to Jerusalem. There, the great temple and sacred monuments of were pulverized, and the aristocracy and priesthood of Judah were forcibly relocated to Babylon. The promise of King Josiah – that luminous vision of a Canaanite kingdom united beneath the mantle of Yahweh, must have seemed all but impossible. The hopes of that ancient hill tribe that called itself Israel, at least as old as 1207, were shattered by the horrors of the 580s. Compressed into the memories of a handful of generations were conquests by Egyptians, Aramaeans, waves and waves of Assyrians, then Egyptians again, and then Babylonians. But bitterest of all – bitterest for that generation who had lived in the court of King Josiah and had dared to hope that their small land might be pious and flourish – was that this generation saw their temple obliterated, their political and cultural center taken over, and that the priestly class of this generation was taken to a foreign land far to the east, a land with strange gods and customs, a land that regarded the Canaanite provincials as pitiful and of little consequence.

What could these battered, horrified generations do in the face of such relentless oppression? How could these heartbroken nobles and priests, and their parents and children, do anything but exhaustedly assimilate to a larger power? Well, for one – although it must have seemed futile – the exiles and their descendants remained a tightly knit community during their captivity. And - oh, yeah. They also wrote the Bible. There was that.

How History Helps Us Understand the Old Testament

This is only the beginning of the history of the Israelites. I wanted to tell you this story, before we even open the first page of the Old Testament. I don’t know how interesting you’ve found all of this. It might have seemed like nothing more than a perfectly bland recitation of ancient history, a slightly bewildering tale of a busy little land where a bunch of people were vying for the same territory, a land where there were are no protagonists or antagonists, but only a slow, logical unfolding of historical events. But, if you know the Old Testament well, you know that the story I just told is wildly out of line with the one told there, particularly in the books of Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and First Kings. If you know the Old Testament well, you know just how much biblical history I’ve left out. Archaeology, in places, has found evidence that supports the history in the Old Testament, in others evidence that contradicts it. We’ll get into the details in the next bundle of episodes.

What I wanted to make clear, here, is that modern biblical scholarship and archaeology see the history of the Old Testament as the product of particular people, very specific circumstances, and a fairly certain time period. In my opinion, far from cheapening the power of the Old Testament, understanding the experiences of those who wrote it makes its stories even more searing, and more explosive. You can read the dense, perplexingly organized verses of a black jacketed Bible – words with no explanatory footnotes – no interstitial essays explaining them. And you might in places be struck by a certain archaic majesty in the book’s diction, and a certain dark austerity in its world view. But, whether or not you consider the Old Testament as divinely inspired, I think that when you understand the books of the Hebrew Bible as the writings of several specific generations of ancient people, people who really did suffer the brutality of Assyria and Babylon, then all of the Old Testament begins to blossom to life. And, though we haven’t done this much yet, when you understand some of the odd, or repetitious, or just impenetrable sections of the Hebrew Bible as the products of now well understood Ancient Near Eastern literary traditions, you can see the Old Testament as a huge strand in the great, harmonious web of ancient human writing. [music]

Seeing the Hebrew Bible as the product of a specific environment, as I said before, need not diminish its significance, or its centrality in western culture, or its sacredness to Jews and Christians. The production of the Old Testament was possibly the most singular, incandescent moment in the history of writing. Every major power in the ancient world had organized against the Judahites. Their kingdom had been physically and economically obliterated. Everything that they’d ever hoped for had been shattered. No gambling man would have placed a bet that their unique and ethnocentric monotheism would have ever limped past the sixth century. And yet while Assyrian Ashur, and Babylonian Marduk were forgotten, and while Egyptian Osiris petered out and Greek Zeus didn’t really make it past the fifth century, the texts of the demoralized Israelites exploded through time and have been read, whether in Biblical Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and so on, ever since. Again, whatever your religious persuasions – it’s easy to see that these two or three generations of Judahite priests and scribes who lived between 630 and 530 were extraordinary individuals – they were people capable of almost limitless defiance, imagination, innovation, and resilience.

I wanted to tell you this story - the story of Canaan - upfront for another reason. I thought about leaving it until the very end of all the episodes on the Old Testament. But I want to bring it up now, because I think for those of us who aren’t biblical scholars, or rabbis, or priests, or divinity school graduates, the Old Testament is an exceptionally difficult piece of writing, both intellectually and emotionally.

Forgive the brief autobiography here – it will serve to illustrate a point. By the time I read the Hebrew Bible, I’d waded through plenty of literature and philosophy in my undergraduate and graduate programs, but, unfortunately for me, I’d never worked my way through the monolithic book that lies at the root of so many western traditions. Then, I picked up a copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible, a grand, wonderful, red jacketed behemoth of a book that includes oceans of footnotes, introductions, appendices, maps, chronological tables, and all that stuff. And that summer, I shouldered my way through the whole thing. It was no special achievement – many people do this, and my reactions to the Old Testament, particularly, were probably quite predictable to someone in my time and life situation.

Everything I found in the Hebrew Bible surprised me. It was violent. Its stories told of broken promises, of regret, and mistakes, and condemnations. Its behavioral prescriptions were preoccupied with meat and blood, sex and flesh, apostasy and sin. Its view of humanity, bracketing a few moments in the Poetic and Wisdom books, was dour and bleak. Notwithstanding its intermittent flashes of hope and serenity in Psalms and Ruth, Ezra and the maybe Song of Songs, it seemed despairing, enraged, and staunchly ethnocentric.

The Hebrew Bible was not at all what I expected, which is certainly more of a testament to my own ignorance going into it than anything. I thought I’d read something like a philosophical treatise – something that at least had an unfolding argument about the primacy of a single god. Instead I found a miscellany – a diverse collection of writings that sandwiched hundreds of commandments between third person omniscient national history and highly emotive first person prophecies, with some proverbs and short poems sprinkled in for variety. It was utterly complex, and unassailably packed with names, places, and fragments of text – more like a modernist novel than an orderly religious tract. I thought I would find a continuum through it all, an unfolding logic that ultimately argued for the primacy of Yahweh, and while this is generally present, the Old Testament god appeared bafflingly inconsistent – at times a loving father, and at others a pitiless butcher. Even in the chronicles of the Israelites, I thought I’d find a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a story where underdogs became heroes, but the story was the opposite. A great kingdom briefly existed in covenant with Yahweh, and then – and then – centuries of teeter-tottering between sin and devoutness – and the story ends. There was no conclusion or epilogue, no perceptive summary – the final book of the Tanakh, Second Chronicles, simply recites the historical happenings already told of in Kings with a small appendix. There are a few scattered visions of a better future in the Prophetic Books - the books that end Christian bibles - these books at least include three or four references to a servant or child mostly in the Book of Isaiah, so important to Christians. But these passages are tiny, uncertain pinpricks, thought by Hebrew midrashim to be references to Hezekiah or Moses.⁹
In the Hebrew Bible, when it's not attached to the New Testament, the Israelite nobility returns home, now under the powers of Cyrus of the Achaemenid Empire. Things are a bit better. But Judah, now a little province called Yehud, is still a small, vulnerable kingdom surrounded by giants.

I’m getting ahead of myself. What I simply didn’t understand, and what made it the most difficult for me, was that the Old Testament is an anthology. It’s an anthology that started coming into being in the historical circumstances we’ve discussed today, in the kingdom of Judah, in the late 600s, in the midst of genocides, and forced relocations, and generations of broken dreams. And so if its worldview seems dark, and if its god appears exacting, or pitiless, and if its condemnations of other nations and ethnicities seem unsettling, then I think history, again, and again, and again, and again, and again is the answer that unlocks most of the questions we have about the Old Testament when we read it for the first time.

The Hebrew Bible isn’t the product of a happy, serene century. A huge amount of it is the product of a deep, multigenerational well of agony and desolation. It’s the stories, poems, and reflections of people who saw their whole way of life facing extinction, and refused to go down.

The next episode will be shorter, and if I do a good job, a lot easier. My goal will be to simply tell you about the general structure of the Old Testament. Too many of us who take a stab at reading the thing march bravely into the creation story of Genesis and then quit by the second or third book of the Bible. What I’ll do next time is summarize the whole Old Testament, talk about its organization, and the various versions of the Old Testament that are used by major world religions today. By the end of the next episode, you’ll know a bit about the history of Canaan, the general group of people who produced the Old Testament, and the contents and structure of this singularly important book.

Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’d like to close with a song. Skip if you’d like. It’s a little tune to celebrate the fact that we’re about to read the Bible. I mean read it – not generalize about it, not say what its teachings are and how they should be applied, and not tell anyone what they ought to believe. I mean, we’re just going to crack that book open, and start combing though it. Hope you like this silly little ditty, and I’ll see you next time.





References

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