A History of Ancient Israel - Eric H Cline

A HISTORY OF
ANCIENT ISRAEL:
FROM THE PATRIARCHS
THROUGH THE ROMANS
COURSE GUIDE
Professor Eric H. Cline

THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
A History of Ancient Israel:

From the Patriarchs Through the Romans
The George Washington University
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COURSE GUIDE
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Lecture content 2006 by Eric H. Cline

Course guide 2006 by Recorded Books, LLC
72006 by Recorded Books, LLC

Cover image: King David brings the Ark of the Covenant to Jersusalem Clipart.com
#UT078 ISBN: 978-1-4193-8872-9
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Course Syllabus
About Your Professor...................................................................................................4

Introduction...................................................................................................................5
Lecture 1
Abraham and the Patriarchs..................................................................6
Lecture 2
The Exodus and Egypt ........................................................................13
Lecture 3
The Conquest of Canaan: Israelites, Philistines,

and Phoenicians ..................................................................................20
Lecture 4
King David in History and Tradition .....................................................25
Lecture 5
King Solomon in History and Tradition ................................................31
Lecture 6
Excursus: The Ark of the Covenant.....................................................37
Lecture 7
The Kingdom of Israel and the Omride Dynasty .................................42
Lecture 8
The Kingdom of Judah Until the Time of Sennacherib .......................48
Lecture 9
Neo-Babylonians and the End of the Kingdom of Judah ....................54
Lecture 10
Persians and Greeks in Judea ............................................................61
Lecture 11
The Coming of the Romans and Christianity ......................................66
Lecture 12
Excursus: Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.....................................71
Lecture 13
From the First Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of

Jerusalem to Bar Kochba and the
Second Jewish Rebellion ....................................................................77
Lecture 14
Excursus: Masada, What Really Happened? ......................................82
Course Materials ........................................................................................................87
Photo courtesy of Eric H. Cline
About Your Professor

Eric H. Cline
Dr. Eric H. Cline, a former Fulbright scholar, is chair of the Department of
Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at The George Washington
University in Washington, D.C., where he holds a joint appointment as an
associate professor in both the Classics/Semitics Department and the
Anthropology Department.
A prolific researcher, Dr. Cline is the author or editor of seven books and
has more than seventy articles and book reviews to his credit. His books
include The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the
Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age, which received the 2001 Biblical
Archaeology Society (BAS) Publication Award for Best Popular Book on
Archaeology; Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel;
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: International Trade and the Late Bronze Age
Aegean; Amenhotep III: Perspectives on His Reign (coeditor); The Aegean
and the Orient in the Second Millennium BC; Thutmose III: A New Biography;
and a book for young adults entitled The Ancient Egyptian World (coauthor
with Jill Rubalcaba).
Professor Cline received the Morton Bender Award for Teaching at The
George Washington University in 2004 and the Archaeological Institute of
Americas National Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award for 2005. He
currently teaches a wide variety of courses, including Troy and the Trojan
War, History of Ancient Greece, History of Rome, and Art and Archaeology of
the Aegean Bronze Age.
Professor Cline has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Skirball Museum
in Los Angeles. His research has been featured in the Washington Post, the
New York Times, US News & World Report, the London Daily Telegraph, the
London Mirror, and many other publications around the world.
In addition, Professor Cline has been featured on numerous radio and
television broadcasts, such as the BBC World Services, National Public
Radio, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and the
History Channel.
Dr. Cline is married, with two children, two cats, and varying numbers of fish.
4
Clipart.com
King David brings the Ark of

the Covenant to Jersusalem
Introduction
Israel conjures up myriad associations for peoples of all cultures and religious backgrounds. Inextricably associated with the worlds three most prominent religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), Israel is steeped in history
and conflict, much of which is known through the tales of biblical figures such
as Moses, David, Solomon, and, of course, Jesus Christ.
But how much of the Bible can be relied upon as accurate history? And how
much of the biblical record can be verified through archaeology? Esteemed
professor, researcher, and author Eric H. Cline of The George Washington
University addresses these and other questions in this fascinating series
of lectures.
A History of Ancient Israel follows the course of Israels history from
Abraham and the Patriarchs through the Exodus, Exile, and two great Jewish
rebellions, encompassing a rich history that increases ones understanding of
Israels place in the world today. In addition to this storied regions tumultuous
past, Professor Cline delves into such compelling digressions as lectures on
the Ark of the Covenant, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and controversy surrounding
the fabled mass suicide at Masada.
5
Lecture 1:
Abraham and the Patriarchs
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple
(chapter 1: The Patriarchal Age: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob).
ny attempt to teach the history of ancient Israel depends

primarily on the biblical record. Some say the Bible is a
completely accurate and adequate account. Others view it
as a collection of folk tales and miracle stories. The biblical
writers themselves did not claim to base their work on factual records, because they were not as concerned with
what actually happened as with conveying the Word of God. On the other
hand, there is a lot of information in the Bible that can be correlated with
independent sources.
The Holy Land
Recorded Books, LLC
LECTURE ONE
The land of ancient Israel and Judah was known before the Israelites got
there as the land of Canaan, which is what the Egyptians called it. This
region is a coastal corridor, positioned between great empires for most of its
history. To the north were the empires in ancient Mesopotamia, modern-day
Iraq and northern Syria, which housed the Assyrians and the Babylonians
throughout time, and the Hittites, who dwelled in Turkey. To the south were
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the Egyptians, not only

King Tut and the people
of the New Kingdom, but
Egyptians from even earlier. Later came the
Greeks and the Romans
from Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient
Near East, so ancient
Israel was many times
caught between two
powers.
This area is frequently
referred to as the Holy
Land. That designation
covers the modern states
of Israel and Jordan, for
the most part, but the borders change dramatically over the course of the history of this region. The Mediterranean is always the western boundary, but
the eastern boundary is more indeterminate. Sometimes it lies on the Jordan
River, and sometimes it lies further east, where the region gives way to
desert. Down south is the Sinai, which historically formed a barrier to settlement. To the north is difficult hill country, where modern-day Israel now gives
way to modern-day Lebanon.
East to west, this region is divided into five different zones, mostly by topography and climate. The westernmost is the Coastal Plain, next to the
Mediterranean Sea. The plain itself is broken up into the Plain of Sharon, the
Plain of Dor, the Plain of Acco, and the Plain of Phoenicia.
Eastward, the second zone is the so-called Western Hills. These foothills,
known as the Shephelah, rise up from the Coastal Plain to the central ridge
of the country. They were heavily wooded in antiquity and heavily settled.
The higher ground, just above these, is known as the Hill Country. This is
where ancient Israel and Judah is located, and this is where the classic trinity
of Mediterranean food is found: wheat, olives, and vines. Along the summit
line of this ridge are important towns from the Bronze Age and Iron Age (for
example, Hebron, Jerusalem, Shechem, Beth-shean). The highest peak
along these hills is about four thousand feet above sea level.
Slightly further east is the Rift Valley, the third zone, one of the deepest
points on the face of the earth. The Rift Valley is a major structural rift that
runs up from East Africa and forms the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Jordan
Valley, Lake Tiberias, and Lake Huleh.
Continuing east is the fourth zone, known as the Eastern Hills, which are
high and rugged. These are where the Moabites, the Ammonites, and others
mentioned in the Hebrew Bible lived.
Beyond the Eastern Hills is the fifth zone, the desert of Syria, Jordan, and
Arabia. This formed the eastern border of the area for much of its history.
Frequently, the eastern border was at the Jordan River, rather than the
desert, but this is as far as this course will extend geographically.
7
Early History
The biblical books of Genesis through 2 Kings provide a continuous account
of Israelite and Judean history from their earliest times until the fall of
Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Genesis through Joshua tell about the origins of the
Israelites and how they came to possess the land of Canaan. The story
begins with the Creation in Genesis. By the end of the Book of Joshua, the
people are at rest in the Land of Promise.
The Hebrew Bible is the only ancient source that directly addresses the
question of Israelite origins. After the Great Flood, which Noah survived in his
ark, the descendants of Noahs three sons began to multiply. They migrated
to the land of Shinar, which is believed to be in lower Mesopotamia, the land
of Iraq today. There they began to construct a great tower that was supposed
to reach the heavens. To stop the project, God ordained diversity, hence the
Tower of Babel. Not able to understand each other anymore, the descendants of Noahs three sons scattered to different parts of the world.
LECTURE ONE
In the meantime, Lot,

Abrahams nephew, settled
in one of the cities of the
plains, in the vicinity of the
Dead Sea. He barely
escaped with his two
daughters when God
destroyed several of the
cities with fire and brimstone. It was during this
time that Lots wife was
turned into a pillar of salt,
while they were escaping
from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Lots daughters gave birth
to two sons, who became
8
Clipart.com
Among the distant descendants of Shem in the ninth generation is a tent

dweller named Abraham. Abrahams father had left Ur of the Chaldees to
migrate to the land of Canaan, but rather than migrating immediately,
Abrahams father settled in the vicinity of a place called Haran in Upper
Mesopotamia. It was only after his fathers death that Abraham migrated from
Haran to Canaan, where he lived as a sojourner in the land; that is, he resisted integration into local society. God promised Abraham that someday the
whole land would belong to his descendants and that they would be great in
number, so eventually he made a permanent camp near Hebron and had two
sons. The older son was
Ishmael, and he became
the father of the desert folk,
but his favorite and the only
son of his wife Sarah was
Isaac, born when Abraham
was one hundred years old
and Sarah ninety.
Lots wife is turned into a pillar of salt after looking back on

the burning Sodom and Gomorrah.
the ancestors of the Ammonites and the Moabites. After Sarah died,
Abraham remarried and had additional children, the ancestors of various
Arabic tribes. Abraham himself died at the age of 175. Before he died, he
obtained a wife for his son Isaac, and Isaac then went on to have children of
his own.
Abraham and His Descendants
If Abrahams father took the journey from Ur in Mesopotamia up to Haran
near modern Turkey, he would have followed the course of the Euphrates
River, which was a known international trade route at that time, and it is quite
possible that he settled down in a region in either north Syria or south
Turkey. There are villages in the region today that still look much as they did
four thousand years ago. Abraham also fits into some of the general migrations during this time period. It is quite conceivable that Abrahams and his
fathers movements should be seen in the light of these major migrations,
which take place at the beginning of the second millennium BCE.
Abrahams descendants then migrated into the land of Egypt. This falls into
the general historical era of the Hyksos, a group of people who ruled Egypt
from 1720 to 1550 BCE. Abraham himself fits well into what was happening
during the early second millennium BCE, that is, a breakdown of powerful
city-states that had flourished during the third millennium (disruptions
occurred in Egypt and in Mesopotamia). Some of the disruptions of urban life
that took place in the early second millennium have been attributed to a
group called the Amorites, and they begin to be mentioned in textual documents of the Mesopotamian city-states.
Building on the Evidence
In the 1930s, William F. Albright, one of the most famous historians studying
ancient Israel, built upon the artifactual and documentary evidence. Using
texts from later Amorite states of the Middle Bronze Age, Albright and other
scholars formulated what is known as the Amorite hypothesis, which states
that the Hebrew Patriarchs entered the area of Canaan as a part of widespread Amorite movements that disrupted the whole region during the early
second millennium BCE. They said that the patriarchal narratives told in the
Hebrew Bible should be seen accordingly, that is, against the background of
early Amorite society.
An early second millennium date for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob essentially agrees with the chronology found in the early Hebrew Bible, that is, in
1 Kings 6.1, which says that the Exodus took place about 480 years before
Solomons Temple was built. In Exodus 12, the Israelites stayed in Egypt for
about 430 years. This means that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob would have
been roaming around the ancient Near East sometime during the nineteenth
century BCE, that is, the beginning of the second millennium, because
Solomons Temple was built about the year 960. If 480 years are added to
get to the Exodus, and then another 430 years as the length of time the
Israelites stayed in Egypt, the year would be 1870 BCE. This was during the
time when the Amorites were moving around the ancient Near East, and it
also would allow the Hebrews to be placed in Egypt during the so-called
Hyksos period, when Egypt was ruled by foreigners. The stories of
9
Abrahams migration from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and then the later migrations of Jacob into Egypt, make sense when viewed against the political conditions of the early second millennium BCE and the geographical migrations
taking place at that time. Moreover, the names of the Patriarchs and some of
the customs that are reflected in the Hebrew Bible are quite similar to those
that are mentioned in second millennium Mesopotamian texts, such as writings from the cities of Mari and Nuzi.
There are a number of problems with the Amorite hypothesis. One is the
idea that the disruption of urban life in Canaan at the end of the Early Bronze
Age and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age was the result of widespread Amorite movements. This is by no means universally accepted by all
archaeologists and historians, so to say that Abraham was part of this
Amorite movement is to stack one hypothesis upon another. Moreover, the
Amorite hypothesis creates problems for the associated genealogical data;
for example, Genesis 15 assumes a four-generation stay in Egypt, and
Moses is identified as a fourth-generation descendant of Jacob (Jacob to Levi
to Amram to Moses). If the genealogical data is to fit with the chronological
data, each generation has to last an average of one hundred years. Usually,
a generation lasts thirty years, so these people must have lived an awfully
long time if the genealogy is to be squared with the chronology.
A second argument against the Amorite hypothesis is that the parallels
between biblical names and customs and those that are known from biblical
texts become less impressive in light of the fact that the names and customs
involved are not confined to the second millennium, but are characteristic of
the first millennium as well. If the Hebrew Bible is not written down until the
eighth or even the seventh century BCE, then all kinds of things might not be
accurate. So some historians and archaeologists say that the parallels are
actually relatively useless for pinpointing a particular period and calling it the
Patriarchal Age.
Finally, the biblical tradition never associates the Patriarchs with the
Amorites, but rather with the Arameans. So the Amorite hypothesis should be
called the Aramean hypothesis, but its not, because theyre not wandering
around just yet. And some of the other groups mentioned in these biblical traditions cannot be placed in an early second millennium BCE context. They are
going to come later in the second millennium or even in the first millennium.
Possibilities for the Patriarchs
LECTURE ONE
What are the possibilities then, in looking at Abraham and the Patriarchs?
One possibility is that the Amorite hypothesis is correct and that Abraham
and the Patriarchs date to the early years of the Middle Bronze Age.
The other possibility is that Abraham and the Patriarchs date to a little bit
later in the Middle Bronze Age, maybe into the seventeenth or the sixteenth
centuries BCE. This is definitely a possibility, though it cannot be corroborated. The third possibility is that Abraham and the Patriarchs date to the Early
Iron Age, that is, the early years of the first millennium, and that the writers of
the Hebrew Bible simply placed them more than a thousand years earlier to
concoct a made-up history of ancient Israel.
10
The fourth hypothesis is that there were no Patriarchs, that Abraham and
Isaac never existed. They were simply made up to illustrate particular stories
and were part of an invented history. How does one choose between these
hypotheses? The Amorite hypothesis is a likely one, because the movements
of Abraham and his descendants are most possible in the early years of the
second millennium BCE. Also, Abraham and his father must have been moving around Mesopotamia in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE in
order to get Jacob and the Israelites down into Egypt by the seventeenth century BCE and make everything else fit. The early second millennium may be
the best time for Abraham and the Patriarchs, but there is no archaeological
evidence that Abraham and the Patriarchs ever actually existed. Thats not to
say that they did not, however, because absence of evidence does not mean
evidence of absence.
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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. How does the breakdown of city-states in the early second millennium
BCE match with the proposed migration schedule for Abraham?
2. What are some of the problems with the Amorite hypothesis?
Suggested Reading
Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman
Destruction of the Temple. 2nd rev. ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1999.
Other Books of Interest

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed:
Archaeologys New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred
Texts. New York: The Free Press, 2001.
Geoghegan, Jeffrey C., and Michael M. Homan. The Bible for Dummies. New
York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2003.
Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000586 BCE. New
York: Doubleday, 1992.
LECTURE ONE
Rast, Walter E. Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology: An Introductory

Handbook. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.
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Lecture 2:
The Exodus and Egypt

(chapter 2: Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus).
he story of the Exodus is filled with problems and questions similar to some of those concerning the Patriarchs.
After Sarah died at the age of 127, Abraham remarried and
had additional offspring by his second wife and by several
concubines. These became the ancestors of various Arabic
tribes. Before Abraham died, he chose a wife for his son
Isaac from their kinsmen. Isaac married Rebecca and settled near Beersheba, in the southern part of the territory, and Isaac and Rebecca gave birth
to twins, Esau and Jacob.
Out of Egypt
Esau became the ancestor of the Edomites, while Jacob fathered twelve
sons by his Aramean wives and concubines, and these twelve sons became
the ancestors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
One of Jacobs sons, Joseph, was sold as a slave by his brothers and was
carried off into Egypt. While he was in prison there, Joseph displayed his ability to interpret dreams, gained his freedom, and eventually became the chief
administrative officer over Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh. Meanwhile,
there was a famine in Canaan that forced Jacob and his family to emigrate to
Egypt in search of food. Joseph arranged for them to settle in a place called
Goshen, and in Egypt, the families of the twelve brothers multiplied into the
Twelve Tribes.
Eventually, a Pharaoh came into power who knew not Joseph, and he
reduced the Hebrews to slavery. God commanded Moses (who, although a
Hebrew, had grown up in the Pharaohs court after being rescued as a baby
from the Nile) to lead the people out of Egypt and back to the land that God
had promised Abraham.
The escape from Egypt by Moses and the Hebrews is surrounded by spectacular miracles, including the Ten Plagues that God sent upon Egypt. After
each of the plagues, the Pharaoh agreed to allow the Hebrews to leave, but
then God would harden the Pharaohs heart so that hed change his mind
and thus invite another plague upon his land. These plagues included blood,
frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the slaying of
the firstborn.
When the Hebrews did finally manage to leave Egypt, the Pharaoh, his heart
having been hardened once again, assembled his army and chased the peo13
ple as far as the Red Sea. God parted the waters and allowed the Hebrews
to cross on dry land, but when the Pharaoh and his army followed, God
caused the waters to return and destroyed the Egyptian army. The story in
the Hebrew Bible is told in a number of different ways. A couple of different
sources seem to have been combined in antiquity within the account of
Exodus. Scholars today refer to the strands within the Hebrew Bible as the
Yawist, the Elohist, and the Priestly sources. These refer to the characters in
the stories or the people who wrote them down.
Forty Years in the Desert
The Hebrews made their journey to Canaan in stages. God sent a pillar of
cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to indicate when they should move
their camp and where they should pitch their tents. Along the way, he fed
them with quail and manna in the wilderness. After three months, the people
reached a mountain in the wilderness of Sinai. They remained encamped at
the foot of the mountain, while Moses climbed the mountain several times
and spoke to God directly. Up there, along with seeing a burning bush, he
received from God extensive legal and cultic instructions and regulations.
These laws, instructions, and regulations were put into practice with the
understanding that they were to be followed by the people from that time on.
And indeed, these are the laws that have governed the Jewish people ever
since, and even had an impact upon Christianity and Islam. These are not
only the famous Ten Commandments, which are unique in history, but also
more than six hundred other laws found in the Hebrew Bible, which determine, among other things, how one remains kosher and which are still followed by people today. The Hebrews were still encamped at the mountain
when they celebrated the first Passover, that is, the anniversary of the
escape from Egypt.
LECTURE TWO
On the twentieth day of the second month of the second year, the cloud that
God had sent was taken up, and it was time for the people to move on. They
set out again and eventually came to a place called Kadesh in the southwest
of the Negev. From there, they sent out twelve spies to explore the Promised
Land. The spies returned with glowing reports about the lands fertility and its
produce (the land of milk and honey), but they also warned that the cities
were too strong to be conquered and that the land was inhabited by giants.
While they were still wandering around, Moses died in the region now called
Transjordan, east of Israel, and Joshua assumed leadership of the people.
He began preparations for an invasion of the western part of Canaan. The
crossing of the Jordan River and the conquest of Jericho were essentially ritual operations surrounded by miraclesand at the same time were quite
good military operations.
Moses and the Hebrews, soon to be named the Israelites, wandered around
the region for forty years. Did they go on a northern route, up near the coast?
Did they go on a middle route across the Sinai, or did they go far down south?
These routes are all possible, and yet the northern route is most likely out of
the picture, because the Egyptians had a series of forts across this route. The
middle route is probably out too, going across the middle of the Sinai, because
it is in the middle of the desert. Its really only the very southern route, going
almost all the way to Sharm El Sheikh, that makes the most sense for where
14
the Hebrews, or Israelites, could have been for forty years. So most archaeologists and historians assume that Moses and the Hebrews wandered around
the very southern part of the Sinai for much of these forty years.
Holes in the Desert
How much of this biblical story can be believed, and how much has been
corroborated by archaeology or other sources? In brief, there is the biblical
narrative and little else. It may be a matter of faith to believe that the Exodus
and everything else took place as the Bible describes it. On the other hand,
even if the Israelites camped in the desert for forty years, little can be expected to be found in the desert through archaeology.
If they were camping, they would have used tents with post holes, rather
than permanent structures, and so an archaeologist is not going to find
houses and walls and remains of permanent structures, but rather simply
holes in the ground in which the tent pegs had once been placed, and those
are almost impossible to find. But again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
However, there are other difficulties with using the biblical narrative for
historical reconstruction: the number forty and multiples of forty are in evidence throughout the Book of Genesis through 2 Kings. Forty is a sacred
number, but it also may simply represent a generation.
There were forty years of wandering in the desert. The interval from the
Exodus down to Solomons building of the Temple is recorded as 480 years,
which is simply forty times twelve, so that could just be twelve generations.
The time from the building of Solomons Temple until the time that the exiles
returned from Babylon in 539 is given as another 480 years. In other words,
Solomons Temple was built at the midpoint between the Exodus and the
return from Babylon, with 480 years, or twelve generations, on either side of
Solomons Temple. This is enough to make one a little suspicious.
Some of the other difficulties with using the biblical narrative also deal with
numbers. Exodus 12.3738 says that the people of Israel journeyed from
Ramses to Succoth. The biblical account states that there were six hundred
thousand men on foot, plus women and children. A mixed multitude also went
with them, as did many cattle. This means that altogether there would have
been about two and a half million people, for most of the men would have
had wives, and most of the couples would have had two children, which
makes 2.4 million people. The mixed multitude would probably add another
hundred thousand people, which explains how the figure of at least 2.5 million people leaving Egypt was calculated. However, there is no way the
Egyptians would have had that many slaves. And if they had, there would
have been a revolt even earlier.
Moreover, if 2.5 million people did leave Egypt, and they marched ten
across, those numbers would have formed a line about 150 miles long. If
Moses did part the Red Sea, it would have had to have been held apart for
eight or nine days before all the Hebrews managed to get through. Then
there are the logistics of organizing such a group and sustaining it for forty
years of wandering in the wilderness, as well as the fact that the Bible says
there were only two midwives to care for the women.
15
However, there are additional questions raised by the biblical narrative. Did
the Hebrews flee Egypt without the Pharaohs knowledge, in great haste and
without preparation, or was the departure deliberate, with the Hebrews organized as an armed military force? How exactly were they able to leave Egypt,
and who was the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph? What was happening on
the international political scene at the time of the Exodus, and when did the
Exodus actually take place? Also, what were the social and political circumstances among the Canaanites at the time of Joshua that allowed him to conquer Canaan?
These sorts of questions are basic to modern historians interest, but are
incidental to the theological message that the people compiling Genesis
through 2 Kings wished to convey. The ancient writers, mostly because it
wasnt central to their interests or concerns, often failed to report precisely
the type of information considered crucial by modern historians.
LECTURE TWO
Other Questions
There are other, perhaps even more crucial, problems. Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua are not mentioned in any nonbiblical
records. Nor is there any reference to an Israelite stay in Egypt, the Exodus,
or the conquest of Canaan in any ancient source contemporary with the time
these events occurred. Furthermore, with one exception, there is no mention
of Israel or the Israelites in extrabiblical sources before the ninth century
BCE, well after the time of David and Solomon. This mention of Israel is in
the so-called Merneptah stele, which dates to 1207 BCE, the fifth year of
Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt. So the Exodus had to have taken place by this
time, but how much earlier did it take place?
Dating the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt is difficult. A variety of biblical, historical, and archaeological data needs to be taken into account. Most scholars
argue for either an early date, about the year 1450 BCE, or a later date,
about the year 1250 BCE. The early date tends to be held by scholars who
rely heavily on the Bible. The later date tends to be held by scholars who give
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All of this raises

enormous questions
for any historian who
wants to use this
information as it is
recorded. But perhaps there are simply a few too many
zeroes. If, rather
than having six hundred thousand
Hebrews of fighting
age leave Egypt,
there were only sixty
thousand, or six
thousand, or perhaps even six hundred, it would make a great deal more
sense, and the wandering and the two midwives would be resolved a
bit more.
more weight to the archaeological evidence. Arguments for the early date
point to Kings 6.1, which says that the Exodus took place 480 years before
Solomon began to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon began to build
the Temple in Jerusalem in the fourth year of his reign. Because Solomons
reign is about 970 to 930 BCE, this would then place the Exodus about 1450
BCE, that is, during the reign of King Thutmose III.
There are a number of letters from Egypt that date to about a hundred years
after this, about 1350 BCE, which document a period of social chaos in
Canaan that is caused by a group called the Habiru. The name sounds suspiciously similar to the name Hebrews, and if this is the case, then this would
represent extrabiblical evidence and an approximate date for an Israelite
invasion of Canaan sometime before 1350 BCE.
However, Thutmose III was the greatest conqueror that Egypt ever had, and
under him the Egyptians were in firm control of both Egypt and Canaan.
There is little archaeological evidence that he would have allowed the
Hebrews to leave Egypt during his reign, and in fact, there is little archaeological data anywhere to support a date for the Exodus about 1450 BCE.
Moreover, it is now doubted by scholars that the Habiru are the Hebrews, or
at least that they are not the invading Israelites led by Moses and Joshua.
Basically, they seem to have been a social class on the outskirts of society
rather than a given set of people.
A Later Date for the Exodus
As for the arguments for a later date for the Exodus, the people following
this line of argument say that the 480 years mentioned in 1 Kings is simply a
symbolic number (that is, twelve generations of forty years each) and can be
safely ignored. They also point to the fact that the cities of Pithom and
Ramses in the Nile Delta region of Egypt, which were supposedly built by the
Hebrews, were in fact founded by the Egyptian King Seti I in about the year
1304 and were completed by Ramses II, who ruled from 1290 to 1224. So if
the Hebrew slaves built the cities of Pithom and Ramses, they would still be
in Egypt until about 1250 BCE.
Moreover, archaeological evidence from various sites in Canaan may support a thirteenth-century date for the conquest, because a number of these
cities were destroyed sometime during the thirteenth century, which would fit
quite well with the coming of Joshua and the Israelites. Additional arguments
for the later date of 1250 BCE for the Exodus point to the Merneptah stele,
which mentions Israel, in the year 1207 BCE. Historians and archaeologists
say that if the Israelites had entered Canaan around 1450 BCE, there should
be other mentions of Israel before the year 1207 BCE, but there are not.
Therefore, there would be more than two hundred years when Israel is not
mentioned. If, however, the Exodus took place at 1250 BCE and the
Israelites wandered for forty years, then having Israel mentioned by
Merneptah in the year 1207 is actually perfect.
If the Exodus took place at 1250 BCE, one could count back 430 years,
which is what Exodus 12 says was the length of time that the Hebrews were
in Egypt during their period of servitude. Counting back from 1250 BCE
would put the Hebrews in Egypt during the so-called Hyksos period, from
17
about 1720 to 1550 BCE, when Egypt was ruled by foreigners from the
region of Canaan for nearly two hundred years. This fits well with the time of
Jacob and Josephs experiences in Egypt.
This is not to say that the later date of 1250 BCE is completely convincing,
because its not clear from the archaeological record that the cities of Lachish
and Hazor were destroyed simultaneously or even by a common enemy.
Indeed, it cant be established that those cities were destroyed by military
action as opposed to acts of Nature.
LECTURE TWO
There is, however, a third possibility. Perhaps the Exodus was a process
rather than an event. It might have taken place over several centuries, from
1450 BCE until 1250 BCE. It is, of course, eminently possible that there were
people leaving Egypt and heading for Canaan over the course of two hundred years, in a series of small groups rather than in one large group, but
even this cannot be proven one way or the other.
18
Questions
1. Why is it difficult to find archaeological proof of the Hebrews supposed
forty-year stay in the desert?
2. What problems exist with the number of Israelites that the Bible claims left
Egypt during the Exodus?
Suggested Reading

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They
Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient
Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001.
Feiler, Bruce S. Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five
Books of Moses. New York: William Morrow, 2001.
Marcus, Amy D. The View from Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the
Bible and Reshaping the Middle East. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2000.
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986.
19
Lecture 3:
The Conquest of Canaan:
Israelites, Philistines, and Phoenicians

(chapter 3: The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges).
srael is mentioned in the Merneptah stele, in the fifth year

of Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt, about 1207 BCE. In this
inscription, Merneptah says that Israel has been laid to
waste. In this same year, in another set of inscriptions,
Merneptah mentioned the invasion of the Sea Peoples,
who conquered most of the countries of the Mediterranean
at this time. The Mycenaeans and Minoans of Greece were conquered by
them. The Hittites of Turkey were conquered by them. Even Cyprus was conquered, as were the peoples of Canaan. It was only the Egyptians under
Merneptah, and then his successor Ramses III, who were able to stand up to
the Sea Peoples.
The Invasion of the Sea Peoples
Did the invasion of the Sea Peoples allow the Israelites to eventually take
over the land of Canaan? The Exodus took place (most likely) by 1250 BCE
at the absolute latest, and may, in fact, have been a process that took place
over a period of two hundred years. If the Israelites wandered in the desert
from 1250 to about 1210 BCE, and then conquered the land of Canaan by
1207 (the time of Merneptahs inscription), this coincides with the time that
the Sea Peoples took over Canaan as well.
The Sea Peoples pillaged and then departed the region (until they were later
resettled in the area by the Egyptians). Some think the Sea Peoples left the
Canaanite city-states in smoking ruins, allowing the Israelites to take over territory that they would not otherwise have been able to conquer. This would
contradict the biblical story of Joshuas conquest, which credits Joshua and
the Israelites for conquering the regionbut then again, does it?
LECTURE THREE
Who Conquered Canaan?

The Book of Joshua tells of Joshuas conquest of Canaan. This is after Moses
died, in Transjordan, within sight of the Promised Land. Joshua took over, and
it is under his command that the Israelites conquered Canaan. Joshua 12 lists
thirty-one kings who were conquered by Joshua. At the same time, the Book of
Judges says, [B]ut the people of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites, who
dwelt in Jerusalem. So the Jebusites have dwelt with the people of Benjamin to
this dayand says that other tribes did not drive out inhabitants from other villages they shared, such as the inhabitants of Megiddo, and that the Canaanites
continued to dwell there. When Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to
forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.
20
Obviously, there are two tales, one in which Joshua and the Israelites were
able to conquer the land of Canaan completely and another account in which
they conquered the land, but did not absolutely kill and suppress everyone.
Both the biblical accounts and the archaeological accounts leave enough
contradictions and negative evidence that an advocate of a military conquest
has to accept that theory on faith. On the other hand, recent archaeological
research and information offers several possibilities in addition to military conquest. William F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University was one of the original
proponents of the theory that the conquest took place as told in the Bible.
However, Albrecht Alt suggested that semi-nomadic Israelites peacefully infiltrated unoccupied areas of the Hill Country, gradually built settlements, and
became sedentary; that is, they became tied to the land and only later displaced the Canaanites in the cities. Alt thought that the military encounters
only took place after the Israelites began expanding out of these central highlands, so then would follow the conquest put forth by Albright.
The third suggestion is whats known as the Revolting Peasants hypothesis,
or the Peasants Rebellion. This was put forth by George Mendenhall and
Norman Gottwald, who suggested that Israel emerged from a melting pot of
Canaanite culture in a revolutionary social movement among peoples who
were already in Canaan, and that this revolt might have begun in Transjordan
to the east and then spread westward across the Jordan to the West Bank
and beyond. The model for this was taken from Habiru inscriptions that say
that they rebelled against the Egyptians about a century earlier. Here was
basically an alliance of disenfranchised elements of Canaanite society going
up against established society. In this case, the so-called conquest of
Canaan is not so much a conquest as an internal revolution led by population
elements that were already there. There was no unified military campaign
conducted by forces from the outside, and there was no mass killing of the
inhabitants of the land. The problem with the Peasants Revolt hypothesis is
that there is no supporting evidence from archaeology or other texts.
The fourth possibility suggests that the Canaanites and the Israelites were
one and the same people; that is, the Israelites were part of the Canaanites,
and they simply took over. The story of the invasion was then made up by
later biblical writers.
The Phoenicians
However the Israelite conquest of Canaan took place, when the Israelites
ended up in Canaan, they came into contact with the Phoenicians and the
Philistines. In fact, the first king of Israel, Saul, was killed in a battle against
the Philistines.
The Phoenicians are basically the latter-day inhabitants of the Syrian coastal
area. The names for both Canaanites and Phoenicians are derived from
words that mean purple. The land of Phoenicia is where Lebanon is today.
The political and economic centers of Phoenicia were the cities of Tyre and
Sidon and Arvad, as well as Beirut and Byblos. Some of these cities were
already major Canaanite centers by the Bronze Age, and some, like Beirut,
remain inhabited today.
21
The civilization of Phoenicia is a conglomeration of different elements. This

region of the Lebanese and Syrian coasts has always been a meeting place
of Europe and Asia. However, the main contribution of the Phoenicians is
undoubtedly the invention of the alphabet, which was taken by the Greeks
and Romans throughout Europe.
The Phoenicians were remarkable merchants and traders. They sailed from
modern-day Lebanon to Crete and Greece, to Italy and Sicily, to North Africa,
and even founded the city of Carthage. They sailed as far as Spain, and to
Sardinia and areas in between. The name Phoenician means purple, and
their name implies that they were merchants of purple dye, as were the
Canaanites before them.
The tenth century is the golden age of Phoenician wealth and power, and it
was during this period that the Phoenicians interacted with the Israelites and
the earliest kings of Israel down to the time of David and Solomon.
The Philistines
The history of the Philistines is known mostly from the Bible, Egyptian
records, and archaeological finds. The Philistines are first mentioned in the
Egyptian inscriptions about the Sea Peoples, where they are known as the
Peleset. According to Egyptian sources during the time of Merneptah and
Ramses III, at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the twelfth centuries
BCE, the Peleset are defeated by the Egyptians and settled in Philistia in the
southern part of Canaan. They named the land Palashtu, from which the
name Palestine eventually came.
The Philistines ruled in small city-states and seemed to have had a military
advantage over the local Israelites, because they had chariots and knew how
to forge iron. During the period of the Judges, the Philistines exercised a definite superiority over the Israelites, and it was not until the time of Saul and
David that there was a shift toward Israelite advantage.
The five cities of the Philistines (Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath)
are all in the Coastal Plain, on the far western side of the region of Israel, or
in the neighboring foothills, the Shephelah region. In addition, there are smaller sites (a site in Tel Aviv, for example).
Philistine pottery owes quite a bit to Mycennean pottery from Greece and to
native Canaanite styles. And Philistine pottery seems to have a particular
preference for birds, particularly birds looking backwards.
The Phoenicians and the Philistines interacted with the early Israelites during the period when the Israelites became a monarchy. The first kings of
Israel came along during the time of Saul, David, and Solomon.
LECTURE THREE
Sauls Rise to Power

The Bible contains what are known as the Samuel-Shiloh stories, in 1
Samuel. Samuel lived at a temple in Shiloh, which was run by an old priest
named Eli and his two sons. Samuel was the last of the Judges, the spokesmen for God. The people of Israel wanted a monarchy, and Samuel was
asked to anoint Israels first king. Samuel said it was not a good idea, but the
people of Israel wanted it, and so the period of Judges gave way to the peri22
od of the first kings. Samuel opposed the institution of the monarchy and
warned the people of the many ways that future kings would take advantage
of them, but then, following divine guidance, he is reported to have selected
Saul. Samuel then explained the rights and duties of kingship and wrote
these in a book.
The stories of Saul in the Bible are the primary source of information about
Sauls rise to power, but they are probably a mixture of folk memory and legend intertwined with a kernel of actual truth. When Saul came to the throne,
he immediately had to deal with the Philistines, and it seems that much of
Sauls reign was a fight against the Philistines in an attempt to establish his
own kingdom.
Saul vs. the Philistines
Saul believed that his kingdom needed to expand. The Philistines saw the
expansion of the Israelites as detrimental to their existence, so for much of
Sauls reign, there were ongoing battles between the Israelites and the
Philistines. This was probably somewhere in the eleventh or into the tenth
centuries BCE. There is little extrabiblical evidence, but David must emerge
by the year 1000 BCE, so Saul should be placed a couple of decades
before that.
Sauls final battle against the Philistines took place in the Jezreel Valley, in
the north of Israel, near Megiddo, the biblical Armageddon. The Philistines
considered this area crucial, and they wanted to encircle and capture the
heart of Sauls kingdom. The Philistines already held Beth-shan to the east of
the Jezreel Valley and the Coastal Plain to the west. If they won the Jezreel
Valley, they would cut Sauls kingdom into two parts and separate the
Israelites in Galilee and the Jezreel Valley from the rest of the Israelite tribes.
Saul, therefore, had no choice but to fight the Philistines for control of the
valley. The story of the battle is told in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles.
There are as yet no contemporary extrabiblical sources to confirm these
accounts, but in Sauls case, at least, the story is repeated with some embellishment about a thousand years later by Josephus, the Jewish general turned
Roman historian, in his book The Antiquities of the Jews.
The Valley of Jezreel was extremely important in antiquity. The Via Maris,
the Way of the Sea, went right through the valley. Megiddo is in the middle of
the valley. The Jordan River is to the east and the Mediterranean Sea is to
the west. Anybody who wanted to invade this area had to go through the
Jezreel Valley, so there have been no fewer than thirty-four battles fought in
the last four thousand years in this single valley. It is one of the bloodiest
places on earth. It is not surprising that the author of the Book of Revelation
placed one of the final battles between good and evil at Megiddo, near where
Saul fought his last battle.
During this battle, Saul was killed, along with his son Jonathan and several
other sons. The Philistines won the battle. David became king upon the death
of Saul, whose head was cut off and whose body was hung up on the wall at
Beth-shan. And with that, the first era of the Israelite monarchy came to an
end. David assumed the throne, and there followed the period referred to as
the United Monarchy, the golden age of Israel.
23
Questions
1. What is the Revolting Peasants hypothesis?
2. Why did the Philistines consider the Jezreel Valley to be such a crucial
area to control?
Suggested Reading
LECTURE THREE
Cline, Eric H. The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley
from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2002.
24
Lecture 4:
King David in History and Tradition

(chapter 4: The United Monarchy: Saul, David, and Solomon).
ing David is one of the most beloved figures in the Hebrew

Bible. Hes also one of the most enigmatic. Much has been
published about him in recent times.
Questions About the House of David
David founded a dynasty that was destined to rule from
Jerusalem for the next four hundred years. Even after Jerusalem fell to the
Babylonians in 586 BCE, ending the long line of Davidic Kings, many of the
people of Jerusalem and Judah continued to hope for a return to the days of
the House of David. So its not surprising that David received so much attention in the biblical materials or that there was an obvious effort to present him
in a favorable light.
The Hebrew Bible devotes forty-two chapters to David and portrays him as
Gods chosen, the true and righteous king. Then there is a second extended
biblical account in Chronicles that begins its history of Judah with David and
devotes twenty chapters to his reign. Finally, David is associated by tradition
with the Book of Psalms, where thirteen of the individual psalms are connected with particular moments in his career.
A number of basic questions face anyone trying to study Davids reign and
the period of the United Monarchy. Can archaeology or other sources shed
light on the transition that took place in Israelite society? Does archaeology
actually indicate that a mighty kingdom existed, such as was described in the
biblical sources? To what extent are the elaborate commercial and political
relations described in the Bible actually reflected in the archaeological
remains? Unfortunately, the extrabiblical evidence is sparse, often controversial, and does not provide unequivocal answers to these questions.
Davids History
The story of David reads like a modern soap opera: plenty of sex, violence,
and struggles for power. David, before being anointed king by Samuel, fought
famously with Goliath. Samuel met with Davids father, Jesse, who brought all
of his sons to see Samuel. Samuel asked if all of Jesses sons were actually
there. One was not and had to be called in, namely David, who was tending
the flock.
David started out as a minstrel for Saul during Sauls melancholy period, but
was rapidly promoted to armor bearer. He then had his first successes as a
young warrior and commander, so that the women sang that Saul had slain
25
thousands, but that David had slain ten thousands. There was the famous
friendship between Sauls son Jonathan and David, which eventually led to
the mistrust of Saul as Saul became increasingly unstable. There was a quarrel, after which Saul tried to kill David. David ran away and returned to Judah,
his homeland. He became a mercenary, leading his own troops.
David lived as a warrior, a kind of a bandit, an outlaw who was tolerated
rather than admired. He operated in large part with Saul pursuing him. David
even entered into the service of the Philistines, albeit temporarily. After Saul
was killed, David became king, and his kingdom assumed a different character from that of Sauls. Saul came from a tradition of charismatic leaders, but
he didnt have a permanent foundation among the tribes. He had no real residence, and no effective administration. David, on the other hand, obtained a
residence and a very effective administration. But he wasnt necessarily a
charismatic leader in terms of ruling from God, by God, and of God. He was a
warrior, supported by his troops, independent of the tribes, and he became
king over the territory. He ruled over a nation, which was limited, and yet was
going to expand quite fast.
David first ruled from Hebron, for about seven years. He had expanded his
territory to the north, and in expanding to the north, he decided that the city of
Hebron was no longer suitable for his capital. He wanted a city that was politically and geographically neutral and one that was relatively isolated.
Jerusalem itself is high up in the Hill Country, but it was not at the crossroads
of any great trade routes. It was geographically separated from most of
Davids territory. From his new capital, David could rule both north and south,
so the formulation of his kingdom seems to be Davids foremost achievement.
Davids capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, somewhere around the year
1000 BCE, may be among the ten most important conflicts in Jerusalems
historyand there have been more than one hundred battles fought for control of Jerusalem over the past four thousand years.
The Capture of Jerusalem
Davids capture of Jerusalem is what brought Judaism to the city and began
the long association of the city with three of the great religions of the world:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In about 1000 BCE, the Jebusites controlled
the city. The city was protected on three sides by deep ravines, so it was only
from the north that David could capture the city.
LECTURE FOUR
The text of 2 Samuel presents a number of different difficulties in translation,

especially with the Hebrew word tsinnor. In the King James Version, this is
translated as gutter, but in the Revised Standard Version, tsinnor means a
water shaft, and the implication is that Davids soldiers, in particular his righthand man Joab, climbed some sort of water shaft from near the Gihon Spring
and thereby entered the city.
However, the New English Bible translates tsinnor as grappling iron, and
others translate tsinnor as ladder or other meanings. Recent archaeology
conducted in the vicinity of the Gihon Spring, on the eastern side of
Jerusalem, has shown that the Canaanites built fortifications, towers, and
walls to protect the Gihon Spring, the only water source for Jerusalem. These
constructions would have been already eight hundred years old by the time
26
David came along, and they are perhaps the tsinnor that allowed Joab to
climb up through the water system and enter the middle of Jerusalem around
midnight. He and his men would have killed the guards at the gate and
opened the gates to Jerusalem. Then David and his men would have
marched in. Thus Jebusite Jerusalem became Israelite Jerusalem.
At this time, Jerusalem lay only on the easternmost of two spurs of land running side by side. It was this eastern ridge that David captured. Over time,
Solomon would expand up to the north on that ridge, and then, over the centuries, the city would expand to the west, gradually filling in the ravine to the
middle and taking over the western ridge as well.
Once he captured the city, David promptly brought the Ark of the Covenant
there. He put it in a tabernacle and danced around it, then got in trouble for
doing so. Eventually, the Ark was moved on top of the rock on which
Abraham supposedly was going to sacrifice Isaac. This is the rock that today
is inside the Dome of the Rock, and which lay inside Solomons Temple.
Indeed, Solomon built his Temple, among other reasons, specifically to
house the Ark of the Covenant. Bringing the Ark to Jerusalem made the city
not only Davids political capital, but also the religious capital for both David
and, later, Solomon.
Eric H. Cline; Background: NASA
Archaeology has been unable to pinpoint structures that definitely belong to

Davids Jerusalem, aside from recent claims by Eilat Mazar to have discovered Davids palace. There is not much that can be conclusively said to date
to the tenth century in Jerusalem, and so there has been an ongoing debate
about the size and extent of Davids Jerusalem, and his entire kingdom, for
that matter. So far there is no archaeological evidence that Jerusalem was
A satellite view of modern Jerusalem showing areas of the city during the time of David and
the Jebosites
27
anything more than a modest highland village during the time of David and
Solomon. It is true that there is little evidence for what Jerusalem looked like
in the tenth century BCE, but many see the downgrading of David and
Solomon as rather ominous, as part of a political agenda that gives ammunition to people who might be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.
The other aspect that Davids capture of Jerusalem has given rise to is the
political ramifications. Indeed, the original battle fought between David and
the Jebusites three thousand years ago for control of Jerusalem is still being
fought today, mostly because the modern Israelis claim to be descendants
from the Israelites and the modern Palestinians claim to be descendants of
the Canaanites and the Philistines. So the modern political and physical battles between Israelis and Palestinians echo the original battle between David
and the Jebusites.
Once David captured the city, he fell in love with the famous Bathsheba after
seeing her bathing. The union of David and Bathsheba resulted in the birth of
Solomon, who continued his fathers process of expansion of the kingdom
and who ruled over the United Monarchy.
Mentions of David
In 1993 and 1994, three fragments of an inscription in old Aramaic were discovered at the site of Tel Dan, in the north of Israel. If the restoration and
translation of the inscription are correct, it contains the first mention of David,
or rather the House of David, found outside the Bible.
The three fragments mention the House of David as well as the kings of both
Israel and Judah. It is now clear that the inscription should be dated to about
the year 842 BCE. This is the first time that the name David has been found in
any ancient inscription outside the Bible, and it would therefore be the oldest
extrabiblical reference to Israel apart from the Merneptah stele, which dates to
1207 BCE.
The critical letters in the inscription are the ones that are usually translated
as House of David. Some scholars have said that this is not the meaning
and that it means House of the Uncle, or House of the Beloved, or even
House of the Kettle, but these claims are spurious and may be dismissed.
LECTURE FOUR
There may be other inscriptions that mention David. Theres the so-called
Mesha stele, which may contain a mention of the king of Israel and the
House of David, but this inscription is broken and much debated. There may
be another mention down in Egypt in a list left by King Shishak (Sheshonq)
of Egypt.
All of these inscriptions have been reinterpreted recently, and so there might
be more mentions of David than thought before. On the other hand, a group
of scholars referred to by others as biblical minimalists (some call them the
Copenhagen school) tend to argue that the history of Israel, Judah, David,
and Solomon is all made up.
28
Biblical Minimalism
Biblical minimalists take the view that the Bible is a narrative of mythology
interwoven with some historical elements, and that trying to read the Bible
as a historical text in the modern sense of the term is doomed from the start.
They say this because the Bible is written in a tradition of storytelling and
religious worship, not with the intention of relating facts. They say that the
United Monarchy and the figures of David and Solomon are legendary and
not historical at all. In short, biblical minimalists say that the Bible is nearly
irrelevant for constructing the history of ancient Palestine and especially of
the ancient Israelites.
Essentially, biblical minimalism arose out of the need to account for the
major discrepancies between the Bible and what archaeologists have dug up
in Israel and Palestine. How much can archaeology prove or corroborate the
biblical account? The arguments about the legitimacy of David and whether
or not he existed are part of this debate, which is one of the most fiercely
debated issues in biblical archaeology.
Biblical stories paint a picture of David in intense detail. On the other hand,
there is no archaeological evidence to prove any of this and, until the finding
of the Tel Dan stele, there was no extrabiblical evidence mentioning David
whatsoever. It is now thought possible, however, that the House of David
may also appear in the Mesha stele, and in Shishaks inscription as well, so
there is now good evidence that someone named David actually did exist.
But whether it is the biblical David or some other David is still being argued.
It is a topic that continues to generate controversy.
29
Questions
1. Why was Davids capture of Jerusalem one of the ten most important conflicts in the citys history?
2. Where is the first mention of David believed to be found?
Suggested Reading

Cline, Eric H. Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the
Roots of the Western Tradition. New York: The Free Press, 2006.
Halpern, Baruch. Davids Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001.
Kirsch, Jonathan. King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
LECTURE FOUR
McKenzie, Steven L. King David: A Biography. New York: Oxford University

Press, 2000.
30
Lecture 5:
King Solomon in History and Tradition

(chapter 4: The United Monarchy: Saul, David, and Solomon).
ing Solomon is renowned for his wisdom, wealth, and

wives. Hes credited in the Hebrew Bible with ruling over
an empire that stretched from Egypt to the Euphrates.
However, like his father David, Solomon and his accomplishments have become the subject of recent controversy.
The Epitome of Wise Governance
Solomons reign was considered to be the golden age of Israelite and
Judean history, at least from
a casual reading of the biblical account. His reign lasted
forty years, approximately
970 to 930 BCE, and he was
buried in Jerusalem, the city
of David, which Solomon
expanded magnificently.
But the biblical text reveals

certain ironies. Wealthy
Solomon developed cashflow problems. Powerful
Public Domain
In the Book of Chronicles,

the chronicler neutralized
any negative aspects of
Solomons reign and elaborated on his role as builder
of the famous Temple in
Jerusalem and cofounder
with his father David of the
United Monarchy. The Book
of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
and the Song of Songs
appear to credit Solomon for
vast amounts of wisdom. So
its not surprising that his
reign came to be considered
the epitome of splendor and
wise governance, not to
mention wealth.
Solomon by Gustave Dor, from The Bible and Its Story
Taught by One Thousand Picture Lessons, vol. 7, edited by
Charles F. Horne and Julius A. Bewer, 1908
31
Solomon was troubled by adversaries close to home. And wise Solomon

apparently exploited his people through forced labor and other despotic practices, so that the bulk of his kingdom chose to break away after his death.
Wealth and Women
Solomons reign is among the first where specific ties may possibly be drawn
between the biblical and archaeological records. In 1 Kings, there is mention of
several cities that Solomon built or fortified, including Jerusalem, Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer. Archaeological excavations at these sites have revealed
layers of building and fortification remains that were dated to Solomons reign
and which do in fact suggest, both by their large scale and similar design, that
they were centralized (a royal building program, perhaps). So there may have
been material evidence of Solomons accomplishments as a builder. On the
other hand, this same evidence shows that his accomplishments were rather
modest when compared with the kings of Egypt or Mesopotamia.
In 1 Kings, Solomon loved many foreign women, including the daughter of a
Pharaoh, as well as Moabite, Ammonite, Ebonite, Sidonian, and Hittite women.
Solomon had seven hundred wives and princesses and three hundred concubines. We are told that these women turned his heart after other gods. He built
sanctuaries to the gods of the Moabites and the Ammonites, respectively, and
therefore God became angry with Solomon and sent adversaries.
Solomon had an abundance of silver and gold. In 1 Kings, the weight of gold
that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents, besides that which came
from the traders, the traffic of the merchants, and the kings of Arabia and
governors of the land. King Solomon made two hundred large shields of beaten gold and a great ivory throne overlain with the finest gold.
LECTURE FIVE
The biblical account from Genesis through 2 Kings serves as the primary
source of information on Solomon, but the presentation in the Hebrew Bible
consists largely of extended descriptions of Solomons cultic activities and
sweeping claims about his great wealth, wisdom, and international prestige.
However, the meager information available today simply does not support the
sweeping claims, and biblical minimalists and others claim that the account of
Solomon in the Hebrew Bible bears no relation to the archaeological record.
Solomon inherited a kingdom from David that was not unified by any means.
The fact that he was able to hold it together was one of his many accomplishments. The trend of a Jerusalem-based kingdom reached full development
under Solomon. He was wealthy and powerful by the standards of the early
first millennium BCE, but he should probably be regarded more as a local
ruler of an expanded city-state than as a world-class emperor like Alexander
the Great or Julius Caesar. He engaged in the usual royal pursuits, including
building programs and patronage of literature. Whether he was wise or not
was something to be discussed even in his own day, and like many of the
kings of his day and afterward, Solomon had international contacts, including
the famed visit of the Queen of Sheba (if it actually took place).
A Peaceful King
Solomon is described in the Bible as a peaceful king, and this may well have
been the case. There are no known clashes, military or otherwise, during his
reign. The achievements credited to him lie mostly in the religious, economic,
32
and cultural spheres. He completed the Temple at Jerusalem, erected buildings in other cities, and made trade alliances and economic treaties with
neighboring countries. He might not have been as vigorous or creative as
David, but he did piece together the empire.
Solomon had inherited this kingdom from his father David, and he managed
to keep control of it by various diplomatic connections, including through his
wives. At that time, it was common to cement a treaty by having the signers
marry each others daughters. A lot of the women in Solomons palace may
well have gotten there because of the various peace treaties that he signed
with his neighbors. Its easy to see foreign politics underlying these marriages, because these are women of the countries with whom Solomon would
have wished to be at peace. In particular, the daughter of the king of Egypt
played a prominent role. Shes mentioned five different times, which may indicate that he wanted to be friends with Egypt. He also cultivated extensive
trade relationships with various countries and sent ships to the land of Ophir
to bring back gold, valuable wood, and other luxuries. Because his Israelites
were not seafarers themselves, he was supported in this by the king of Tyre,
from the coast of Lebanon, where the sea-going Phoenicians were located.
Solomons Temple
The king of Tyre in 1 Kings put shipwrights and sailors at Solomons disposal, and so Solomon had a city constructed for his fleet on the northern
coast of the gulf of Aqaba. Excavations have confirmed that ruins in this
area may indeed be those built by Solomon. The Bible tells us that this is
when Israel became open to the international world. Great buildings were
erected and literature was collected.
However, this whole development must be seen in fairly modest terms within a small area. It is highly doubtful that the empire stretched from Egypt to
the Euphrates. More likely, it was about the bounds of the modern state of
Israel as it exists now, if even that. This age of Solomon should not be
underestimated, however. Rather, it should be appreciated, because immediately upon his death, violent conflicts broke out and the United Monarchy
split into the Divided Kingdoms.
The city with which Solomons name is forever linked is the city of Jerusalem,
even though little or nothing of what he built there has actually been identified
by archaeologists. Solomons Temple and palace were built to the north of the
Jebusite city, the city David had captured on the southernmost part of this
eastern ridge. Solomon then built up the northern part of that eastern ridge,
which is where the Temple Mount lies today. It was not easy to build there
Solomons workmen, architects, and construction engineers would have been
hard-pressed to build in that area. Nevertheless, the famous Temple of
Solomon was built on this northern part of the eastern ridge, about 750 feet
to the north of the Jebusite city, joining the two by a narrow strip. But none of
this has been confirmed by archaeology, in part because this city has been
rebuilt so many times over the last couple of thousand years. The Temple
Mount is today the home of the Dome of the Rock, sacred to Islam, located
on the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, as it is known to the Arab
world. This particular area is the center of battles that have been fought for
Jerusalem over the last four thousand years.
33
The Temple Mount was probably already a Canaanite high place back in the
third millennium BCE. There have probably been five thousand years of continuous religious worship on the Temple Mount, which may make it the oldest
piece of real estate in the world with a continuous religious presence. Here is
the rock on which Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac and on which
Mohammed ascended to Heaven on his nocturnal journey. There are indentations in the rock, which, depending on the story, are either the marks made
by the legs of the Ark of the Covenant or the marks made by Mohammeds
steed as he leaped up to the heavensor by the ladder as he climbed up to
the heavens.
Detailed descriptions of Solomons Temple are found in the Book of Kings
and 2 Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible and in the firsthand evidence of
Ezekiel. We are told that the Temple was begun in the fourth year of
Solomons forty-year-long reign, which was also the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus from Egypt. Solomons building projects took exactly half his reign, twenty years, and during those twenty years, seven years
were devoted to the building of the Temple. One problem here is the presence of symbolic numbers: four, forty, multiples of forty, and seven, and so it
might be best not to take these numbers literally.
Once Solomon began to build the Temple, Hiram, the king of Tyre, agreed
to supply building materials and skilled workmen. Solomon himself raised
forced labor for the project and hired a bronzesmith from Tyre, who made
bronze fixtures and furnishings for the Temple. When all the work was completed, Solomon stored in the Temple all the things that David had dedicated:
silver, gold, and vessels, including the Ark of the Covenant. There was a dedication ceremony that included the ritual transfer of the Ark into the Temple
and a long prayer by Solomon to reconfirm his promise to David to bless the
Temple with his presence and to forgive the people. Then there were elaborate sacrifices, followed by a great feast. After the people returned to their
homes, God appeared to Solomon and assured him that his prayers would
be answered, depending upon the kings faithfulness. Solomon gave twenty
cities to Hiram in payment for everything that Hiram had contributed and the
daughter of the Egyptian Pharaoh was moved to her own house. Solomon
then began to make burnt offerings in the Temple three times a year.
Descriptions of the Temple
LECTURE FIVE
The Temple itself presents a puzzle. The biblical description is not entirely
clear and could be interpreted in a number of different ways, for the Bibles
description of the Temple is fairly inexact. The furniture and the utensils are
described in minute details, but the building itself lacks detail except for a
brief notice concerning its windows. However, descriptions of the internal
aspects are described in tremendous detail: the doors to the inner sanctuary,
side chambers, and so on.
Solomons Temple seems to have been a long-room temple, one that is oriented with the entrance on the short side and the shrine at the opposite end
of the building. This type of building is not uncommon and can be found in
Syria, Greece, and other places. It can be traced back to the so-called
Megaron type of building found in Turkey and Greece in the third and
second millennia BCE.
34
Solomons Temple seems to have comprised three parts. First was a porch at
the front, with two free-standing columns, then came the main hall or sanctuary, and then at the far end was the inner sanctuary known as the Holy of
Holies. This was where the Ark of the Covenant would have been kept.
One scholar claims that the Bible says the Temple was sixty cubits (about a
hundred and three feet) long, twenty cubits (thirty-three feet) wide, and thirty
cubits (fifty-one feet) high. Other scholars say that the whole building was
about one hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide (a hundred and fifty feet by
seventy-five feet).
This type of temple is completely unlike the indigenous Israelite temples that
existed at that time, which are called broad-room temples (more like a square
than Solomons Temple). Why didnt Solomon follow the more usual Israelite
temple plan? Why did he build something more like that found in North Syria?
The answer probably lies in the fact that when it came time for him to build a
house for God, he looked to Phoenician examples. Also, the fact that Hiram
of Tyre helped Solomon probably had a lot to do with it. So Solomons
Temple looked more like a Phoenician temple than an Israelite one.
Solomons Royal Cities
Next to the Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon built a palace. It included units
such as the House of the Forest of Lebanon, the Hall of Pillars, and the Hall
of the Throne, where he was supposed to pronounce judgement. There have
been a number of similar palaces discovered, but the Palace of Solomon at
Jerusalem has not yet been discovered.
However, a passage from the Hebrew Bible has long attracted the attention
of archaeologists. The Book of Kings states that this is the account of the
forced labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the Lord and his
own house and the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo
and Gezer.
Indeed, archaeological excavations at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer have
uncovered architecture which has long been dated to the time of Solomon.
Thus Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo have become popularly known as
Solomons royal cities. Each of these cities is uniquely situated to command
important areas within the kingdom (Hazor in the Jordan Valley, Megiddo in
the Jezreel Valley, and Gezer at the foot of the Hill Country). All of these
were powerful Canaanite city-states that passed into the hands of Solomon.
In each of these cities have been found multichambered gates, so archaeologists thought for a long time that there was a global blueprint used by
Solomons architects at each of these cities. This idea has come under
attack in recent years. It seems that these gateways might not date to the
time of Solomon, but could be anywhere from a hundred to two hundred
years later. At the very least, they may well date to the period of the Divided
Kingdoms, the later part of the Iron Age. In fact, the whole account of
Solomon in the Hebrew Bible has recently been called into question and is
currently the subject of much debate.
35
Questions
1. What ties exist between Solomons reign and the archaeological record?
2. What are the beliefs about the marks in the rock at Temple Mount?
Suggested Reading

. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bibles Sacred Kings and the
LECTURE FIVE
Marcus, Amy D. The View from Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting

the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 2000.
36
Lecture 6:
Excursus: The Ark of the Covenant
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is J. Maxwell Millers and

John H. Hayess A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (chapter 5:
David, King of Jerusalem and chapter 6: The Reign of Solomon).
onsidered the most holy and powerful object in the Hebrew

Bible, the Ark of the Covenant measured only 21/2 cubits by
11/2 cubits by 11/2 cubits (4 feet 2 inches long by 2 feet 6 inches
wide by 2 feet 6 inches high).
The Power of the Ark
The description of the Ark is found in Exodus 25.1022: They shall make an
ark of Acacia wood, 2 cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half
its breadth and a cubit and a half its height. And you shall overlay it with pure
gold, within and without shall you overlay it and you shall make upon it a
molding of gold roundabout, and you shall cast four rings of gold for it and put
them on its four feet . . .
You shall make poles of Acacia wood and overlay them with gold and you
shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the Ark to carry the Ark by
them. The poles shall remain in the rings of the Ark and shall not be taken
from it. And you shall put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give you.
And you shall make a mercy seat of pure gold . . . and you shall make two
cherubim of gold . . . on the two ends of the mercy seat . . . The cherubim
shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their
wings . . . And you shall put the mercy seat on the Ark, and in the Ark you
shall put the Testament . . .
In the Ark were the two tablets of stone on which God made a covenant with
the people of Israel when they came out of the land of Egypt. The tablets of
the Law were put into the Ark, and this is what gave it its power. Many great
deeds were performed with the Ark as it traveled in front of the army. In the
Book of Joshua, it says that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down when
the Ark was carried around its wall in front of the army.
The Ark Arrives at Jerusalem
The journey of the Ark through the Hebrew Bible proceeds as follows: The
Ark was first kept at the city of Shiloh (Joshua 18 and 1 Samuel 3) and
accompanied the Israelite army into battle. It fell into the hands of the
Philistines, who took it to three of their five cities. According to 1 Samuel,
When the Philistines captured the Ark of God . . . they took it into the house
of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon, and when the people of Ashdod rose
early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downwards beside the Ark
37
The Philistines
thus decided to
send the Ark
back to the
Israelites,
because it had
created such a
panic among
their people.
Because Shiloh
had been
destroyed, the
Ark moved on
(Jeremiah 26
and Psalms 78):
When God
heard He was
Eighteenth-century engraving of Joshua and the Israelites tearing down the
full of wrath and
walls of Jericho
He utterly rejected Israelite. He
forsook his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where He dwelt among men, and
delivered His power to captivity, His glory to the hand of the foe. He gave His
people over to the sword and vented His wrath on His heritage.
The Ark was returned to Beth-shemesh, an incident described in 1 Samuel.
The Ark remained there until a plague necessitated its transfer to the house
of Abinidab, where it stayed for twenty years. Then David moved the Ark to
Jerusalem (1 Samuel), dancing and singing before it as it was led to the city.
He first left it at a house on the outskirts of the city, before finally moving it
into a special tent within Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). Eventually, a year later, it
was finally placed within in the Holy of Holies in Solomons Temple.
First Kings 8 says, And all the elders of Israel came and they brought up
the Ark of the Lord, the tent of meaning, and all the holy vessels in the tent,
and King Solomon and all the congregation of Israel were with him before the
Ark, sacrificing so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted or
numbered. Then the priests brought the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its
place in the inner sanctuary of the house in the most holy place underneath
the wings of the cherubim.
LECTURE SIX
Where Is the Ark?

After it was moved to the Temple, there is no further mention of the
Israelites carrying the Ark to war or to festivals. Some scholars note that it
was not among the vessels carried into exile or brought back, suggesting
that the Ark was no longer in the Temple when the city was destroyed by
the Babylonians in the year 586 BCE. So the Ark probably disappeared
sometime between the end of Solomons reign and the time that the city
was destroyed.
38
Clipart.com
of the Lord.
The Book of 2 Esdras, found only in Bibles that contain the Apocrypha,
implies that the Ark was destroyed. The author, lamenting the fall of
Jerusalem, says that the sanctuary was laid waste, the altar broken down,
and the Ark spoiled.
Another possibility is that the Ark was captured and carried off. There is a
passage in the Talmud that says that the Ark was hidden by King Josiah in
its place. There is no indication of where this might be, but according to the
Talmud, Josiah hid the Ark ten or fifteen years before the destruction of the
city by the Babylonians. This statement has led to the theory that the Ark is in
a secret chamber carved deep beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Indeed, there are chambers underneath the Mount where no one is allowed
to go; some ultraorthodox Jews claim that the Ark is down there and will be
revealed at the proper time.
There are stories that when a tunnel was being excavated next to the
Temple Mount, two rabbis went in to see if they could find the Ark. In the
course of these investigations, the rabbis noticed water seeping from a stone,
removed the stone, and revealed a vaulted chamber. From there, they discovered another lower chamber; in this lower chamber, they believed they
would find the Ark. Unfortunately, the authorities got wind of the investigations and sealed up the entrance to the caves before the rabbis were able to
locate the Ark. This is a common theme: Everyone who claims to have discovered the Ark, without exception, can never produce evidence of it.
Great Discovery, or False Sighting?
Numerous people have found, or claimed to have found, the Ark. This
includes people like Ron Wyatt, who claimed to have discovered Noahs Ark,
among other things. In 1979, he began excavations with his sons to find the
Ark of the Covenant. They dug for a couple of years and claimed to have broken through the rocks into an open space. There they caught a glimpse of
something shiny. Entering, they discovered dry-rotted wooden timbers and
animal skins, which turned to powder when they moved them, as well as
objects from Solomons Temple. They couldnt uncover all the artifacts, and
yet they are confident that they saw the Ark, the Great Menorah, a large
sword, a mitre with an ivory pomegranate, and so on. Unfortunately, they did
not take any photographs, nor were they able to bring out any objects.
Another favorite suggestion for the location of the Ark is Mount Nebo in
Jordan, on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, because 2 Maccabees says that
Jeremiah hid the Ark of the Covenant there. In the autumn of 1981, Tom
Crotser and his team from the Institute for Restoring Ancient History went to
the Franciscan monastery on the summit of Mount Nebo. They said that they
found a plaque that indicated that the Ark of the Lord was buried there. At
night, they entered a tunnel that was 35 feet long and 4 feet wide. At the end
of the tunnel, they ran into a wall. After knocking the stones down, they
entered a small cave and discovered a large object, under whose covering
they could see a golden box. They did not touch the box because they
remembered what had happened to others who had touched it (namely, they
were killed). So they photographed the box and withdrew. An archaeologist
later looked at the photographs, which were not of the highest quality. One of
them showed a very modern-looking box with a nail sticking out of one corner.
39
Other people have suggested that the Ark is buried in the area of the
Qumran caves, but there have been major excavations in the area and no
one has yet found the Ark there.
The Ark in Ethiopia
LECTURE SIX
There is also a tradition that claims that the Ark is in Ethiopia. Journalist
Graham Hancock, in particular, investigated this claim. According to the story,
the Queen of Sheba and Solomon had a son. This son went to Ethiopia and
brought the Ark with him. Eventually it reached the site of Axum. Others have
tried to follow up on this theory and have traced this movement of the Ark to
one particular church, but nobody has been allowed in to see the Ark, if
indeed it exists there.
40
Questions
1. What is the history of the Ark before its arrival in Jerusalem?
2. What are the possibilities for what became of the Ark?
Suggested Reading

Boren, Kerry R., and Lisa L. Boren. Following the Ark of the Covenant.
Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, Inc., 2000.
Cornuke, Robert, and David Halbrook. In Search of the Lost Ark of the
Covenant. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2002.
Hancock, Graham. The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the
Covenant. New York: Touchstone/Crown Publishers, 1993.
Jones, Cheviene. The Ark of the Covenant. New York: Clarion Publishing, 1994.
Munro-Hay, Stuart, and Roderick Grierson. The Ark of the Covenant: The
True Story of the Greatest Relic of Antiquity. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1999.
Woudstra, Marten H. The Ark of the Covenant from Conquest to Kingship.
Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1965.
41
Lecture 7:
The Kingdom of Israel and the Omride Dynasty

(chapter 5: The Divided Monarchy: The Kingdoms of Judah and Israel).
ollowing the death of King Solomon, the United Monarchy

dissolved and split into the Divided Kingdoms of Israel in
the north and Judah in the south. The Omride dynasty was
the most infamous family to rule Israel, especially in the
view of the biblical writers, but then the expansionist ambitions of the Neo-Assyrians from Mesopotamia in the eighth
century BCE spelled an end to the Kingdom of Israel and gave rise to the tradition of the Ten Lost Tribes.
The Kingdom Splits
When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam came to the throne. In his rule, the
first question he faced was whether he could hold the kingdom togethera
question that was quickly answered when the North broke away.
The Israelites in the North declared emphatically that Solomon had made
their lot too hard. They asked Rehoboam to lighten the load, but rather than
decreasing the burden on the North, Rehoboam increased it. The Northern
tribes of Israel broke away, so there was the Kingdom of Israel in the North
and the Kingdom of Judah in the South.
The resulting kingdoms existed alongside each other for approximately two
hundred years. The northern kingdom reverted to the name Israel, centered
in the Hill Country north of Jerusalem. The southern kingdom took the name
Judah and was centered in the southern Hill Country, encompassing Jerusalem and extending south to the Negev.
Pharaoh Shishak
LECTURE SEVEN
Rehoboam went back to Jerusalem, and the Israelites made Jeroboam king
of Israel. The Bible tells of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak, who besieged
Jerusalem. The Egyptian accounts talk about a Pharaoh named Shoshenq
(note the similarity between the names) who campaigned against the
Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Pharaoh Shoshenq was a Libyan mercenary who founded the twenty-second dynasty of Egypt and ruled from about 945 to 923 BCE. He came to the
throne toward the end of Solomons rule.
Shoshenq left behind (on the wall of a temple in Karnak in Egypt) an impressive list of cities that he claimed to have captured. The cities are all located in
the region now called Israel and Judah. According to the inscription, he captured Megiddo, Taanach, Shunem, and other cities and towns in Israel and
42
the Negev. Shoshenqs campaign, on the heels of the death of Solomon, indicates that he had been waiting for Solomon to die and that the splitting of the
kingdoms was to his benefit. His campaign in the lands of Israel and Judah
was probably an attempt to recapture some of the glory days of Egyptian
dominance, when Canaan was regarded as belonging to the Egyptian
empire. However, because one cannot always believe the evidence put forward by Egyptian Pharaohs, it has to be asked whether this campaign actually happened.
In Egypt, Shoshenq claimed that he captured Megiddo, while at Megiddo,
there is an inscription indicating that Shoshenq captured the city, so the campaign probably did take place. The next question to be asked is whether this
Egyptian Pharaoh is the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak who is mentioned in the
Bible and who fought in Judah some five years after the death of Solomon.
In 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, King Shishak of Egypt came to Jerusalem and
took away the treasures of the House of the Lord and the treasures of the
kings house. He also took the shields of gold that Solomon had made. This
might be when the Ark of the Covenant disappeared.
Are these Pharaohs the same person? The cities that are named in the
Egyptian account are almost all from the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The
cities named in the biblical account are almost all from the Southern Kingdom
of Judah. Were there in fact two different Egyptian Pharaohs, one who
attacked Israel and one who attacked Judah? The biblical accounts are concerned with the events in Judah, which didnt put up much of a fight. The
Egyptian account emphasizes the major military events that took place in the
North. Its highly unlikely that these are records of different campaigns, so
these are probably two versions of the same military conquests, and there
are not two Pharaohs, just one, for Shishak and Shoshenq are probably one
and the same.
The Omrides
In the Northern Kingdom of Israel, a man named Omri ascended to the
throne of Israel in 885 BCE, introducing a new era for both kingdoms that
would last for about forty years. Even though they remained separate entities, Israel and Judah entered into a close alliance and together entered a
time of prosperity, which may have even surpassed the earlier days of David
and Solomon.
Omri was the chief architect of the policies that characterize the era, but it
was under his son Ahab, who came to power in 875 BCE, that the new policies came to fruition and under whom the two kingdoms enjoyed their best
relations in years. After the death of Ahab, the situation declined rapidly, and
this era came to an abrupt end about 842 BCE with the massacre of both the
royal family in Israel and in Judah at the hands of Jehu the Usurper.
Omri and Ahab are the first kings in Israelite or Judean history to be mentioned in nonbiblical documents from the ancient Near East and other places
outside of Israel and Judah, so it is at least possible to begin to corroborate
the episodes and peoples mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, the
Omrides were the first Northern kings to accomplish a dynastic succession,
which they did for three succeeding generations. Long after they had passed
43
from the scene, Israel was still referred to by the Assyrian monarchs as the
Land of Omri.
Information about the Kingdom of Israel and about the Omride era in particular is derived from several different sources, including the Hebrew Bible (2
Kings and Chronicles) and extrabiblical evidence from King Mesha of Moab,
King Shalmaneser III of Assyria, and others. The Mesha inscription is particularly interestingit is a commemorative inscription written in Moabite that was
discovered in 1868 on the east side of the Dead Sea. Unfortunately, the
inscription was broken into pieces soon after its discovery, but later was
reconstructed almost completely. The inscription was commissioned by King
Mesha of Moab, apparently late in his reign, in connection with the dedication
of a sanctuary to the Moabite god Chemosh. The inscription recounts the
deeds of King Mesha, who ruled Moab during the ninth century and who is
mentioned in 2 Kings. The text reports the main accomplishments of Meshas
reign. In particular, it mentions Omri, king of Israel, for Mesha brought Israelite
dominance over Moab to an end and recovered all of the Moabite territory
north of the ancient city of Madiba.
Shalmaneser III
There are other inscriptions, such as the so-called Monolith inscription of
Shalmaneser III, which dates to the ninth century BCE. These inscriptions
report Assyrian activities in what is now Iraq, where Shalmaneser III ruled
from 858 to 824 BCE. In the sixth year of his rule, he campaigned in Israel,
and did so again in the tenth, eleventh, fourteenth, eighteenth, and twentysixth years of his reign.
The first campaign is described in some detail in the so-called Monolith
inscription, discovered in the mid 1800s in present-day Iraq. This inscription
tells of a coalition of kings from Israel and surrounding areas who fought
against Shalmaneser. They apparently halted his march in the vicinity of a
place called Qarqar.
The following are the words of Shalmaneser III: I decisively defeated them
from the city of Qarqar to the city of Gilzau. I felled with the sword fourteen
thousand troops, their fighting men. Like Adad, I rained down upon them a
devastating flood. I spread out their corpses and filled the plain.
LECTURE SEVEN
The Black Obelisk, which dates to 838 BCE, reveals that Shalmaneser
marched all the way to Damascus and Syria with no serious opposition and
that he besieged the city, but didnt actually take it. Then he marched into
Israel, where he collected tribute from Jehu, the general who usurped the
throne of Israel from the Omrides in about 841 BCE. Jehu is not actually the
son of Omri. Jehu is the Usurper, who does away with the House of Omri,
and yet the Omrides are so famous that the Land of Israel was referred to as
the Land of Omri.
The Tel Dan inscription dates to about 841 BCE and was probably put up
by King Hazrael of Aram when he destroyed this area. These are the fragments that were found in 1993 and 1994 at the site of Tel Dan in northern
Israelthe ones that mention the House of David. The Black Obelisk and
contemporary inscriptions mention individuals: Omri, Ahab, Jehu, the House
of David; so for the first time there is a series of external references from
44
sources outside the Bible. In the early years of the first millennium BCE, the
biblical account, extrabiblical account, and archaeology all come together to
help corroborate some of these events, so there are at least three independent sources to work witha most desirable situation from the point of view
of an ancient historian or archaeologist.
Solomon or the Omrides?
The Omrides far surpassed any other kings in either Israel or Judah as both
builders and administrators. In a sense, theirs was the first golden age of the
Israelite kings. Yet in the Bible the description of the Omride kingdom is
quite sketchy. Theres mention of elaborate palaces at Samaria and Jezreel,
but theres almost no reference to the size, scale, or opulence of their kingdom. Indeed, these northern kings are despised by the authors of the Bible
and referred to in derogatory terms. The writers of the Hebrew Bible consistently tried to uphold the kings of Judah in the South rather than the evil
kings of Israel in the North. Yet the kings in the North, the Omrides, were
rather impressive.
The city of Samaria was built by Omri and became the capital city of the
North. When the site of Samaria was first excavated in 1908 by Harvard
University, the splendor of Omris buildings was revealed. The site was further explored in the 1930s, at which time additional evidence for the spectacular nature of the ancient city was found. Even today, the site of Samaria is in
a rich agricultural region, and there are numerous buildings and other architectural remains at which the modern tourist can marvel. It was conceived as
the capital city of the Omride dynasty, and, as such, reveals fittingly
grandiose architecture from the time of Omri and Ahab.
The chambered gates at Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo were for a long time
identified as part of Solomons grand building plan, but they have now been
redated by some archaeologists to the time of Omri and Ahab. The chambered gates at these cities, as well as some of the palaces at Megiddo, and
perhaps even the so-called stables at Megiddo, might have to be redated
from the time of Solomon in the tenth century to the time of Ahab and Omri in
the ninth century and perhaps even into the eighth centuries BCE.
Perhaps the most impressive engineering achievements possibly linked to the
Omrides are the enormous underground water tunnels cut through the bedrock
beneath the cities of Megiddo and Hazor. These tunnels provided the cities
inhabitants with secure access to drinking water even in times of siege. In the
ancient Near East, this was a critical challenge, because while important cities
were surrounded by elaborate fortifications that allowed them to withstand a
siege, they seldom had a source of fresh water within a citys walls.
Many of the building activities that were previously attributed to King
Solomon may have to be reassigned to the Omrides. Both archaeologically
and historically, the redating of architecture at sites like Hazor, Megiddo, and
Gezer from Solomons time to the period of the Omrides has enormous implications. It removes the only archaeological evidence that there really was a
United Monarchy and suggests that David and Solomon may have been little
more than Hill Country chieftans, or so some archaeologists would argue.
45
Neo-Assyrians and the Lost Tribes

One thing is clear: the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were at
the mercy of a new set of empires that were emerging elsewhere in the
ancient Near East. The first of these large empires was the Neo-Assyrians,
who came back more fierce and determined than ever, particularly in the form
of Tiglath-Pileser III, whom the Bible calls Pul, and who ruled from 744 to 727
BCE. For a little over a century, the Assyrians dominated life in the Middle
East, and Israel as an independent kingdom ceased to exist quite early in the
period of Assyrian domination. The capital city of Israel, at Samaria, was captured in the year 722 BCE, and Israelite territory was subsequently incorporated into the Assyrian provincial system.
Not content with going up against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the NeoAssyrians of Tiglath-Pileser III actually campaigned against the Southern
Kingdom of Judah as well.
In the Hebrew account, in the days of Pikah, king of Israel, Tiglath-Pileser
captured a number of cities and carried the people to Assyria, the beginnings
of the deportations. When they captured a new country, the Assyrians often
deported its people and placed them elsewhere in their empire, the idea
being that people are less likely to rebel if they are far from their native land.
The beginnings of the Neo-Assyrian deportations can be traced to the days
of Tiglath-Pileser III, in about 734 BCE. These continue through the reign of
Shalmaneser V, from 727 to 722 BCE, and even down into the reign of his
successor, Sargon II. In the years 722 and 721 BCE, the Northern Kingdom
of Israel essentially ceased to exist. By the year 720 BCE, the Northern
Kingdom of Israel had been incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
LECTURE SEVEN
What happened to the people living in the Northern Kingdom of Israel? More
than twenty-seven thousand people were carried off into exile, the famous
Ten Lost Tribes, never to be seen again. Where are they today? Like the Ark
of the Covenant and Noahs Ark, it is going to be difficult to ever find the Ten
Lost Tribes. And yet the quest to locate them continues today, and numerous
books are published every decade claiming that the authors have found the
Lost Tribes or know where to look for them.
46
Questions
1. What is the significance of the Tel Dan inscription?
2. What are the implications of the reassigning of building activities from
Solomon to the Omrides?
Suggested Reading

47
Lecture 8:
The Kingdom of Judah Until the Time of Sennacherib

he Kingdom of Judah consistently found itself caught

between mighty empires far to the north in Mesopotamia
and far to the south in Egypt.
Sister States?
Rehoboam came to the throne when he was forty-one
years old, following the death of Solomon. Rehoboam ruled for seventeen
years in Judah. There are few details about his reign, except an account of
his actions when Israel split off from Judah, an account of his actions in connection with Shishaks invasion from Egypt, and a note that there was constant warfare between Israel and Judah, that is, between Rehoboam
and Jeroboam.
The time between Solomons death in
about 930 BCE and the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE is referred to as the
Divided Monarchy. This period of 350
years is treated largely by the Bible as a
period of moral decline and religious laxity. The history of Israel is dealt with in a
fairly cursory manner, and the history of
Judah fares only a bit better.
But the latest archaeological data doesnt fit this picture. There are differences
in everything from pottery traditions to
architectural styles in the two kingdoms.
Israel and Judah, although close geographically, had different climates and
topographies. Pottery traditions changed
more slowly in Judah, in part because Judah lay off the beaten path of the
48
Clipart.com/Recorded Books, LLC
LECTURE EIGHT
The Bible clearly considers Israel and

Judah to be sister states, that is, two
branches that share the same ethnic,
cultural, and religious roots and that
emerged from a larger Israelite kingdom.
Residents of both kingdoms worshiped
the same god, spoke a similar language,
and wrote using the same script.
main trade routes, and it was these trade routes that brought new styles, techniques, and technology to Israel.
The kings of Israel built more monumental architecture than their counterparts in Judah. Israels rulers were looking for ways to impress and intimidate
their subjects, in part because they were in contact with other kingdoms
across the ancient Near East. Even at the height of its power, Judah never
commanded the economic resources or population necessary to pursue such
grandiose architectural projects.
In terms of cultural and political development, settlement patterns, and climate, both Ammon and Moab, across the Jordan River, fulfilled the role of
sister state to Israel better than Judah. In fact, Judah had more in common
with Edom, across the river in southern Jordan, than it did with Israel, so
scholars and archaeologists question the portrayal of the Divided Kingdoms
just as they question the Bibles portrayal of the United Monarchy.
Development of the Kingdoms
This was a critical time in the ancient Middle East, as national boundaries
were being decided. Today, archaeology is helping to reconstruct the jockeying for power that was taking place throughout the region. There are numerous military powers of the day, and people like Ahab and Omri in Israel had
to deal with them, as did the kings of Judah, albeit a little later.
Israel developed into a full-blown state in the ninth century BCE. Judah finally followed in the eighth century BCE, taking off only when Israel collapsed in
the year 720 BCE, in part because refugees from Israel fled south to Judah
and settled there, bringing with them technology and new ideas for architecture. In short, recent investigations have led many scholars to conclude that
there was a gap of about a century and a half between the time that Israel
and Judah became full-fledged states.
Until recently, most biblical archaeologists took the biblical description of
Judah and Israel at face value. They showed Judah as being a fully developed state as early as the time of Solomon. But recent evidence published by
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in their book The Bible Unearthed
shows that accomplishments attributed to Solomon should be downdated by
a century or more. Finkelstein, Silberman, and other archaeologists have
argued that the early kings of Judah were not the equal of the kings of Israel,
that not a trace of literary activity has been found in the tenth century, or even
in the ninth century, and that monumental inscriptions and personal objects
with names of individuals appear in Judah only two hundred years after the
time of Solomon.
Sudden Expansion
Similarly, archaeological surveys indicate that until the eighth century, the
population of the highlands (the hills in Judah) was about one-tenth the population found in similar highlands in the North. Of the twelve tribes of Israel,
ten were in the North; only two were in the South.
Judah underwent a long, gradual development over hundreds of years, in
large part because it had limited economic potential. It was isolated geographically and was tradition bound. But with the rise of the Neo-Assyrians in
Mesopotamia and their attacks on Israel, Judah began to expand.
49
The year 734 BCE saw a rather complex political situation. The king of Israel
was a man by the name of Pekah. The king of Aram, that is, of Damascus in
Syria, was named Rezin. The two conspired to attack Judah and lay siege to
Jerusalem, whose king at the time was Ahaz. Threatened by the kings of
Israel and Aram, Ahaz turned to Tiglath-Pileser III, the Neo-Assyrian king who
had already attacked Israel. Ahaz emptied out the treasury in Jerusalem to
pay the necessary bribe. It worked; Tiglath-Pileser went away.
After the year 720 BCE, with the conquest of Samaria, the capital city of
Israel, and the fall of all Israel, Judah found itself surrounded by NeoAssyrian provinces and vassals. The royal citadel of Jerusalem was transformed in a single generation from the seat of an insignificant local dynasty
into the political and religious nerve center of a regional power, both because
of its dramatic internal developments and because thousands of refugees
from the conquered Kingdom of Israel fled south.
Excavations conducted in Jerusalem have shown that, at the end of the
eighth century BCE, Jerusalem underwent an unprecedented population
explosion. Its residential areas expanded from the former narrow ridge on the
east to cover the entire western ridge as well, as the city doubled in size. A
formidable defensive wall was constructed to include these new suburbs. In a
matter of decades, Jerusalem went from a modest highland town of about ten
or twelve acres to a huge urban area of a hundred and fifty acres of densely
packed houses, workshops, and public buildings.
In demographic terms, the citys population may have increased as much as
fifteen times. Finkelstein and Silberman state that a similar picture of tremendous population growth emerges from the archaeological surveys conducted
outside Jerusalem, in its hinterland. In the districts south of the capital city,
relatively empty countryside filled with new farming settlements. What had
been sleepy little villages became real towns. Lachish, south in the
Shephelah, is a good example. Until the eighth century, Lachish was a relatively modest town. Then, sometime after about 720 BCE, it was surrounded
by a formidable wall and transferred into a major administrative centerand it
became the second most important city in Judah.
In the Grip of the Neo-Assyrians
LECTURE EIGHT
Judah experienced a tremendous social evolution. There are archaeological

indications of state formation, monumental inscriptions, seals and seal
impressions marking private property, royal inscriptions for the administration,
masonry and stone capitals used on public buildings, mass production of pottery vessels and other crafts, and central workshops and distribution throughout the countryside. Middle-sized towns served as regional capitals and
large-scale industries in olive oil and wine pressing, which shifted from private
production to state industry.
Evidence of burial customs suggests that there was a new elite in the social
structure. Elaborate tombs were cut into the rock of the ridges surrounding
the city of Jerusalem. Many of these are extremely elaborate, with ceilings
and architectural elements, and there is no doubt that these were used for
the burial of the noble class.
50
Where did the wealth and movement toward full state formation come from?
Finkelstein and Silberman have argued that Judah was integrated into the
economy of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. King Ahaz of Judah had already started cooperating with the Neo-Assyrians, but the most dramatic changes came
after the collapse of Israel. Wealth began to accumulate in Judah, especially
in Jerusalem, where the kingdoms diplomatic and economic policies were
determined. Jerusalem became the administrative and religious capital of a
powerful kingdom.
In the final years of the eighth century BCE, Judah saw a chance to break
free from the Neo-Assyrian grip. The powerful king Sargon II died, leaving his
throne to a young, untested son named Sennacherib. The Neo-Assyrian
empire was preoccupied with troubles to the east, so the king of Jerusalem,
Hezekiah, thought it was a good time to rebel, and tried to play the two great
empires of the day (Egypt to the south and Assyria to the north) off against
each otherwith little success.
The Book of 2 Kings states that Hezekiah rebelled against the king of
Assyria and would not serve him. In these early years of Sennacherib, who
came to the throne in 705 BCE, Hezekiah participated in a widespread revolt
against Assyrian rule. He withheld the payment of his tribute to Assyria, but
the revolt was quickly suppressed by Sennacherib and the Neo-Assyrians in
the year 701 BCE.
The account of Sennacheribs campaign is found in 2 Kings and 2
Chronicles, as well as in Sennacheribs own account. Jerusalem was surrounded. An Assyrian general, speaking for his king, addressed the people
and offered them two options: surrender or die. The Assyrian generals arrogance provoked Hezekiah to pray and ask for divine assistance in defending
Jerusalem. According to the Book of Isaiah, an angel of God was sent out
that very night and killed one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians.
When the people of Jerusalem awoke the next morning, the city was surrounded by dead soldiers. Sennacherib retreated back to his capital,
Nineveh, where he was subsequently killed by his sons while praying.
Hezekiahs Tunnel
The Assyrian attack on Jerusalem was no surprise to Hezekiah. He clearly
saw it coming. According to Sennacheribs own records, the Assyrians conquered forty-six cities in Judah before attacking Jerusalem. Jerusalem was
well protected, though, so Sennacherib decided to subdue the city by siege.
Hezekiah had no doubt prepared for the siege by laying in vast stores of
food. But water presented a more difficult problem. The citys water supply
lay outside the city, near the floor of the Kidron Valley. Hezekiah solved this
problem by building a tunnel that led under the city, from the spring to a pool
known as the Siloam Pool on the other side of town. Hezekiahs Tunnel was
dug through 1,750 feet of solid rock.
This is an amazing story of engineering done almost three thousand years
ago, and it is a story that ranks right up there with the biblical story of
Hezekiahs triumph, in which God struck down the Neo-Assyrian army in a
single night. Exactly what took place there is not known, but it can be concluded from archaeology and the biblical account that Sennacherib was not
51
able to capture Jerusalem in 701 BCE. Indeed, what probably happened is

that he was bribed and released Jerusalem from the siege on the condition
that it would pay tribute every year.
Attack at Lachish
The other major city that Sennacherib attacked in 701 BCE was the city of
Lachish, which was the second most important city in Judah. Unlike
Jerusalem, however, Lachish was not able to hold out and was attacked and
destroyed by Sennacherib. There are no fewer than four independent
accounts of its destruction: first, the biblical account; second, an account by
Sennacherib himself; third, an account in pictures that Sennacherib put up in
his palace at Nineveh; and fourth, the archaeological evidence.
Lachish was the scene of excavations for many years, directed in large part
by David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University. Archaeology makes clear that the
Assyrians mounted their siege of the city from the southwest, which makes
sense topographically. They built a large siege ramp, up which they could
push their war engines up against the walls of the city. The Judeans defending the city built a counter-ramp; archaeologists have discovered both the
Assyrian siege ramp and the Judean counter-ramp.
Back at Nineveh, Sennacheribs capital city, the battle of Lachish was
depicted in scene after scene carved into stone, beginning with the phalanxes
of infantry marching toward the battle and ending with the deportation of the
conquered Judeans.
LECTURE EIGHT
These reliefs show that Lachish ultimately fell, and that the defenders were
deported or killed. After the capture of Lachish, Sennacherib made his way to
Jerusalem, but Jerusalem, in turn, did not fall. Jerusalem probably paid a
bribe to Sennacherib and was allowed to continue as the capital city of
Judah. However, this would not be the last time that Jerusalem came under
attack from a foreign power, and, in fact, the days of Jerusalem and the
Kingdom of Judah were numbered.
52
Questions
1. What are the major cultural, climatic, and topographical differences
between Israel and Judah?
2. How did Hezekiahs Tunnel help Jerusalem to withstand the siege
by Sennacherib?
Suggested Reading

53
Lecture 9:
Neo-Babylonians and the End of the Kingdom of Judah

udah rose to great prominence in the seventh century

BCE, after Israel was destroyed by the Neo-Assyrians.
Unfortunately for Judah, it would come to an end not much
more than a century later. Nebuchadnezzar and the NeoBabylonians destroyed Jerusalem not once, but twice,
burning the Temple to the ground and exiling the leading
citizens to the faraway city of Babylon.
A Contested Periphery
Josiah was one of the last major kings of Judah and one of the last descendants of the House of David to rule independently in Judah. He enacted
reforms in an effort to return Judah to the grand days of David and Solomon.
Josiah came to the throne of Judah in

the year 639 BCE at the age of eight.
Halfway through his reign, he began a
series of far-reaching reforms. A scroll
of laws was found in the Temple of
Solomon in Jerusalem; there is some
question as to whether it was really
discovered or if it was planted there.
Josiah realized that the people of
Judah had strayed from where they
54
Clipart.com
LECTURE NINE
Judah was a contested periphery during the last decades of the seventh
century and the first decades of the
sixth century BCE. It was on the
periphery of the Assyrian Empire, the
Babylonian Empire, and the Egyptian
Empire. All three thought that they
could claim Judah and all three were
willing to fight over it. This was not a
good time to be a king of Judah. Of
the last five independent kings
descended from the House of David,
two met their deaths in direct connection with international struggles and
the other three died in foreign exile.
A depiction of Josiah listening as the scrolls

found in Solomons Temple are read to him
should have been, religiously speaking, and so he implemented sweeping

religious and political reforms.
Along with these reforms, Josiah was actively involved in expanding Judahs
territory to the north, and in doing so, he annexed the city of Samaria, which
had been the former capital of Israel. He also annexed Megiddo and the
Jezreel Valley. He was probably trying to take Judah back to the greatness of
the United Monarchy three hundred years earlier. Unfortunately, Josiah ran
up against the Egyptians.
A Period of Tremendous Turbulence
For many who study ancient history and religion, the meeting of Josiah and
Pharaoh Necho II is considered the most significant of the battles that took
place in the Jezreel Valley. The battle is related in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and
the recounting by Josephus.
In the spring or the summer of 609, Necho II of Egypt and his army headed
northward, up to the city of Carchemish. They went to the aid of their ally, the
Assyrians, and the two fought against their common foe, the Babylonians.
Because the battle was to be fought at Carchemish in northern Syria,
Nechos army had to traverse the length of Judah to get there. He asked permission from Josiah for his army to march through Judah en route to northern
Syria. Josiah refused the Egyptians permission and instead marched with his
army up to the Jezreel Valley and waited for the Egyptian army there. When
the Egyptians came into the valley, they found the Judean army waiting.
Josiah climbed into his chariot and drove up and down in front of his army,
encouraging the men. He sounded the attack, but just as the battle got under
way, an Egyptian archer let fly with his arrow and hit Josiah, either killing him
outright or mortally wounding him. Either dead or dying, Josiah was transported out of the battle and taken south to Jerusalem, where he was buried along
with his dreams for a rejuvenated Judah.
After the death of Josiah, Judah suffered a period of tremendous turbulence.
By 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians had emerged as the
prime power in the region. Judah was under the thumb of the NeoBabylonians for the next twenty or more years. The year 586 saw the
destruction of Jerusalem, but even then the Neo-Babylonians continued to
rule Judah until 539 BCE. Overall, there were about seventy years of NeoBabylonian domination over Judah.
Jehoachim Withholds Tribute
In comparison with other periods, the source material for this time period is
quite abundant, with both biblical and nonbiblical texts. The biblical text is
found in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles as well as in some of the Books of the
Prophets, such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The book of Jeremiah, especially,
provides important information on this period.
From Babylon itself, the so-called Babylonian Chronicles (not a single document, but rather a genre of literature) present selective summaries of royal
reigns, probably based on year by year records of events. Only portions of
these survive, but they include coverage of the years from 616 to 594 BCE.
In particular, there are accounts from a number of the years of Nebuchad55
nezzar, and it is from these Babylonian Chronicles that the exact dates
when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem (namely, 597 and 586 BCE)
can be determined.
Nebuchadnezzar came to the throne of the Neo-Babylonians in 605 BCE
and ruled for the next forty-three years. One of the first things he did was
expand his empire to the south, down into Judah and beyond. He destroyed
the cities of Ashkelon and perhaps Ekron in the year 604, and then, in 601,
he again fought against the Egyptians.
Once again, the Egyptians were led by Necho II. As in the earlier battle at
Carchemish, the Neo-Babylonians fought the Egyptians, but this time without
the Assyrians, who were no longer a player on the world stage. As far as can
be learned from the Babylonian Chronicles, neither side was able to claim
victory, and both sides suffered heavy casualties. Both the Babylonians and
the Egyptians withdrew from the battlefield to recover and regroup. At this
time, the king of Judah was Jehoachim, who seems to have been a fairly
faithful vassal of the Neo-Babylonians ever since he came to the throne a
couple of years before, in 604 BCE.
In 601, after Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians failed to conquer
Egypt outright, Jehoachim saw this as a sign of weakness and withheld the
tribute he was supposed to pay the Neo-Babylonians. He was probably proEgyptian anyway, because it seems that he came to the throne of Judah with
the help of the Egyptians.
The Babylonian Exile
Nebuchadnezzar retreated back to Babylon after he failed to defeat the
Egyptians. He took some time to get his army back to full strength, and then
set off again to Judah to bring his rebellious vassal back under his thumb.
Josephus, writing about six hundred years after the actual events, says that
Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem in the year 598 and put Jehoachim to
death for rebelling and failing to pay tribute. He also exiled many of the leading citizens of the city or put them to death.
The Bible provides a similar account to Josephuss, although a bit more
ambiguous. After Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem, he exiled three thousand people, including the prophet Ezekiel. This is the first of what will be no
fewer than four deportations, which together became known as the Babylonian Exile, in which the leading people of Jerusalem were taken away as
captives to Babylon.
LECTURE NINE
The worst, though, was yet to come, because Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to
Jerusalem at least twice more, in 597 and 586. When Jehoachim was killed,
his son Jehochin became the king of Judah at either eight or eighteen years
of age. He was king for a very short time, even by the standards of Judah.
Josephus says that he ruled about three months.
Somewhere around the middle of March in the year 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar returned to Judah and encamped against the city of Jerusalem. On the
second day of the month of Adar, he captured the city and seized its king. He
then appointed a new king in the city and took vast tribute back to Babylon.
56
A Puppet King
The recording of the exact month for the capture of Jerusalem is extremely
unusual. It probably reflects the importance of the conquest of the city. The
campaign, from start to finish, lasted no more than three months. This
includes the time to march from Babylon to Jerusalem (about two months), so
the city gave in after a siege that lasted no longer than about a month.
The Bible tells of the capture of Jerusalem, but does not provide any details
of the siege itself. It simply says that Nebuchadnezzar arrived after the siege
was already underway. In 2 Kings, we are told that Nebuchadnezzar came to
the city while his servants were besieging it, and that Jehoachin gave himself
up to the king of Babylon, who took him prisoner and carried off all the treasures of the House of the Lord.
The biblical account also says that in addition to King Jehoachin,
Nebuchadnezzar also exiled some ten thousand captives from the conquered
city. The Ark of the Covenant is not mentioned, suggesting that it had already
disappeared or been destroyed before the capture of Jerusalem.
After 597, Nebuchadnezzar installed a new king on the throne of Judah to
be his puppet king. This was Zedekiah, brother of the former king Jehoachin
and son of the earlier king Josiah. Nebuchadnezzar probably hoped that
Zedekiah would obey him, and Zedekiah did for the first few years. But just
like his predecessors, he eventually rebelled, and just as they had done, he
misjudged the power of the Neo-Babylonians.
Zedekiahs Rebellion
The Babylonian Chronicles break off after Nebuchadnezzars eleventh year
of rule, in about 594 or 593 BCE, so historians must rely on the biblical
account and on the later commentary by Josephus for the story of Zedekiahs
rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar in 586. However, there is archaeological
evidence for the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE.
The biblical account says that Nebuchadnezzar came down on the tenth day
of the tenth month in Zedekiahs ninth year of rule (about January 15, 587
BCE). As Nebuchadnezzers army swept down from Jerusalem, they
destroyed the cities of Judah one by one. Archaeological evidence found at a
number of different cities in Judah agrees with this. There are houses with
burnt and toppled walls, as if theyd been destroyed by siege engines.
Lachish seems to have been destroyed once again. Josephus says that the
siege of Jerusalem lasted a total of eighteen months this time. Either they
had managed to put the walls back up or they had learned better tactics,
because rather than withstanding the siege for one to three months, they
were able to last for eighteen months. Both Josephus and the biblical
accounts agree that the siege ended around July 18, 586 BCE. This was the
ninth day of the fourth month of Zedekiahs eleventh year of rule.
The Hands of Compassionate Women
The siege tactics were the standard ones used by the Neo-Babylonians
everywhere and were the same ones that had been used by the NeoAssyrians. They built siege ramps and a dike to surround the city, and it was
only after a breach had been made in the fortification walls that the
57
Babylonians were able to enter the city. The inhabitants had been reduced by
famine and disease and offered little resistance. The archaeology of the city,
excavated after 1967, shows that the biblical accounts and Josephus were
correct in what happened. There are ruins, ash, burnt wood, and destruction
debris that remain from the houses that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed. There
are also Neo-Babylonian arrowheads found in the houses and in the streets.
The Book of 2 Kings says that the famine was so severe in the city by the
end of the siege that there was no food for the people of the land. And the
book of Lamentations says that the hands of compassionate women have
boiled their own children, suggesting that the famine was so severe that people were reduced to cannibalism.
Archaeologists have found no fewer than three toilets in the ruins. They were
able to excavate the material in at least one of the toilets. Looking at the feces
and other remains underneath a microscope, the archaeologists were able to
determine that the people of Jerusalem, in 586, were not eating what would be
expected. They were not eating wheat, barley, or other grains. Instead, they
were eating backyard plants: mustard grass, dandelions, weeds.
The archaeologists also found something else interesting. The inhabitants of
Jerusalem were suffering from parasites, particularly from tapeworm and
whipworm, parasites contracted from living in unsanitary conditions, using
polluted water, or even fertilizing using human waste rather than other kinds
of fertilizer. There is also evidence that they were not cooking their meat
properly, perhaps an indication that there was not enough wood or other fuel
available. Fortunately, human remains were not found in the toilet, so it
seems that the people of Jerusalem had not been reduced to eating their children after all.
A Calculated Act
Zedekiah fled from Jerusalem under the cover of darkness, but was caught
near Jericho and brought before Nebuchadnezzar. He was condemned to be
blinded, but first he was forced to witness the killing of his own sons. His
eyes were then put out, so that their deaths were the last things he ever saw.
Zedekiah was then bound in chains and taken away as a prisoner into exile,
to Babylon along with many of his leading citizens.
LECTURE NINE
There was a delay of approximately one month between the fall of Jerusalem
and the destruction of the city and the Temple of Solomon. Some scholars
have suggested that the Neo-Babylonians used this month to loot the city and
deport its inhabitants, as the biblical
text reports.
There are similar accounts in 2 Chronicles and the Book of Jeremiah. There
are some discrepancies in the biblical accounts as to when exactly these
events took place, but the destruction of the Temple is traditionally said to
have taken place on the ninth of Av (August 16, 586 BCE). Archaeology has
confirmed that the destruction of the city was complete. The Temple of
Solomon was destroyed, its treasures looted and carried off to Babylon.
58
Clipart.com
Considering that Nebuchadnezzar had attacked and besieged Jerusalem

several times during his reign, its not surprising that he finally burned the city
to the ground. Some scholars propose that the destruction of Jerusalem and
the Temple of Solomon was a calculated act to remove the House of David
forever, after it had proved disloyal time and time again.
The Fate of Zedekiah

by Gustav Dor
Zedekiah is forced to witness the murder of his sons before
being blinded by Nebuchadnezzar.
59
Questions
1. Why is the meeting of Josiah and Necho II considered the most important
of the battles that took place in the Jezreel Valley?
2. How was it determined that the people of Jerusalem probably did not
resort to cannibalism during the siege of Nebuchadnezzar?
Suggested Reading

LECTURE NINE
Sweeney, Marvin A. King Josiah of Judah: The Lost Messiah of Israel.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
60
Lecture 10:
Persians and Greeks in Judea
(chapter 6: Exile and Return: From the Babylonian Destruction to the
Reconstruction of the Jewish State and chapter 7: The Age of
Hellenism: Alexander the Great and the Rise and Fall of the
Hasmonean Kingdom).
he immediate results of the Babylonian conquests are
clear. Much of the country was destroyed, and though a
fair number of citizens were killed, even more were taken
into exile.
Life in Exile
The exile in Babylon lasted for about fifty years, from 586 to 539 BCE. It had
an enormous impact on the Jewish people and the evolution of religious
thought for the Western world. For example, its during this time that the
books of the Pentateuch were edited into their final form and religious practices evolved into what was going to become Second Temple Judaism and
ultimately early Christianity.
The exile occurred in four different phases. There were deportations in the
years 598, 597, 586, and 582 BCE. All told, just under fifteen thousand people were exiled: three thousand in 598, ten thousand in 597, just under a
thousand in 586, and about 745 in the year 582 BCE.
Scholars have estimated that there were probably about seventy-five thousand people in Judah at this time and about fifteen thousand in Jerusalem. If
this is accurate, that would mean about 70 percent of the population still
remained in Judah even after the final set of deportations in 582 BCE.
In the exile, a number of Jews lived in Egypt and other places as well as
Babylon. For example, the prophet Jeremiah went to Egypt rather than
Babylon, along with quite a number of his fellow Judeans.
There are also some non-Jewish accounts of life in exile. For example, in the
Babylonian materials, there are royal cuneiform texts that talk about King
Jehoachin in exile. And there are numerous documents in Aramaic from Egypt
that provide information about the people there. The most significant of these
are the Elephantine papyri. They were found in the late 1800s at Elephantine
Island, opposite Aswan in Egypt, and were from a Jewish military settlement.
The documents present many of the legal and religious conditions that existed
in the colony. Most of the documents date from the fifth and fourth century
BCE, but they can nevertheless be used to reconstruct the Babylonian period.
Contrary to popular opinion, the people in exile did not live in bad conditions.
They were simply treated in the same way as exiles from any other nation.
They were settled all over the place in Babylonia. They served in the military,
could own property and slaves, and occasionally even became quite wealthy.
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They were relatively free and were able to practice their religion. There was
little or no pressure to assimilate.
The Returner of the Dispersed
The middle years of the sixth century BCE saw the rise of a new power in
the ancient Near East: the Persians. They quickly established the largest
Near Eastern empire that had ever existed. The person behind this was
Cyrus the Great, who took over all of the lands previously occupied by
Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians.
The Persians ruled this area for over two hundred years, from 539 until the
time of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Essentially, the people of Judah and
Israel traded one overlord for another. After living under Persian rule, the
people of Judah and Israel fell under the control of the Greeks and then the
Romans, with only small interludes of independence in between.
In September of 539, the Persians defeated the Babylonian army. Soon
thereafter, the Persians took Babylon. A Persian text reads, On the sixteenth
day the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle. On the twenty-ninth
of October, Cyrus himself entered Babylon. There was peace in the city as
Cyrus spoke his greeting to all of Babylon.
It is not an accident that history remembers Cyrus as a great liberator. That
was an image he fostered. When he captured Babylon, he issued proclamations that allowed all of the people in exile to return home; that is, he allowed
the Judeans to go back to Jerusalem. So he is portrayed as the restorer of the
gods and their sanctuaries, the returner of the dispersed.
The Book of Ezra contains two decrees from Cyrus in 539 BCE. One is written in Aramaic and is described as the official edict. In this decree, he actually said that the Temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt, and he provided the
dimensions and the specifications.
He said that the vessels that had
been stolen from the Temple of
Solomon should be sent back.
Persian Rule
When the exiles returned, rival
Judeans had differing opinions of
who should be in charge.
Eventually, after much squabbling,
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Clipart.com
LECTURE TEN
A second decree, written in

Hebrew, was distributed throughout the kingdom. It said that Cyrus
was charged by God to reconstruct the Temple in Jerusalem
and that anyone who wished was
granted permission to return to
Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple.
With this, Cyrus brought an end to
the exile and charged the Judeans
with rebuilding the Temple.
The Persian king Cyrus
they rebuilt the Temple and rededicated it in 516 BCE; it took more than
twenty years to rebuild the Temple. In the meantime, Cyrus had been killed in
battle and succeeded by his son Cambyses, who invaded Egypt and added it
to his empire. Darius subsequently came to the throne, and the people of
Judah had their Temple once again, around seventy years after the first one
had been destroyed.
During the Persian period, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were ruled by a
governor who reported back to Persia, but for the most part, the inhabitants
were left to their own devices. It was during this period that the word Jews
came into play, referring to the people who lived in Judea.
Alexander the Great
The period of Persian rule lasted for about two hundred years. It was a relatively quiet period for the Jews, but it came to an end when Alexander the
Great and the Greeks appeared on the scene, late in the fourth century BCE.
Alexander conquered the Persians between 324 and 333. He took control of
most of the Persian empire, including the province that they called Yehud
(Judea, Judah, and Israel).
Under Alexander, the Greeks ruled most of the ancient Near East. But when
he died in 323, having named no successor, the empire collapsed and was
split up under his generals. The period when the Greeks ruled Judea was
known as the Hellenistic Age, which lasted for approximately three centuries,
from 323 until 30 BCE. This was a period that began with Alexanders death
in Babylon and was a time characterized by upheaval. Alexanders successors fought over his empire for the next three hundred years. There were
feuds between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in the Levant (the
area of modern-day Israel and Syria). The Ptolemies in Egypt regarded
Jerusalem and the surrounding territories as their own, while the Seleucids
regarded it is as their own. Jerusalem itself was ground zero for more than
twenty conflicts that took place during these years.
Antiochus IV
Around 167 BCE, a Seleucid named Antiochus IV captured Jerusalem. Once
he took the city and its inhabitants, he ordered parts of the wall torn down
and the building of a new fortress called the Akra, in which he installed a garrison of soldiers to keep order. He introduced a number of measures that
were seen as burdensome. In particular, he instituted a series of restrictions
on religious practices. He forbade circumcision and the observation of the
Sabbath and various religious spectacles. He also forced the Jews to eat
pork and worship idols. The people who did not obey were beaten or killed.
Antiochus ordered his delegates to pollute the Temple in Jerusalem and call
it the Temple of Zeus. Josephus said that Antiochus placed an altar in the
Temple and killed pigs on it. His motives were to civilize the Jews, but the
Jews saw things differently.
Following his decrees and pollution of the Temple, there was the
Maccabean Rebellion, a rebellion by the Judeans against the Greek overlords in which the Jews hoped to form their own independent kingdoms. The
story is found in 1 and 2 Maccabees. The rebellion started in about 167 BCE.
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The incidents that set off the rebellion included the flogging to death of an old
scribe for refusing to eat pork, the killing of a mother and her seven children
for refusing to worship an idol, and various other abuses. The final straw
came on December 25, 168, when Antiochus offered a pig to Zeus on the
altar in the Temple.
The Maccabean Rebellion
The rebellion was led by Judas Maccabees (Judas the Hammer) from the
family of Hasmon. The rebels fought the Greeks and were eventually victorious. The prohibitions against religious practices were lifted. They also recaptured and rededicated the Temple. During the cleaning of the Temple, they
found oil to light the flame of the Great Menorah for eight full days, until more
sacred oil could be found. It is from this that Hanukkah and the Festival of
Lights are celebrated today.
After the successful rebellion, the Jews planned to set up their own kingdom. However, it took approximately twenty more years for the Hasmoneans
to win their battles against the Greeks, and it was not until 142 that they
established a new dynasty called the Hasmonean Kingdom, where Jews
ruled themselves for the first time in centuries. It would last until 63 BCE,
only to come to an abrupt end when the Romans, in the form of Pompey the
Great, made all of Judah, Israel, and Syria into a Roman province with the
name of Syria-Palestina.
LECTURE TEN
The Maccabean Rebellion was more than just a struggle for religious freedom. It was for national liberation, independence, and the establishment of a
free Jewish state. As a result, the Zionists in the nineteenth century liked to
refer to the period of the Maccabees as the only time when an independent
Jewish state had been set up. Theodore Herzel, the father of modern
Zionism, said in a pamphlet called The Jewish State, Therefore I believe that
a wondrous breed of Jews will spring up from the earth. The Maccabees will
rise again. He said this in the year 1896, so the rebellion has been used in
relatively modern propagandistic statements as incentives for establishing the
modern state of Israel.
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Questions
1. What was life like for the Jews in exile?
2. What events led to the Maccabean Rebellion?
Suggested Reading

Harrington, Daniel J. The Maccabean Revolt: Anatomy of a Biblical
Revolution. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988.
Lipschits, Oded, and Joseph Blenkinsopp (eds). Judah and the Judeans in
the Neo-Babylonian Period. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns Publishing, 2003.
Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Volume II: The
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732332 B.C.E.). New York:
Doubleday, 2001.
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Lecture 11:
The Coming of the Romans and Christianity

(chapter 8: Roman Domination: The Jewish Revolt).
n 63 BCE, Pompey and the Romans ended the rule of the

Hasmonean Dynasty and took over Jerusalem. In 40 BCE,
Herod, a Jew by religion, was placed in charge. In the year
30, he was recognized by the Romans as the king of the
Jews. He ruled over the whole of the territory as well as
other districts. This is the region known as Palestine to the
Romans. To the north is Syria, and to the south is the Nabatean Kingdom.
Restoration of the Temple
Herod remained in power for thirty years and proved to be an ambitious
builder. He rebuilt the city walls of Jerusalem, which may have been as large
as 230 acres and may have had a population of as many as forty-thousand
permanent inhabitants. In about the year 35 BCE, Herod had a massive
fortress constructed in Jerusalem, so that his soldiers could keep an eye on
what was happening in the Second Temple. He called it the Antonia after his
good friend, the Roman Mark Antony.
About a decade later, he built a huge palace in Jerusalem. Then, about 19
BCE, he began his most ambitious building project, renovating the Second
Temple, which had originally been finished in about the year 516 BCE by the
Jews who had returned from Babylon. Five hundred years later, it was beginning to show signs of its age.
LECTURE ELEVEN
Herod wanted to make the Temple one of the eight wonders of the ancient
world. He doubled the size of the platform on which it stood to about thirty-five
acres. In addition, in expanding the Temple Mount, he had arches built underground and then paved over to extend the area for building. It is these underground arches that are erroneously called Solomons Stables, even though
they were not built by Solomon or used as stables, except by the Crusaders.
The so-called Western (or Wailing) Wall was the western retaining wall of
the Temple Mount as built by Herod. In restoring the Temple, Herod essentially built a new Temple, but in order for it not to be seen as a new Temple,
he had all the building materials prepared beforehand and then trained the
priests as carpenters and masons and bricklayers, so that the religious services continued during the building and reconstruction. As a result, even
though this Temple should be called the Third Temple, technically speaking,
Herods is still called the Second Temple.
Sometime around the year 10 BCE, Herod held the dedication ceremony.
Apparently, the reconstructed Temple was an absolute marvel. Josephus
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wrote that the outward face of the Temple . . . was covered all over with
plates of gold of great weight, and at the first rising of the sun it reflected back
a very fiery splendor and made those who forced themselves to look up on it
to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the suns own rays.
Very little remains of anything Herod built. Most of his constructions were
destroyed by the Romans when they crushed the First Jewish Revolt and
destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. One of the three towers built by Herod survived; it is now known erroneously as the Tower of David and is located just
inside the old walls of Jerusalem. Herod himself died in the year 4 BCE after
spending his final years suffering intestinal pain, swollen feet, difficulty breathing, and other problems.
The Life of Jesus
Things remained reasonably quiet in Jerusalem for the next thirty years. It
was during this period that the territory became a Roman province and was
put under the governance of a Roman procurator. This period also saw the
birth of Jesus, either in the year 7 or the year 4 BCE, and it was during this
time, just after the death of Herod, that Jesus grew to adulthood.
Some of the events that are well known in the life of Jesus took place in the
Temple restored by Herod. The best known of the events are depicted in the
Gospels, specifically in Matthew 21, where it says, Jesus entered the
Temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple, and he
overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold
pigeons. He said to them, it is written, my house shall be called a house of
prayer, but you make it a den of robbers. And the blind and the lame came to
him in the Temple and he healed them.
There is also the story that Jesus accurately predicted the fall of Jerusalem
at the hands of the Romans. In Matthew 24, it is written, Jesus left the
Temple and was going away when his disciples came to point out to him the
buildings of the Temple. But he answered them, you see all these, do you
not? Truly I say to you, there will not be left one stone upon the other that will
not be thrown down. Indeed, the destruction of the city by the Romans would
take place about four decades later. The question is whether or not this is a
prediction. Many say the Gospels were written after the death of Jesus, in the
year 40 or 50 CE. This would have been before the assault of the Romans, in
the year 70, but others say they were not written down until 90 CE, so the
event prophesied would have already taken place.
The Origins of Christianity
The triumph of Christianity represents one of the most remarkable cultural
revolutions in history. Up until this time, the Greek and Roman philosophers
had taught the notion of carpe diem, because they believed there was nothing beyond this world. Christians taught of an afterlife in Heaven. So
Christianity started out appealing to slaves, the underclass, and the army.
There are two origins for Christianity: the so-called mystery religions and
Judaism. Mystery religions were so termed because only initiates knew what
occurred within them. These religions explained the ultimate mystery of life
and offered life after death. They had strange initiation rights, and they worshiped heroes who had conquered death.
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Examples of mystery religions include those built around Mithras, Orpheus,

Adonis, and Osiris, all pagan gods. Mithras was a favorite of the Roman
Army, and was usually accompanied by a scorpion, a dog, and frequently, a
bull. Initiates were placed underneath a white bull, whose neck was then cut,
and the initiates were splashed from head to toe with the blood of the sacrificial bull. Orpheuss lyre attracted animals, and Adonis was extremely good
looking (of course).
These gods all shared common characteristics. Another figure who fit the
pattern of the mystery religions was Jesus. He was a hero who was said to
have explained the ultimate purpose of life. It was thought that he offered his
followers personal salvation. There were mysterious rituals of initiation, such
as baptism. His followers believed that he had risen from the dead.
There are, however, some differences. The major difference is that Jesus
was a historical person and the others were not. Moreover, Christianity
required an upright and moral life, and the mystery religions did not.
Jesus in History
During this period, the Jews who were living in this region were not united.
There were different sects of Judaism, which included the Sadducees,
Essenes, and Pharisees. The Sadducees advocated strict adherence to
Jewish law, rejected belief in an afterlife, denied the existence of angels, and
werent happy with the idea of a personal, redeeming god. The Pharisees
were more liberal. They believed in life after death, accepted Gentile (nonJewish) converts to Judaism, and were willing to accommodate both Jewish
law and Greco-Roman culture. Then there were the Essenes, an ascetic
community that sought isolation from the world.
The earliest accounts of Jesus date from decades after his death. There are
therefore many problems in arriving at a clear picture of his life. The sources
themselves present difficulties, because Jesus wrote nothing and his life is
only seen through the writings of others, all of whom wrote well after the
death of Jesus.
LECTURE ELEVEN
These earliest writings probably date from about the year 70 CE. The latest
date from about the year 100 CE. Its thought that the New Testament itself
was collected and collated in about the year 90, that is, at the end of the first
century CE. Even in the books of the New Testament, the authors concentrate on the miracles of Jesus, not on his life in chronological order. Thus,
little is known about his life as a child or as a young adult. Its similar to the
Hebrew Bible in that descriptions are not meant as history but as statements
of faith by true believers.
According to his followers, Jesus was the son of Mary; he was born in
either 7 or 4 BCE. The dating system used today was determined by
Dennis the Monk in about the sixth or seventh century after the birth of
Christ. He was trying to figure out when Christ was born, but miscounted by
either four or seven years. Thus, Jesus was born either in the year 7 or 4
BCE, in the province of Judea or Palestina.
At about the age of 30, Jesus was publicly baptized, and thereafter entered
into a life of teaching. He was an effective teacher, in the tradition of the
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Israelite prophets and of the teachers of the day. Indeed, the Romans might
not have known what to make of him. His preaching could have been understood as belonging to one of the mystery religions. Technically, it was illegal to
practice mystery religions, but so many soldiers followed them that they tended to be overlooked, as long as people worshiped the Roman gods as well as
their own mystery religion.
Once the Romans figured out that Jesus and his followers were not members of a new mystery religion, it was easy to assign them to a branch of
Judaism. Christians could be lumped in with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and
Essenes. One could be a Jew in the Roman Empire, though one might have
to pay a fee.
It was only after the death of Jesus, who was crucified on the order of the
Roman governor Pontius Pilate, probably in the year 30 CE, that Christianity
really began to spread. Even after the death of Jesus, the Christians initially
formed only one of the many sects within the larger body of Judaism. They
called themselves Christians, and they seemed to have been a little lost.
There was no clear notion as to whom Jesus had directed his message: Was
it the Jews or the Gentiles?
A Coherent Christian Tradition
The man who clarified these issues was Saul, a Jewish man from Tarsus.
Saul converted to Christianity and took the name Paul. After he converted to
Christianity, he became its principal architect, organized churches throughout
the Roman world, and is by far the best known of its teachers. Acts of the
Apostles is concerned primarily with his career. There are also letters as well.
From the writings both by Paul and about him, the first coherent Christian
theology was developed. Paul was the one who also began the mission of
preaching to the Gentiles.
The Christians set themselves apart from other religions by refusing to worship the Roman gods. People could follow whatever religion they wanted in
the Roman Empire, but they had to worship the Roman gods, and the
Christians refused to do this. Thus, there were the infamous persecutions.
Persecutions, however, were not carried out as frequently as many seem to
believe. There was one set of persecutions in the year 64 by the emperor
Nero, who set Rome on fire and famously fiddled while it burned (except he
didnt actually fiddle; he sang the poem The Sack of Troy, then blamed the
Christians for setting the fire and persecuted them). There are a number of
other persecutions, but they didnt begin in earnest until the year 300.
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Questions
1. Why is Herods Temple called the Second Temple and not the
Third Temple?
2. Why was Christianity such a revolutionary religion?
Suggested Reading

Charlesworth, James, ed. Jesus and the Origins of Christianity. Vol. 5: The
Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal Press, 2004.
Shanks, Hershel, ed. The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at
the Gospels. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2002.
LECTURE ELEVEN
Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews Under Roman Rule. Leiden, The Netherlands:
E.J. Brill, 1976.
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Lecture 12:
Excursus: Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reader from the Biblical
Archaeology Review.
he Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin boys in

1947. The scrolls were thought to be part of the library of
the settlement of Qumran, located on the shores of the
Dead Sea. They contain copies of almost all of the books
of the Hebrew Bible.
The Caves at Qumran
The Dead Sea Scrolls refer to scrolls and fragments discovered between
1947 and 1960 in at least seven different sites on the northwestern shore of
the Dead Sea. The most important of these are approximately eight hundred
scrolls found in the caves around Qumran. The scrolls date roughly from 200
BCE to 70 CE.
According to William F. Albright, the dean of biblical archaeology, the Qumran
scrolls are the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.
The caves at Qumran are situated about a mile from the western shore of
the Dead Sea, and about three miles from its northern end. Jerusalem is
about thirteen miles to the west; Jericho is about nine miles to the north.
This is the Judean wilderness, approximately thirteen hundred feet below
sea level.
The ruins of Qumran are about a half mile to the south of the cave in which
the first scrolls were found. At the time, back in 1947, there wasnt much visible of the ruins. But several eminent travelers in the early nineteenth and
twentieth centuries had described the remains of Qumran. One even suggested that they were the biblical remains of Gomorrah, though this is not true.
The ruins of Qumran were excavated in five original seasons, 1951 and then
1953 to 1956. The earliest period of occupation of Qumran was during the
Israelite period, approximately the eighth century BCE. The final period of
occupation, a brief one, was when the area was occupied by Roman soldiers
sometime after the year 68 CE, after the Essene community at Qumran was
destroyed by the Tenth Legion in the year 68, during the First Jewish Revolt
against Rome.
There were three phases of occupation that represent almost continual
inhabitation of the site by the Essenes. However, the exact nature of the settlement is the focus of ongoing debates. Some scholars have suggested that
Qumran was a giant villa, or even something entirely different. Josephus
mentions that there were three kinds of schools or divisions of Jews in his
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day: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. He devoted his longest description

to the Essenes in his book The Jewish Wars. Even though Qumran doesnt
agree in every detail with Josephus, most scholars have accepted the identification of the Qumran community with the Essenes or some branch of them,
and thus think that the Dead Sea Scrolls represent the library of these
Essenes. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria said that the Essenes
numbered about four thousand, and Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century CE, tells of a community of Essenes in his Natural History, On the west
side of the Dead Sea . . . is the solitary tribe of the Essenes . . . [which] has
no women and has renounced all sexual desire . . . Day by day, the throng of
refugees is recruited to an equal number by numerous successions of personnel tired of life and driven there by ways of fortune to adopt their manners. Thus for thousands of years, incredible to relate, a race where no one
is born lives on forever.
Most scholars would agree that Qumran was the home of the Essenes.
Whether or not it was, it seems most likely that the Dead Sea Scrolls came
from Qumran and represent the library of the settlement. They were most
likely hidden by members of the community, who fled from the Romans in the
year 68 CE, intending to return and retrieve their library. Unfortunately, they
were probably all killed or sent off into exile. So their library remained in the
caves in which they hid it, for nearly two thousand years.
Discovery of the Scrolls
The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered sometime during the winter of
1946 and 1947. Three cousins belonging to a Bedouin tribe were watering
their flock of goats about two miles to the south of Qumran. One of the boys
began exploring the hundreds of caves in the area, hoping to find hidden
gold. Intrigued by the openings in the cliff face many feet above him, he
threw a rock into the opening and heard something shatter. He decided to
wait until the next morning and bring his two cousins with him, but the next
morning, one of the cousins woke early and climbed up to the cave. He found
the floor covered with broken pottery and saw ten jars stacked against the
walls. Eight of the jars were empty, but from one of the others, he pulled out
two bundles wrapped in linen and a leather scroll.
LECTURE TWELVE
When he got back, the boys unrolled the bundles and found two more
scrolls. These three scrolls, covered in a strange script, were taken back to
their Bedouin camp and left to hang in a bag from a tent pole. Eventually,
they went to Bethlehem and sold the scrolls to an antiquities dealer and
leather maker known as Kando, who figured that if he couldnt sell the scrolls,
he could make them into sandals using the leather.
The Bedouins eventually found four more scrolls and gave them to Kando.
The very first scholar to see the scrolls was Eleazar L. Sukenik, who was a
professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During the
last week in November in 1947, he received an urgent message from a friend
asking to meet him. When they met, the friend handed him a scrap of parchment. Sukenik realized that it was an ancient scroll, and he agreed to buy all
the scrolls on behalf of Hebrew University. Sukenik went down to Bethlehem,
bought the scrolls, and returned with them. A couple of hours after he got
back to Jerusalem, the United Nations passed a resolution creating the state
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of Israel, and all contact was cut off with the Arab world for a number of
months. So he made it back with the scrolls by scant hours.
The Contents of the Scrolls
The first two scrolls were nonbiblical. One was called the War of the Sons of
Light Against the Sons of Darkness, and the other was called the
Thanksgiving Scroll. The third scroll was a copy of the Book of Isaiah. Before
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest part of the Hebrew Bible
was dated to the year 895 CE. This copy of the Book of Isaiah was dated to
about 100 BCE, so it is nearly a thousand years earlier. The difference
between the Dead Sea Scroll copy of the Book of Isaiah and the later copies
is insignificant. There are only about thirteen little differences, which shows
the care with which the text has been transmitted over the centuries.
Upon further research, it turned out that the so-called Thanksgiving Scroll
was a copy of the prayer book of the community, and the so-called War
Scroll describes a time when God and his angels will join the Sons of Light
in wiping out the Sons of Darkness. This is one of the first descriptions
of Armageddon.
Portions of the New Testament are very similar to phrases found in the War
Scroll. First Thessalonians says, But you are not in darkness, brethren, for
you are all Sons of Light and Sons of the Day. Second Corinthians says,
For what partnership has righteousness with iniquity, or what fellowship has
light with darkness? The comparison of light and darkness is continued in
the fourth gospel: Jesus said to them, he who walks in the darkness knows
not where he goes. While you have the light, believe in the light that you may
become Sons of Light.
The Essenes and early Christians appear to have had a common theological
worldview. Both thought they were living in the End Days, and both lived in a
world where the powers of righteousness and the powers of evil were
engaged in warfare. The Essenes saw themselves as soldiers in an army at
the end of time. Because they were engaged in a war for God, they believed
in keeping the purity of their camps, refraining from sex and marriage, and
keeping stringent sanitary regulations.
No Sale
Two months after Sukenik bought the scrolls, someone else produced four
more scrolls and asked if he wanted to buy them. The scrolls belonged to the
head of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Mar Athanasius Yeshue
Samuel. The archbishop had bought the four scrolls from the same dealer
from whom Sukenik had bought them, reportedly for about fifty dollars.
Sukenik looked at the four scrolls and said that they were genuine. He told
the archbishop that he was willing to buy the four scrolls, and they agreed to
meet a couple of days later, but the sale never took place.
That was the last that Sukenik saw of the scrolls. Months later, he received a
message saying that the archbishop had decided not to sell the scrolls.
Indeed, it turned out that Sukenik had only been called in to ascertain that the
scrolls were genuine. The archbishop then tried to sell them in the United
States for several million dollars, but he never found a taker at that high price.
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Sukenik died early in 1953, never knowing that the additional four scrolls
would end up back in Jerusalem and that he would know well the person
responsible for retrieving them.
A Surprising Buyer
In 1954, a famous Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin was in the
United States lecturing in Baltimore and New York on his interpretation and
explanation of the scrolls that Sukenik had bought. While chatting with
William F. Albright at Johns Hopkins University, Yigael Yadin heard that
Samuel had dropped his price for the four scrolls to half a million dollars and
was advertising them in the classifieds section of the Wall Street Journal.
Yigael Yadin then bought the scrolls for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, through an intermediary. Most interesting, and what many dont realize,
is that Yigael Yadin was the son of Eleazar L. Sukenik. He had taken an
Israeli name, and he had managed to purchase the four scrolls that had eluded his father. He brought the scrolls back to Jerusalem, where they were
reunited and placed in the Shrine of the Book.
The Copper Scroll
What was in the four scrolls that Yigael Yadin had bought from Samuel?
One was another copy of the Book of Isaiah, which was in better condition
than Sukeniks. The other scrolls were the Manual of Discipline, the Genesis
Apocryphon, which is a retelling of the story of Genesis from Noah to
Abraham, and the Pesher, a commentary on Habakkuk.
The Bedouins discovered another cave, called Qumran Cave 2, and from it
came thirty-three fragmentary texts (eighteen biblical and fifteen nonbiblical).
This discovery provoked a full-scale official search of all the caves extending
over a stretch of five miles. This search revealed Cave 3, which contained
fourteen fragmentary texts (three biblical and eleven nonbiblical).
Cave 3 also contained two scrolls that caused great excitement, for they
were both made of copper. When connected, they formed a single manuscript known as the Copper Scroll. The Copper Scroll was extremely difficult
to unroll. Finally, in Manchester, England, it was sawn into separate pieces,
flattened, and reattached so that it could be read (it was written in Hebrew).
LECTURE TWELVE
The contents dealt with hidden treasures, specifically sixty-four different treasures and their locations. It has been speculated that this list refers to Temple
treasures smuggled out of Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt, from 66
to 70 CE. But despite more than one expedition in search of this lost wealth,
nothing has been found. Its now widely suspected that not only the hiding
places, but also perhaps the treasures themselves, were made up.
Cave 4 contained the remains of five hundred manuscripts. It didnt have
any complete scrolls, but it had heaps upon heaps of fragments: between fifteen and forty thousand fragments. To date, a total of five hundred and twenty texts have been identified: one hundred and fifty-seven from the Bible, thirteen commentaries on quoted parts from the Bible, and three hundred and
fifty nonbiblical documents, including sectarian texts, originals of previously
known literature, and many previously unknown Hebrew and Amaraic texts.
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Virtually all of the manuscripts are fragmentary and in an advanced state of

decay. Some of the manuscripts are preserved in no more than one or two
fragments. Others contain more than forty columns of texts. These texts comprise virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible. The only missing book is
Esther. One fragment, from the Book of Samuel, is the oldest piece of the
Bible yet found, dating to the third century BCE.
75
Questions
1. Why were the Essenes considered such an unusual tribe?
2. What similarities were there between the Essenes and the early Christians?
Suggested Reading
Shanks, Hershel, ed. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reader from
the Biblical Archaeology Review. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Abegg, Martin G., and Peter Flint. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest
Known Bible Translated for the First Time Into English. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
Brown, Judith A. John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005.
Davies, Philip R., George J. Brooke, and Phillip R. Callaway. The Complete
World of the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
LECTURE TWELVE
Elledge, C.D. The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Boston: Brill
Academic, 2005.
76
Lecture 13:
From the First Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of Jerusalem
to Bar Kochba and the Second Jewish Rebellion

(chapter 8: Roman Domination: The Jewish Revolt).
he First and Second Jewish Revolts took place in the first

and second centuries CE. Both ended as dramatic failures.
The first resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the
Second Temple. The second rebellion resulted in the banishment of the Jews from Jerusalem for more than five
hundred years. Together, the failed rebellions led to the
Diaspora, spreading Jews and Judaism to the four corners of the earth.
The First Revolt
After the Maccabean Rebellion, the Jews rose up against the Romans. In 66
CE, the uprising spread across Palestina and into Egypt and other areas of
the Roman Empire. The Romans decided they could not allow this to continue and sent Roman troops to put down the rebellion in Palestina.
The troops were the Twelfth Legion, known as the Thunderbolts, based in
Antioch. The legion probably boasted close to thirty thousand infantry and
horsemen. They were led by the Roman governor of Syria. Josephus says,
As for the Jews, when they saw the war approaching to their metropolis,
they left the feast and betook themselves to their arms. Taking courage
greatly from their multitude, they went in a sudden and disorderly manner to
the fight with a great noise and a rage that made them forget their religious
observance, because it was the Sabbath . . . five hundred fifteen of the
Romans were slain, of which number four hundred were footmen and the rest horsemen, while the Jews lost
only twenty-two.
The historian Suetonius, in his book The Life of

Vespasian, says that the Jews captured the Eagle standard of the Twelfth Army. It was an absolute disgrace for any
legion to lose its Eagle standard. It happened rarely and meant
that the legion itself was probably annihilated. In every other
known case when this happened, the Romans sent armies to
Clipart.com
The Romans besieged Jerusalem, but suddenly

withdrew. The Jews followed and ambushed the
Romans. The Roman troops were absolutely massacredthey lost five thousand three hundred footmen
and three hundred eighty horsemen. The Jews lost
only a few men. This defeat happened in the twelfth
year of the reign of Emperor Nero.
77
retrieve the standards. So for no other reason, the Romans would have come
up against the Jews again. The First Jewish Revolt lasted for a good five
years. It is not known whether the Romans regained their lost standard,
though it can be presumed that they did.
Under Siege
It actually took the Romans a while to attack Jerusalem, because in 67, 68,
and even 69 CE, things were not going well in Rome. There were four
Roman emperors in the year 69 alone, and the man who emerged victorious
was none other than Vespasian, who had been sent to crush the Jewish
revolt previously. Because he had become emperor and could not lead the
army, he sent his son Titus to do the deed. So it was probably during the
month of May in the year 70 that the battle for Jerusalem and the end of the
First Jewish Revolt came to pass.
Josephus says there were about twenty-three thousand fighting men in the
city. Tacitus says that the number of every person in the city was six hundred
thousand, which may have included the pilgrims who had come to celebrate
Passover. The usual population was probably only about eighty thousand, so
Josephuss number makes more sense.
The Romans attacked from the north, breaking through no fewer than three
different walls. The Romans then put the city under siege. Josephus tells us
that the famine became so severe that the children pulled the very morsels
out of their fathers mouths and the mothers did the same to their infants. It
sounds very much like the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the
Neo-Babylonians.
LECTURE THIRTEEN
By July, Titus had launched an assault on the Antonia Fortress that Herod
had built. Titus captured it and ordered its demolition. Then came the Temple
itself. Within a week of capturing the fortress, the Romans began to build
siege embankments, and eventually brought up the battering rams. The gates
of the Temple were set on fire, and then the Roman soldiers dashed in. After
taking control of the outer courts, the defenders went in to the inner part of
the Temple, where the sanctuary lay. Only a couple of days later, in the last
days of August 70 CE, the Roman soldiers broke into the inner Temple.
Josephus says that the defenders were everywhere slain. Eventually, the
sanctuary and Temple were set on fire, accidentally, by an ordinary Roman
soldier throwing a piece of burning wood into the Temple. Titus later claimed
that he never meant to destroy the Temple, and that he had ordered his men
to save it. But it was too late. The Temple was consumed by flames and for
the second time in history, the holiest place of the Jews was destroyed by
an invading force. It took place on August 28, 70 CE, the ninth of Ab, the
same day that the Temple of Solomon had been destroyed more than 650
years earlier.
In the end, the Romans marched into the smoldering ruins of the Temple,
set up the rest of their standards, and made sacrifices to them. It took another month for the Romans to subdue the rest of Jerusalem. Titus ordered his
soldiers to kill the inhabitants, plunder the city, and set it on fire. By the end
of September, the entire city was destroyed. Josephus says that ninety-seven
thousand people were taken captive, and that more than one million were
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killed. That is certainly an exaggeration, but it is nevertheless likely that the

Judeans lost a substantial portion of their population.
Booty from the Temple
In the Jewish quarter, at a place called the Burnt House, there was found
the arm and hand of a twenty-year-old woman, who had died in 70 CE. It is
not known what happened to the rest of her body; the arm and the hand are
the only human remains left from the destruction of the city in 70 CE.
The majority of the captured were taken to work in mines or were killed in
amphitheaters by gladiators. Indeed, so many people were sold as slaves
that the price of slaves dropped by half. The Romans destroyed the rest of
Jerusalem and left standing only the three towers built by Herod.
In the meantime, upon Tituss return to Rome, he held a parade in which
hundreds of Jewish prisoners were forced to march, and the booty from the
campaign, including objects from the Temple, was displayed. Josephus says,
There was here to be seen a mighty quantity of gold and silver and ivory, running along like a river. Those that were taken in the Temple of Jerusalem, they
made the greatest figure of them all, that is, the golden table of the weight of
many talents, the candlestick also that was made of gold, and the last of all
the spoils was carried the law of the Jews [the Torah]. To celebrate his victory, Titus built a Triumphal Arch at the eastern end of the Forum in Rome.
Inside, he had carved a depiction of his soldiers carrying off the treasures from
Herods Temple. The inscription that accompanies it is not entirely accurate,
but is only a little exaggerated: The Roman Senate and the people dedicate
this to the emperor Titus. He subdued the Jewish people and destroyed the
city of Jerusalem, which all generals, kings, and peoples before him had either
attacked without success or left entirely unassailed.
A Single Letter
The famous Coliseum in Rome may have been built using the loot the
Romans captured after putting down the First Jewish Rebellion. Outside the
Coliseum is an inscription that says that a certain Roman restored at his own
expense the Coliseum. It is dated to the fifth century CE, just before Rome
was destroyed. But recently, a professor from Heidelberg University noticed a
series of holes in the actual marble of the slab. He realized he was looking at
a ghost inscription. The original inscription on the block had been composed
of bronze letters that had little pegs which were inserted in the marble. After
much examination, he came up with an interesting reconstruction of the original inscription. The inscription that he determined had been on the original
slab of marble reads as follows, The Emperor Caesar Vespasian Augustus
ordered the new amphitheater to be made from the proceeds of the sale of
the booty.
This dates to 79 CE, nine years after Jerusalem fell. No other campaign
would have yielded so much money and booty, so if the reconstruction is
correct, the proceeds from the looting of the Temple may have gone toward
the construction of the Coliseum.
One part of the inscription bothered the professor. Some holes didnt fit his
pattern, and he realized an adjustment had been made to the display. The
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very next year, in 80 CE, somebody had inserted the letter T into the pattern
and changed it completely, so it said that the Emperor Titus Caesar Vespasian
Augustus had ordered the new amphitheater to be made. So with the insertion
of a single letter, Titus claimed that he had built the Coliseum, rather than
his father.
The Diaspora
With the end of the First Jewish Rebellion, the Jews were subdued, but the
Romans didnt leave. Instead, they built their headquarters in Jerusalem.
Archaeologists have excavated remnants from this period, including inscriptions, coins, traces of an aqueduct, and roof tiles stamped with the logo of the
Tenth Legion.
The Second Jewish Rebellion, known as the Bar Kochba Rebellion after its
leader, started in the year 132 CE, and lasted four years until 135 CE. By this
time, Josephus had died, but archaeology, the Roman historian Dio Cassius,
the Church historian Father Eusebius, and Hadrians biography provide a lot
of information about this Second Jewish Rebellion.
Hadrian visited Jerusalem as part of a grand tour of his empire. He
announced that Jerusalem would be renamed, and henceforth would be
called Aelia Capitolina, named for the emperor himself and the cult of
Capitolia at Rome. This announcement was met with intense resentment, and
rebellion soon broke out.
The uprising lasted for four years and was led by Bar Kochba, whom some
regarded as the Messiah. His name meant Son of the Star, and he was one
of the most effective leaders the Jews ever had. It took eighty thousand
Romans to repress his revolt.
LECTURE THIRTEEN
Dio Cassius said that many Romans perished in the war. According to his
account, Hadrian did not say the legions were in health when he wrote to the
Senate, which has been interpreted as meaning that the Judeans killed a
large number of Romans. But the Judeans fared worse. Dio Cassius says
that fifty important outposts and almost one thousand villages were burned to
the ground. He also says that so many people were taken as slaves that
once again the price of slaves dropped drastically. So many Judeans were
taken off that the whole of Judea became desolate.
In the end, the rebellion was repressed and Hadrian renamed Jerusalem
Aelia Capitolina. He put up new streets, erected a temple to Jupiter, and
expelled all remaining Jews from Jerusalem, forbidding them to ever live
there again. The Jews could only go into Jerusalem once a year, on the ninth
of Ab, and even for that they had to pay a price. But the city became a holy
city to the Christians, and sometime after 200 CE, pilgrims began coming to
Jerusalem. The city flourished with this new business.
80
Questions
1. What is the possible link between the Coliseum and the First Jewish Rebellion?
2. Who was the leader of the Second Jewish Rebellion?
Suggested Reading

Applebaum, Shimon. Prolegomena to the Study of the Second Jewish Revolt
(A.D. 132135). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1976.
Berlin, Andrea M., and J. Andrew Overman, eds. The First Jewish Revolt:
Archaeology, History, and Ideology. London: Routledge, 2002.
Furneaux, Rupert. The Roman Siege of Jerusalem. New York: David McKay
Company, Inc., 1972.
Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the
Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome. New York: Random House, 1971.
81
Lecture 14:
Excursus: Masada, What Really Happened?
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Yigael Yadins Masada:

Herods Fortress and the Zealots Last Stand.
asada is perhaps the most spectacular site in Israel.

Located just south of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scroll
caves, it is a great rock rising up out of the Judean
desert, moored to the western cliffs of the Dead Sea. It
was excavated between 1963 and 1965.
Up the Snake Path
Prior to the excavations, all information about Masada came from Josephus.
Most details are from his book The Jewish War, in which he says, There was
a rock, not small in circumference, and very high. It was encompassed by
valleys of such vast depth downwards that the eye could not reach their bottoms. They were abrupt and such as no animal could walk upon, excepting
two places on the rock where it subsides, affording a passage of ascent,
though not without difficulty. Now of the ways that lead to it, one is from Lake
Asphaltitus toward the sun rising and the other on the west, where the ascent
is easier. The one of these ways is called the Serpent, as resembling that
animal in its narrowness and its perpetual windings. This path is now called
the Snake Path, and many tourists walk up it today. The siege ramp built by
the Romans is also in place today.
Masada was first fortified during the Hellenistic period, and was used by
Herod the Great in the year 40 BCE, when he left his fiance and eight hundred soldiers at Masada as he fled across the desert to Rome. When he
came back, he realized Masada would be a great place to escape to and so
continued to fortify the site, though he never had to use it. In the end,
Masada contained an elaborate set of buildings that Herod had ordered constructed, including two palaces.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
The Great Siege Ramp

At the beginning of the First Jewish Rebellion, in the year 66, rebels took
over Masada. They didnt take much part in the war after that. Masada didnt
pose any threat to the Romans, and even after Jerusalem fell, Masada held
out. The Romans ignored it until the winter of 73. Then the Roman general
Flavius Silva moved against it.
Flavius Silva set up a ring of camps surrounding Masada. There were eight
fortified camps, all linked by a wall, as dictated by the Roman military textbook. To reach the top, he built a huge ramp that rose 450 feet above the
82
desert floor. Having built the ramp, he then brought up Roman siege engines
and began the assault of Masada.
Josephus says, There was a certain eminence of the rock, very broad and
very prominent. But it was 300 cubits beneath the highest part of Masada.
Accordingly, he got upon that part of the rock and ordered the army to bring
earth. And when they fell to that work with alacrity . . . the bank was raised
and became solid for 200 cubits in height. Yet was not this bank though sufficiently high for the use of the engines to be set upon that still another elevated work of great stones compacted together was raised upon that bank.
Josephus continues, The other machines that were not got ready were like
to those that had been first designed by Vespasian and afterwards by Titus
for sieges. There was also a tower made to the height of sixty cubits and all
over plated with iron out of which the Romans threw darts and stones from
the engines. So the Romans hurled stones and arrows, getting the siege
engines up to the walls, and letting the battering rams go to work.
Excavations inside and on top of Masada provide proof of the siege. For
example, stones have been found that the defenders hurled down upon
the attackers.
Through the Wall
Josephus continues, At the same time, Silva ordered that the great battering ram that he had made to be brought thither and to be set against the wall
and to make frequent batteries against it, which with some difficulty broke
down a part of the wall and quite overthrew it.
Josephus says that when the Romans battered down this outer defensive
wall, they found inside a new wall that the defenders had put up. This was a
wooden wall that Josephus describes as follows. It was made soft and yielding and so was capable of avoiding the terrible blows that affected the outer
wall. It was framed after the following manner. They laid together great
beams of wood lengthwise, one close to the end of another, and the same
way in which they were cut. There were two of these rows parallel to one
another and laid at such a distance from each other as the breadth of the wall
required. And earth was put into the space between those walls.
So there were two sets of wood, and in between the wood was earth. As
the battering ram hit the outer wall, the inner, softer wall absorbed the
impact. Thus, it took much longer than the Romans expected to knock a
hole in the outer wall. Once they put a hole in it, they found themselves facing that first stack of wood, which had defenders on top of it shooting down
at them. The Romans did as one might expect. They tossed burning arrows
and torches inside, and the wall quickly blazed up in flames. The defenders
had one moment of hope when the wind changed direction and blew the
flames against the Roman towers, but the wind changed again, and the wall
burned down.
By Their Own Hands
Josephus says that night was falling and the Romans, according to him,
returned to their camp with joy and resolved to set the attack the next day.
On top of Masada, the Jews realized that everything was lost. Josephus
83
says, Neither did Eleazer once think of flying away, nor would he permit anyone else to do so. But when he saw their wall burned down by the fire and
could devise no other way of escaping or room for their further courage, setting before their eyes what the Romans would do to them, their children and
their wives, if they got them into their power, he consulted about having them
all slain. Now as he judged this to be the best thing they could do in their present circumstances, he gathered the most courageous of his companions
together and encouraged them to take that course by a speech.
Josephus quotes Eleazer, Since we long ago, my generous friends,
resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God
himself, who alone is the true and just lord of mankind, the time is now come
that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice. It is still in our power
to die bravely and in a state of freedom . . . It is very plain that we will be
taken in a days time, but it is still an eligible thing to die in a glorious manner
together with our dearest friends. The punishments let us not receive from
the Romans but from God himself, as executed by our own hands, for these
will be more moderate than the other. Let our wives die before they are
abused and our children before they have tasted of slavery. And after we
have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom as an excellent funeral monument for
us. But first let us destroy our money and the fortress by fire, for I am well
assured that this will be a great grief to the Romans, that they shall not be
able to seize upon our bodies and shall fall of our wealth also . . .
This is one of the most famous statements from antiquity. Josephus says
that as he was carrying on in this exhalation, they all moved off and did this
work on their own, seized with a demonical fury. For the husbands tenderly
embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, and gave the
longest parting kisses to them with tears in their eyes, yet at the same time
did they complete what they had resolved on. Every one of them dispatched
their dearest relations. Then they chose ten men by lots to dispatch the rest,
and when those ten had killed all of the other men, one of the ten killed the
others and then killed himself. When the Romans came in the next morning,
they found no one alive. All nine hundred sixty were dead.
Uncertain Historicity
How did Josephus know this story? He claimed that two old women and five
children had concealed themselves in caverns underground, emerged the
next morning, and told the Romans the story.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
The story of Masada has been told and retold. Moreover, from 1948 until
the early 1980s, new recruits into the Israeli army were sworn in at the top
of Masada.
The problem is that the historicity of this basic plot is completely uncertain.
The general facts are accurate and confirmed by archaeology. The ramp is
still there. Fragments from the camps are still there. But Josephus was not at
Masada, so it is not a firsthand account. He did have access to the official
field reports, and he may even have consulted Flavius Silva, so he is reliable
on some instances. But the secondhand nature of his knowledge is evident
upon a close examination of the details.
84
Josephus is wrong in his description of the northern palace. He is wrong

about the number of palaces on top of Masada, and his account goes completely wrong when he reports that the Romans stopped for the night just
after they had breached the wall. Even though nighttime had fallen, the
Romans would never have stopped. The military textbook manuals instructed
them to push the attack wherever and whenever it was called for. If they had
broken through, they would have carried on with the attack. And indeed, the
burning wood on top of Masada would have meant that they could have seen
as plainly as day. And yet Josephus has them stop, which gives the Jews
time for their mass suicide.
What actually happened up on top of Masada? Probably some Jews killed
themselves and their families, but the majority were killed by the Romans. In
other words, it was a massacre and not a suicide.
The speech that Eleazer gives is highly unlikely and mimics an event that
occurred during Josephuss own life. Before he was a Roman historian, he
was a Jewish general who had been captured by Vespasian after hiding in a
cave with other survivors. He had persuaded all of the others to commit suicide, leaving only him and one other man aliveand then he persuaded the
other man to give up with him. So he had seen an event very close to what
he had described, only he had survived it.
The thinking is that Josephus may have invented the speech of Eleazar in
part to lay the blame on the Jews themselves, to take the burden of the massacre off the hands of the Romans, and to turn the massacre into a suicide
for which the Romans were not responsible. Here again, there is much
debate today. A number of scholars have reinvestigated Masada, and the
Israeli army has ceased to swear in new soldiers on top of Masada. Indeed,
the entire notion of the suicide has been called into question. Its now being
referred to as the myth of Masada, though there are those who still hold that
it was a mass suicide.
85
Questions
1. How did the Romans go about their siege of Masada?
2. What is meant by the myth of Masada?
Suggested Reading
Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herods Fortress and the Zealots Last Stand. New
York: Random House, 1966.

Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and
Mythmaking in Israel. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
. Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada. Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 2002.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
Josephus, Flavius. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged.

Trans. William Whiston. New York: Hendrickson Publishers, 1980.
86
COURSE MATERIALS
Suggested Readings for This Course:

. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reader from the Biblical
Archaeology Review. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herods Fortress and the Zealots Last Stand. New
York: Random House, 1966.
Other Books of Interest:
Abegg, Martin G., and Peter Flint. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest
Known Bible Translated for the First Time Into English. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
Applebaum, Shimon. Prolegomena to the Study of the Second Jewish Revolt
(A.D. 132135). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1976.
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and
Mythmaking in Israel. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
. Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada. Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 2002.
Berlin, Andrea M., and J. Andrew Overman, eds. The First Jewish Revolt:
Archaeology, History, and Ideology. London: Routledge, 2002.
Boren, Kerry R., and Lisa L. Boren. Following the Ark of the Covenant.
Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, Inc., 2000.
Brown, Judith A. John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005.
Charlesworth, James, ed. Jesus and the Origins of Christianity. Vol. 5: The
Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal Press, 2004.
Cline, Eric H. The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley
from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2002.
. Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel.
Cornuke, Robert, and David Halbrook. In Search of the Lost Ark of the
Covenant. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2002.
Davies, Philip R., George J. Brooke, and Phillip R. Callaway. The Complete
World of the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
87
COURSE MATERIALS
Other Books of Interest (continued):

Elledge, C.D. The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Boston: Brill
Academic, 2005.
Feiler, Bruce S. Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five
Books of Moses. New York: William Morrow, 2001.
. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bibles Sacred Kings and the
Furneaux, Rupert. The Roman Siege of Jerusalem. New York: David McKay
Company, Inc., 1972.
Geoghegan, Jeffrey C., and Michael M. Homan. The Bible for Dummies. New
York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2003.
Halpern, Baruch. Davids Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001.
Hancock, Graham. The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the
Covenant. New York: Touchstone/Crown Publishers, 1993.
Harrington, Daniel J. The Maccabean Revolt: Anatomy of a Biblical
Revolution. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988.
Jones, Cheviene. The Ark of the Covenant. New York: Clarion Publishing, 1994.
Josephus, Flavius. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged.
Trans. William Whiston. New York: Hendrickson Publishers, 1980.
Kirsch, Jonathan. King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
Lipschits, Oded, and Joseph Blenkinsopp, eds. Judah and the Judeans in
the Neo-Babylonian Period. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns Publishing, 2003.
COURSE MATERIALS
Marcus, Amy D. The View from Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the
Bible and Reshaping the Middle East. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2000.
Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000586 BCE. New
York: Doubleday, 1992.
McKenzie, Steven L. King David: A Biography. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Munro-Hay, Stuart, and Roderick Grierson. The Ark of the Covenant: The
True Story of the Greatest Relic of Antiquity. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1999.
88
COURSE MATERIALS
Other Books of Interest (continued):

Rast, Walter E. Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology: An Introductory
Handbook. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.
Shanks, Hershel, ed. The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at
the Gospels. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2002.
Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews Under Roman Rule. Leiden, The Netherlands:
E.J. Brill, 1976.
Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Volume II: The
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732332 B.C.E.). New York:
Doubleday, 2001.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Woudstra, Marten H. The Ark of the Covenant from Conquest to Kingship.
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Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the
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A HISTORY OF

Professor Eric H. Cline

A History of Ancient Israel:

Recorded Books is a trademark of

A History of Ancient Israel:

Lecture content 2006 by Eric H. Cline

72006 by Recorded Books, LLC

About Your Professor...................................................................................................4

Abraham and the Patriarchs..................................................................6

The Exodus and Egypt ........................................................................13

The Conquest of Canaan: Israelites, Philistines,

King David in History and Tradition .....................................................25

King Solomon in History and Tradition ................................................31

Excursus: The Ark of the Covenant.....................................................37

The Kingdom of Israel and the Omride Dynasty .................................42

The Kingdom of Judah Until the Time of Sennacherib .......................48

Neo-Babylonians and the End of the Kingdom of Judah ....................54

Persians and Greeks in Judea ............................................................61

The Coming of the Romans and Christianity ......................................66

Excursus: Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.....................................71

From the First Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of

Excursus: Masada, What Really Happened? ......................................82

Course Materials ........................................................................................................87

Photo courtesy of Eric H. Cline

About Your Professor

King David brings the Ark of

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

ny attempt to teach the history of ancient Israel depends

Recorded Books, LLC

Recorded Books, LLC; Background: NASA

the Egyptians, not only

In the meantime, Lot,

Among the distant descendants of Shem in the ninth generation is a tent

Lots wife is turned into a pillar of salt after looking back on

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Other Books of Interest

Rast, Walter E. Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology: An Introductory

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

Recorded Books, LLC; Background: NASA

All of this raises

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

srael is mentioned in the Merneptah stele, in the fifth year

Who Conquered Canaan?

The civilization of Phoenicia is a conglomeration of different elements. This

Sauls Rise to Power

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

ing David is one of the most beloved figures in the Hebrew

The text of 2 Samuel presents a number of different difficulties in translation,

Eric H. Cline; Background: NASA

Archaeology has been unable to pinpoint structures that definitely belong to

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Other Books of Interest

McKenzie, Steven L. King David: A Biography. New York: Oxford University

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hershel Shankss (ed.)

ing Solomon is renowned for his wisdom, wealth, and

But the biblical text reveals

In the Book of Chronicles,

Solomon was troubled by adversaries close to home. And wise Solomon

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING