1 Ancient Israel: History and Language The Bible comes to us from the world of the eastern Mediterranean. Much of what Christians call the Old Testament was written in what is now Israel/Palestine, the majority probably in Jerusalem. Some may come from Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq), to which many Jews were exiled in the sixth century BCE, and some perhaps from Egypt, where a substantial Jewish community lived from the same period onwards. It is conceivable that there are passages in the Old Testament as old as the tenth or eleventh centuries BCE, but modern scholars tend to think that the eighth century - possibly the age also of Homer - is the earliest likely period; the latest Old Testament book (Daniel) comes from the second century BCE. There may already be some surprises here. It is widely believed that large parts of the Bible are much older than this implies, with the stories about characters such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the book of Genesis going back into the second millennium BCE. The story the Bible tells does indeed span a very long period; but the books that describe it almost certainly do not date back in written form to such remote antiquity themselves. For the early stories in Genesis, and even the accounts of the activity of Moses in Exodus, we probably have a written version of tales that originally circulated by word of mouth in a mostly illiterate culture, though some biblical scholars think they are deliberate fiction.

(It is noticeable that Moses and his predecessors are scarcely mentioned again until literature that we are sure derives from the sixth century BCE, notably Isaiah 40- 55.) The story of the origins of Israel, then, is at best folk-memory, which is unlikely to be accurate in any detail across more than a generation or so. This means that we have little access to the history of Israel in the times covered by the opening books of the Bible, the Pentateuch (Greek for ''five scrolls'', and meaning Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). At the other end of the chronology, it is also not generally known that there are Old Testament books more recent than Greek tragedies or the works of Plato and Aristotle. This is partly because later books tend to claim an older ancestry: Ecclesiastes (Qohelet in Hebrew) seems to claim to be by Solomon, who lived in the tenth century BCE, and Daniel claims to be a near- contemporary of Jeremiah, living in the time of the exile in the sixth century BCE. But the general consensus now is that both books are the product of a much later period, and in the case of Daniel a time as late as the age of the Maccabees, Jewish freedom fighters in the second century BCE who went on to found a dynasty. Thus the Old Testament does not derive from a single period in the history of Israel, but from a wide range of dates as well as a variety of places. It is the national literature of a small nation: Israel is about the same size as Wales, or the state of Maine.

Before modern times, Israel had a genuinely independent existence for only a few centuries, from perhaps the tenth to the seventh century BCE, and was otherwise subject to the main regional powers - Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia or the Hellenistic kingdoms that controlled the Middle East after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Israel was itself a geopolitically unimportant state, but it lay at the heart of various trade routes in the Middle East and so was open to influences from its larger and more significant neighbours. If we are to understand the development of its national literature, it is necessary to have in mind an outline history of Israel within the wider ancient Near Eastern world. But the history as reconstructed by modern historians differs markedly from the story the Old Testament itself tells. We begin by sketching this story, and then proceed to the modern reconstructions. The Old Testament gives the impression that the origins of the people of Israel do indeed go back well into the second millennium BCE. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Joseph and his eleven brothers, live well before the time of Moses, which in turn is long before the first Kings of Israel, Saul, David and Solomon. In Genesis, the ancestors migrate from Mesopotamia to the Promised Land but continue to have connections with their relatives to the east.

They then move to Egypt in a time of famine, Joseph having gone ahead of them as a slave who becomes a major Egyptian official. Chronological notes in the Old Testament suggest that we are meant to think of this as happening in perhaps the fourteenth century BCE. The people return to the Land, this time from the west, from Egypt, under the leadership of Moses; after wandering in the desert for forty years and receiving the Ten Commandments and the other laws, they finally enter the Land with Joshua at their head. By the eleventh century or so they have settled down in the Land under the people the Old Testament calls the ''judges'', tribal leaders who rose to rule the whole of Israel. They face opposition from other local peoples such as the Midianites. It is the Philistines, however, incomers who have settled in the west of the Land (where the Gaza Strip is now), who present the first major challenge; a local leader called Saul rises to the occasion, repels the Philistines and becomes the first king of all the tribes in the north of the Land, excluding the southern tribe of Judah. David, a Judahite from Bethlehem, takes over from Saul when Saul is killed in battle with the Philistines, and unites Judah and Israel to make a single kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. The union is unstable, and always a source of tension.

Under David and his son Solomon, Israel then expands to dominate the surrounding small nations such as Moab, Ammon, Edom and even Aram (now Syria), and we can speak of an Israelite empire. Solomon also constructs a royal temple in Jerusalem as a centre for the worship of God. This is the high point of the history of Israel as the Old Testament sees it. After the death of Solomon the old north- south divide reasserts itself, and there are two kingdoms, Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel, sometimes referred to as Ephraim after the name of the main tribe that had settled in the area it covered. It is Judah that really interests the Old Testament writers, who (we may surmise) lived mostly in Jerusalem. Still there are stories of the north too, such as the tales of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who work under various northern kings in the ninth century, including the notorious Ahab and his queen, Jezebel - regarded by the Old Testament''s second book of Kings as apostates from the true Israelite religion and worshippers of the god Baal. Israel is continually at war with Aram, inconclusively so, throughout the century, but in the eighth century the rising power of Assyria, with its capital at Nineveh (near modern Mosul), snuffs out the northern kingdom. The king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it.

In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. (2 Kings 17: 5- 6) Judah survives, the Bible tells us, as a tiny independent state until the beginning of the sixth century when it in turn falls to the Babylonians, who have by now supplanted Assyria. The Temple is destroyed, and the land devastated. So begins the Jewish exile, with all the leadership either executed or transported to Babylonia, and only ''the poorest of the people of the land'' (2 Kings 25:12) left behind. The Old Testament speaks of a number of important figures from the exilic age, notably Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but tells us little of what the exiles in general did or suffered. Later in the sixth century the conquest of Babylon under its last king, Nabonidus, by the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great leads to a different imperial policy, under which exiled peoples are allowed to return to their homelands. ''Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of those among you who are of his people - may their God be with them! - are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the LORD, the God of Israel.

'' (Ezra 1: 2- 3) Accordingly a number of Jews return to Judah and begin to rebuild the Temple (known usually as the Second Temple, to distinguish it from the original built by Solomon). We read of some of their activities in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, who are presented as regulating Jewish life under the Torah - the great law book given by God, which we are probably meant to understand as the Pentateuch. After Nehemiah we learn little more of the Persian period, and the Old Testament gives the impression that the significant history of Israel, guided by its God, is more or less over. Only the book of Esther purports to tell of Jewish life under the Persians. Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great (at the end of the fourth century, in 333 BCE, at the Battle of Issus), and there is more inf.