2.2 Jewish History - The Israelite Monarchies

Welcome. This is episode 2.2. In this arc of episodes, we are looking at the history of the community of people who wrote the Bible, the Jews. We looked last week at Jewish history from the birth of civilization down to the period of a tribal confederacy in Canaan among a group known as the Hebrews. We left off around the year 1000 BC as the Bronze Age had given way to the Iron Age, and a collapse of the great civilizations of the Near East left a power vacuum in Canaan which the Hebrews were able to exploit. 

During this period, the proto-Jewish people were not called Jews. That is a later term we will get to. They were Hebrews who began to identify with the term Israelites. Hebrew, as we discussed last time, may be a term that was originally associated with a nomadic, lower social class—petty bandits, even—not a flattering way to think of oneself. 

In their own origin stories, recorded in Genesis, the Hebrew tribes traced their ancestry to a man named Israel, also called Jacob, one of their patriarchs. Israel means “God strives” or “God prevails”, or something close to that. El, as in Isra-el, is the name of God that derives from the chief deity of Canaanite mythology. Other common names, by the way, like Daniel, Gabriel, and Nathaniel, all contain this same generic god-word that comes from Canaanite. 

In the late Bronze Age, the Hebrews tribes shared an emerging distinct language and they cooperated with each other, but they didn’t have a unified government. They were not a state at that time, but in the 11th century BC, the Hebrews do indeed come together to form a kingdom. At the same time or a little before, as Egypt lost control of Canaan and surroundings lands, tribal groups, as we mentioned last week, in several neighboring areas had also formed small, petty kingdoms. Kingdoms east of the Jordan river included Ammon, Moab, and Edom, and to the north along the Mediterranean Coast was Phoenicia with city states Tyre and Sidon ruled by kings, and to the northeast the Kingdom of Aram Damascus.

So, in this general milieu of tribal or ethnic groups coming together to form small kingdoms rather than mere tribes with chiefs, we find that the Israelites adopt monarchy, too. In the period that the Bible calls that of the Judges, the 11th century BC, there may have already been some very abortive attempts to unite the tribes under a king. The first Biblical indication of this is a man named Abimelech who was the son of a prominent judge or warrior-chief named Gideon. Abimelech killed all of his brothers, according to the story in the book of Judges, and declared himself the king, but then died himself after a woman dropped a stone on his head during a siege. So, that version of an Israelite kingdom didn’t make it off the ground. 

But, along comes another king named Saul who is a fairly major figure in the Bible, particularly in the first book of Samuel. Saul is described as being the first person to rule over the Hebrew Confederation as its king. But, Saul is killed in battle, and while one of his sons, Ishbosheth, attempts to take his father’s throne, he fails. Saul’s dynasty doesn’t get far off the ground. 

Replacing Saul was a warrior chief named David, who took the throne in about the year 1000 BC and ruled over the Israelite tribes as the founding king of a long-lived dynasty. David establishes his court at a city called Jerusalem. David has a son named Solomon who builds a temple to the God Yahweh in Jerusalem and enjoys what might be called the glory days of the Israelite kingdom when all of the Hebrew tribes were unified, at least in the ancient Jewish telling of their own story.  

Up until the time of David, before the 10th century BC, that is, it must be said that historians are unable to verify the stories in the Bible as being factually accurate. There were Hebrew tribes in Canaan from which the Israelite kingdom descends. There is archaeological evidence that there was a dynasty of kings referred to as the House of David. But, nothing more on earlier biblical events. Scholars, then, must refer to the pre-David stories and their characters as legends that may have basis in historical events, but they can’t know. 

The biblical stories of the kings from the time of David forward, by contrast, while still not verifiable in the details, do generally represent factual history.

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We should also say that historians are not entirely sure that the tribes of the Hebrews were ever really fully united. They were fractious, and even if there ever was a single Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon, it certainly didn’t last long. The Hebrew tribes had long been loosely grouped as northern tribes and southern tribes, and they officially split into two kingdoms around the year 925 BC; the northern tribes became a kingdom simply called Israel, and the southern tribes, which were dominated by a single tribe called Judah, became a kingdom called Judah. So, Israel north. Judah south. These two kingdoms, in spite of sharing a language, Hebrew, and, at least ostensibly, a religion, often lived in tension and conflict with each other.

Now, let’s discuss the general history of these parallel kingdoms separately, stating with the northern kingdom of Israel, which lasts for roughly 200 years from the time of the assumed split. Of the two kingdoms, Israel was the more powerful and prosperous over much of its history according to modern archaeologists. Its capital settled at a city called Samaria. Its monarchy was generally unstable. Of the 19 kings who ruled Israel during its history, 8 of them took power in a coup.  

Regarding religion, the Israelites in the north actually worshipped many old Canaanite gods, including Baal and Asherah. But, the kingdom was theoretically dedicated to a single god called Yahweh. The god Yahweh, or at least the name Yahweh, had origins among the Hebrews’ southern neighbors the Midianites and the Edomites, and it seems the god Yahweh never took hold in the northern kingdom as strongly as he did in the southern kingdom, which we will get to in a moment. While it had priests and important worship sites, Israel in the north did not have highly centralized worship at a single temple. Shrines and altars were spread throughout the kingdom. 

In the sweep of history, the Kingdom of Israel is kind of a blip, and to understand how the kingdom ends, we need to revisit an event from the last episode: the cataclysmic Late Bronze Age Collapse around the year 1200 BC. This collapse, you remember, took the great powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia, among others, down a few pegs, and created the power vacuum that gave the Hebrews and their neighbors the space to establish kingdoms in and around Canaan in the first place. Well, the great powers that collapsed at that time, including the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, didn’t stay collapsed forever. 

By the 8th century BC, the brutal Assyrian Empire was in power in Mesopotamia, and they started expanding outward, building a vast empire and sending armies to threaten lands along the Mediterranean far to the west. In the year 732 BC, Assyria conquered large chunks of Israelite territory and then in 720 destroyed the rest of the kingdom including its capital at Samaria. We will talk more about the destruction of Israel and its aftermath in the next episode.

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So, the northern kingdom is gone after only two centuries, but the Southern Kingdom of Judah keeps going for a while longer, less of a blip than the north. Judah had, in fact, also been threatened with destruction by Assyria. The Assyrians besieged Judah’s capital at Jerusalem in 701 BC, and while they failed to capture the city, they did reduce Judah to a vassal state. Judah paid tribute thereafter but managed to hang on to some of its independence.

Unlike Israel in the north, Judah in the south had a stable monarchy for the most part. All of its kings, 21 of them over its history, were descendants of King David. Jerusalem became an important city, as the kings of Judah established their royal court there along with the priesthood of Yahweh at the temple. Worship was much more centralized in Judah than it was in Israel. The priests of Yahweh in Judah were law givers and law enforcers, closely connected to the king. As elites, the priests and members of the royal court were also literate, which is an important thing to keep in mind as we talk about the formation of the Old Testament. 

In 612 BC, the Assyrian Empire, of which Judah, as we mentioned, had been a vassal state, falls to a new empire also based in Mesopotamia, Babylon. At this point, Judah becomes the rope in a tug of war between Babylon and Egypt, which is also resurgent after over 500 years in a weakened state. Both empires, Egypt to the southwest and Babylon to the east, try to exert influence over Judah and the other smaller kingdoms in the neighborhood. And this awkward position characterizes the final chapter of the southern kingdom of Judah. More on how Judah met its final end in 587 BC in the next episode.

And now a note about religion in general at the time of the Israelite kingdoms. Religion was not monotheistic as you may assume but rather, at least ostensibly, monolatrous. This is another topic we’ll talk about in further detail in the future. But, for now, monotheism is, of course, the idea that there exists only one god. Judaism later becomes truly monotheistic, but during the monarchies, they weren’t yet. The people believed in a variety of gods, but the Israelites and Judahites, at least according to their priests, were only supposed to worship one god—the god Yahweh. Believing in multiple gods but worshipping only one is called monolatry. While this is an important point, both the Bible itself and modern archaeology attest that in actual practice the Israelites worshipped a variety of gods alongside Yahweh, even though they weren’t supposed to.  

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So the monarchical period of Israelite history lasted for approximately 425 years in grand total, from the late 11th century BC to 587 BC. And yet, for as brief a time as this was, the period of the kings forms a huge portion of the historical backdrop of the Old Testament. Virtually none of the Bible, as we noted last week, had been written up to the time of the Hebrew Tribal Confederacy, but during the monarchies that followed, by contrast, major parts of the Old Testament were written. 

For something to be written down it, clearly, must be written by someone who is literate. Well, who was literate during the period of the monarchies? Virtually no one. The exceptions, those who could write, lived among the social elite—members of the royal court, military leaders, and the priests. That was about it. So, an important point to keep in mind is that everything you read in the Old Testament from this time period is the product of the scribal elites who lived in close contact with the King and the priesthood of Yahweh. 

So, what actually got written down during the monarchical period? Before we identify actual Bible books, let’s first mention types of literature that were written during this period. The Israelites write origin stories about the world and about themselves. They write down laws. They write down history, some of which likely stuck to the facts, and some of which likely contained a lot of spin. And, they write down poetry and collections of wisdom. So, a variety of writings in a variety of categories shows up during the period of the kings. 

As for specific books, the material that became Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus (maybe), Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings got their start during this period. These books, especially the first five, started at this point but later evolved, they got edited over time, which is something we will talk about in the future. The story of these books deserves its own arc of episodes. These books preserve the Hebrew origin stories, some of their history, and their laws. 

For the books of Samuel and Kings, the author would have used the records of the royal courts of Israel as source material for those books. These court records, called the Annals of the Kings, are all lost—they didn’t make it into the Bible—but their existence does get mentioned numerous times in the Bible. To give one example, I Kings 15:7, says, “The rest of the events of King Abijah's reign, including all his accomplishments, are recorded in the scroll called the Annals of the Kings of Judah.” So these court records served as a basis for the stories we find in the Bible from this period. 

Other Bible books from the monarchical period include some of what we call the books of the prophets. The prophets functioned as called men of god, either from among the priests or from outside the priesthood, and they had messages for the kings or for the population at large. Today we sometime think of prophets as people who can see into the future, but mostly they functioned then as preachers. Amos and Hosea were prophets in the north, Israel, and the books that bear their names are among the oldest in the Bible and from from this period. Micah, Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habakkuk were southern prophets in Judah whose books are from this period. Also, parts of the books of Isaiah, maybe Obadiah, and maybe parts of Jeremiah are from this period. 

Last, we can add from the time of the monarchies the beginnings of the collections we call Psalms and Proverbs. Many of the Psalms were originally songs sung in the royal court of Judah or for temple worship, and the Proverbs were sort of pithy-one liners of wisdom. In fact, the Psalms and Proverbs are often classified under the genre of wisdom literature. 

So, if you add up all of the books I just mentioned, you have from the period of the monarchies, dating from roughly 1000 BC to 587 BC, all or large parts of as many as 22 of the 39 Old Testament books—39, assuming the Protestant Bible. The remaining 17 haven’t been written or started yet, so we will mention those as we keep moving forward through Hebrew/Israelite/Jewish history in the next couple of episodes.  

We will end there, but we will pick up the story in the next episode discussing what became of the Israelites and Judahites after their kingdoms came to a dramatic end. 

As always, thanks for listening. I really do appreciate it when you tell your friends about this podcast, as we will always be hoping to grow our audience for the Bible Unthumped. Always feel free to email the podcast, especially if you have any questions related to the episode. 

Less thumping. More understanding. See you next time.