History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot.

Hebron is there to prove it. It lies 20 miles south of Jerusalem, 3,000 feet up in the Judaean hills. There, in the Cave of Machpelah, are the Tombs of the Patriarchs. According to ancient tradition, one sepulchre, itself of great antiquity, contains the mortal remains of Abraham, founder of the Jewish religion and ancestor of the Jewish race. Paired with his tomb is that of his wife Sarah. Within the building are the twin tombs of his son Isaac and his wife Rebecca. Across the inner courtyard is another pair of tombs, of Abraham’s grandson Jacob and his wife Leah. Just outside the building is the tomb of their son Joseph.1 This is where the 4,000-year history of the Jews, in so far as it can be anchored in time and place, began.

It has been in turn a Hebrew shrine, a synagogue, a Byzantine basilica, a mosque, a crusader church, and then a mosque again. Herod the Great enclosed it with a majestic wall, which still stands, soaring nearly 40 feet high, composed of massive hewn stones, some of them 23 feet long. Saladin adorned the shrine with a pulpit. Hebron reflects the long, tragic history of the Jews and their unrivalled capacity to survive their misfortunes. David was anointed king there, first of Judah (II Samuel 2:1-4), then of all Israel (II Samuel 5:1-3). When Jerusalem fell, the Jews were expelled and it was settled by Edom. It was conquered by Greece, then by Rome, converted, plundered by the Zealots, burned by the Romans, occupied in turn by Arabs, Franks and Mamluks. From 1266 the Jews were forbidden to enter the Cave to pray. They were permitted only to ascend seven steps by the side of the eastern wall. On the fourth step they inserted their petitions to God in a hole bored 6 feet 6 inches through the stone. Sticks were used to push the bits of paper through until they fell into the Cave.2 Even so, the petitioners were in danger. In 1518 there was a fearful Ottoman massacre of the Hebron Jews. But a community of pious scholars was re-established. It maintained a tenuous existence, composed, at various times, of orthodox Talmudists, of students of the mystic kabbalah, and even of Jewish ascetics, who flogged themselves cruelly until their blood spattered the hallowed stones. Jews were t...

Who was this Abraham, and where did he come from? The Book of Genesis and related Biblical passages are the only evidence that he existed and these were compiled in written form perhaps a thousand years after his supposed lifetime. The value of the Bible as a historical record has been a matter of intense argument for over 200 years. Until about the year 1800, the predominant view, among scholars and layfolk alike, was fundamentalist: that is, the Bible narratives were divinely inspired and true in whole and in detail, though many scholars, both Jewish and Christian, had maintained for centuries that the early books of the Bible in particular contained many passages which should be understood as symbols or metaphor rather than as literal fact.

The first five books of the Bible, or pentateuch, were now presented as orally transmitted legend from various Hebrew tribes which reached written form only after the Exile, in the second half of the first millennium BC. These legends, the argument ran, were carefully edited, conflated and adapted to provide historical justification and divine sanction for the religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the post-Exilic Israelite establishment. The individuals described in the early books were not real people but mythical heroes or composite figures denoting entire tribes.4

Thus not only Abraham and the other patriarchs, but Moses and Aaron, Joshua and Sampson, dissolved into myth and became no more substantial than Hercules and Perseus, Priam and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Aeneas.

Under the influence of Hegel and his scholarly followers, Jewish and Christian revelation, as presented in the Bible, was reinterpreted as a determinist sociological development from primitive tribal superstition to sophisticated urban ecclesiology. The unique and divinely ordained role of the Jews was pushed into the background, the achievement of Mosaic monotheism was progressively eroded, and the rewriting of Old Testament history was pervaded by a subtle quality of anti-Judaism, tinged even with anti-Semitism. The collective work of German Biblical scholars became the academic orthodoxy, reaching a high level of persuasiveness...

other theories necessarily discarded all Biblical history before the Book of Judges as wholly or chiefly fiction, and Judges itself as a medley of fiction and fact. Israelite history, it was argued, does not acquire a substantial basis of truth until the age of Saul and David, when the Biblical text begins to reflect the reality of court histories and records.

The work of W.F. Albright and Kathleen kenyon in particular has given us renewed confidence in the actual existence of places and events described in the early Old Testament books.

The Jews are thus the only people in the world today who possess a historical record, however obscure in places, which allows them to trace their origins back into very remote times.

The Jews simply assume the pre-existence of an omnipotent God, who acts but is never described or characterized, and so has the force and invisibility of nature itself: it is significant that the first chapter of Genesis, unlike any other cosmogony of antiquity, fits perfectly well, in essence, with modern scientific explanations of the origin of the universe, not least the ‘Big Bang’ theory.

The Jews are presented, even in their most primitive antecedents, as creatures capable of perceiving absolute differences between right and wrong.

The importance of this last discovery was that it enables us to focus on the figure of Noah himself. For it relates how the god, having created mankind, regretted it and decided to drown it by flood; but Enki, the water-god, revealed the catastrophic plan to a certain priest-king called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived.14 Ziusudra was undoubtedly a real person, king of the south Babylonian city of Shuruppak about 2900 BC, in which capacity he figures in the earliest column of the Sumerian king-list. At the site of Shuruppak itself there is evidence of a phenomenal flood, though the dating does not correspond with Woolley’s flood at Ur.15 The saviour-figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, thus provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage.

‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.’ This might be termed the central tenet of Jewish belief, and it is significant that it occurs in conjunction

Old Akkadian period to 2360-2180 BC, the lawgiver Ur-Nammu and the Third Dynasty of Ur to the end of the second millennium or the beginning of the first, and Hammurabi, who is unquestionably an authentic statesman and law-codifier, to the precise regnal period of 1728-1686 BC.

Abraham’s dating for most of his professional life, pushing him backwards and forwards between the twentieth century BC and the seventeenth, finally concluding that he could not have lived before the twentieth or after the nineteenth. This dating seems reasonable.18 The

This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and is returnable to him. That is why Abraham called the place of his act of supreme obedience and abortive sacrifice, the Mount of the Lord, an adumbration of Sinai and a greater contract.42 It is significant of the importance of the event that, for the first time, the Bible narratives introduce the note of universalism into God’s promises. He not only undertakes to multiply Abraham’s offspring but now also adds: ‘And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.’43

‘To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’48 There is some confusion about the frontiers, since in a later passage God promises only a portion of the larger gift: ‘And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan.’49

Jacob-Israel was also the father of the twelve tribes which in theory composed it. These tribes, Reuben, Simeon (Levi), Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim and Manasseh, were all descended from Jacob and his sons, according to Biblical tradition.

Jacob’s adoption of the name Israel (or Isra-el) marks the point at which Abraham’s God becomes located in the soil of Canaan, is identified with Jacob’s progeny, the Israelites, and is soon to become the almighty Yahweh, the god of monotheism.

The Bible narrative, ending Genesis with the death of Joseph, then taking up the story again with its disastrous consequences at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, seems to suggest that the nation as a whole went down into Egypt. But this is misleading. It is quite clear that even in Jacob’s time many of the Habiru or Hebrews, whom we must now call Israelites, were beginning to settle permanently in Canaan, and even to acquire territory by force.

Shechem was thus, in a sense, the original central shrine and capital of Israelite Canaan. The point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible.62 The Israelites in Egypt always knew they had a homeland to return to, where part of the population was their natural ally; and this fifth column within the land, in turn, made the attempt to seize Canaan by a wandering band less of a forlorn venture.

Indeed there is pretty convincing evidence that the period of Egyptian oppression, which finally drove the Israelites to revolt and escape, occurred towards the last quarter of the second millennium BC, and almost certainly in the reign of the famous Rameses II (1304-1237 BC).

Taken in conjunction with other evidence, such as calculations based on I Kings 6:1 and Judges 11:26,69 we can be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century BC and had been completed by about 1225 BC.

we sometimes lose sight of the sheer physical fact of the successful revolt and escape of a slave-people, the only one recorded in antiquity. It became an overwhelming memory for the Israelites who participated in it. For those who heard, and later read, about it, the Exodus gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history. Something happened, at the frontiers of Egypt, that persuaded the eye-witnesses that God had intervened directly and decisively in their fate. The way it was related and set down convinced subsequent generations that this unique demonstration of God’s mightiness on their behalf was the most remarkable event in the whole history of nations.

He was a prophet and a leader; a man of decisive actions and electric presence, capable of huge wrath and ruthless resolve; but also a man of intense spirituality, loving solitary communion with himself and God in the remote countryside, seeing visions and epiphanies and apocalypses; and yet not a hermit or anchorite but an active spiritual force in the world, hating injustice, fervently seeking to create a Utopia, a man who not only acted as intermediary between God and man but sought to translate the most intense idealism into practical statesmanship, and noble concepts into details of everyday life. Above all, he was a lawmaker and judge, the engineer of a mighty framework to enclose in a structure of rectitude every aspect of public and private conduct–a totalitarian of the spirit.

The discovery of monotheism, and not just of monotheism but of a sole, omnipotent God actuated by ethical principles and seeking methodically to impose them on human beings, is one of the great turning-points in history, perhaps the greatest of all.

The fact is, the Mosaic code was far more humane than any other, because, being God-centred, it was automatically man-centred also.

Belief in magic was ubiquitous and institutionalized. Moses not only talked to God face to face and presided over stupendous miracles, he also performed magic tricks. Staffs and rods which turned into snakes, the vulgar commonplace of ancient Near Eastern magic, were part of Israelite religion too, and sanctified from the age of Moses and Aaron onward. The earlier prophets, at least, were expected to perform, and often wore the magician’s apparatus.

The present monastery of Sinai has always been a Christian site; it goes back certainly to the fourth century AD, and perhaps to about 200 years before. But even that was 1,450 years after Moses came down from the mountain. It is likely that, after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Mosaic Sinai remained a pilgrimage site for generations. But the tradition eventually lapsed and the site fell out of memory, and it is most improbable that the early Christians went to the right place.

The first place to fall, after the crossing of the Jordan, was Jericho, one of the most ancient cities in the world. The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon and carbon-dating show that it goes back to the seventh millennium BC. It had enormous walls in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, and the strength of its defences produced one of the most vivid passages in the Bible. Joshua the prophet-general ordered the priests to carry the Ark round the city, with their ram’s-horn

give us some fascinating details about Solomon’s officer Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, ‘who had done many acts. He slew two lion-like men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow. And he slew an Egyptian, a goodly man: and the Egyptian had a spear in his hand; but he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand, and slew him with his own spear.’145 This

‘Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.’ Gideon replied: ‘I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you.’ This good and humble man, in rejecting the crown, was stressing that Israel was still a theocracy.

those that survive, especially the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, are history on the grand scale, among the greatest works of all antiquity.

The Israelite prophets likewise acted as mediums. In a state of trance or frenzy they related their divine visions in a sing-song chant, at times a scream. These states could be induced by music. Samuel describes the process himself: ‘thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy’.

The Nazarites had much in common with the ultra-strict and ferocious Rechabites, who engaged in massacres of backsliders when opportunity offered. Such sects were the most extreme monotheists and iconoclasts. They tended to drift into semi-nomad life on the fringe of the desert, a featureless place conducive to strict monotheism. It was from such a background that the greatest of all Jewish sectarian heresies was to spring–Islam.156

Among the mercenaries Saul had recruited was David; it was his policy: ‘When Saul saw any strong man, or any valiant man, he took him unto him.’163 But the Bible text, as it stands, confuses two distinct layers of David’s military career. He was originally a shepherd, descended from the humble and enchanting Ruth the Moabitess. When first picked to serve, he knew nothing of arms. He girded on sword and armour ‘and tried in vain to go for he was not used to them’.164 He used a more primitive weapon, the sling, to achieve his first great exploit, the killing of the Philistine strongman, Goliath.

David became the most successful and popular king Israel ever had, the archetype king and ruler, so that for more than 2,000 years after his death Jews saw his reign as a golden age. At the time, however, his rule was always precarious. His most dependable forces were not Israelites at all but his personal guards of foreign mercenaries, the Cherethites and Pelethites.

The Old City of Jerusalem which we know today is built on three valleys, the Hinnom (west), Kedron (east) and Tyropoeon (central), which merge to the south into the Brook of Kedron.

‘And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain.’169 Joab and his men performed this exploit, climbing up the water tunnel and so getting inside the walls and taking the city by surprise.170

If the Israelites tried to survive simply as a religious community, without a state, they would sooner or later be attacked, scattered and absorbed into the local paganisms. Thus the worship of Yahweh would succumb to external assault. That, of course, was what nearly happened during the Philistine invasion, and would have happened had the Israelites not turned to the secular salvation of kingship and a united state. On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and the worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption. The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today. One

‘And this is the reason of the levy [forced labour] which King Solomon raised: for to build the house of the Lord, and his own house, and Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer.’

Solomon had about 1,500 chariots and 4,000 horses in his various stables.179 At Megiddo, strategically the most important of the lot, overlooking what was later to be known as the Plain of Armageddon, he built a high, defended royal quarter, with an immensely powerful gateway, and buildings which would house 150 chariots and 400 horses. Hazor, an abandoned city, was likewise given a royal quarter, gatehouse, walls and huge stables. Gezer, a city he acquired by dowry, and which controlled the route to Egypt, he transformed into another royal chariot-city.

Solomon ensured by his activities that his royal house received a princely share of this new prosperity. He expanded trade by marrying daughters of all the neighbouring princes, with the slogan ‘trade follows the bride’. He ‘made affinity with Pharaoh King of Egypt’ by marrying his daughter–that is how he obtained Gezer. The Bible tells us of other matrimonial alliances, saying he ‘loved many strange women together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites,

There is now nothing visible left of Solomon’s Jerusalem, since it was either submerged beneath the enormous Temple building which Herod the Great later erected, or quarried away by the Romans.

Under the House of Omri, the prophetic tradition was suddenly reinvigorated in the north by the astonishing figure of Elijah. He came from an unidentified place called Tishbe, in Gilead east of the Jordan, right on the fringes of the desert. He was a Rechabite, a member of that ultra-austere, wild and fundamentalist sect, ‘an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins’. Like nearly all Jewish heroes, he came from the poor and spoke for them. The tradition said he lived near the Jordan and was fed by the ravens.194

challenged the priests of Baal and ‘the prophets of the grove’–‘which eat at Jezebel’s table’–to a rain-making contest. His aim was to settle the religion of the people once and for all, saying to the assembly: ‘How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ The priests of Baal went through all their rituals, cutting themselves with ‘knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them’; but nothing happened. Then Elijah built his altar and offered sacrifice to Yahweh, and immediately ‘the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice’. Then all the people ‘fell flat on their faces and said: The Lord he is the God, the Lord he is the God.’ Elijah and his mob took the pagan priests to the Kishon Brook ‘and slew them there’, and, after further prayer on the summit of Carmel, Elijah summoned up ‘a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand’; soon, ‘the heaven was black with clouds and winds, and there was a great rain’.

Elisha was of a different cast, however. The Bible narrative shows him performing remarkable acts: when mocked by ‘little children’ (or possibly teenage roughs) near Bethel, he summoned two she-bears from the wood, which tore to pieces no less than forty-two of the delinquents.

Jehu, as was foreseeable, was soon behaving in as arbitrary a manner as the House of Omri; indeed, virtually all the kings of Israel broke with the religious purists sooner or later. To preserve his power, a king, or so it seemed, had to do things that a true follower of Yahweh could not countenance.

The Talmud laid down: ‘The commandment of righteousness outweighs all the commandments put together.’