Introduction to the old testament part 1

You don't need me to tell you that human civilization is very, very old.

Nevertheless, our knowledge of the earliest stages of human civilization was quite limited for many centuries. That is, until the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which unearthed for us the great civilizations of the Ancient Near East, of which I have drawn a remarkably life-like map here on the board: Mediterranean, I always start with the Mediterranean Ocean, the Nile River, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

So: the great civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the area we refer to as the Fertile Crescent, of which a little part here about the size of Rhode Island is Canaan.

And archaeologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were stunned to find the ruins and the records of remarkable peoples and cultures--massive, complex empires in some cases but some of which had completely disappeared from human memory. Their newly uncovered languages had been long forgotten; their rich literary and legal texts were now indecipherable. That soon changed. But because of those discoveries, we are now in a position to appreciate the monumental achievements of these early civilizations, these earliest civilizations. And so many scholars, and many people, have remarked that it's not a small irony that the Ancient Near Eastern people with one of the, or perhaps the most lasting legacy, was not a people that built and inhabited one of the great centers of Ancient Near Eastern civilization. It can be argued that the Ancient Near Eastern people with the most lasting legacy is a people that had an idea. It was a new idea that broke with the ideas of its neighbors, and those people were the Israelites. And scholars have come to the realization that despite the Bible's pretensions to the contrary, the Israelites were a small, and I've actually overrepresented it here, I'm sure it should be much smaller, a small and relatively insignificant group for much of their history.

They did manage to establish a kingdom in the land that was known in antiquity as Canaan around the year 1000.

They probably succeeded in subduing some of their neighbors, collecting tribute--there's some controversy about that--but in about 922 this kingdom divided into two smaller and lesser kingdoms that fell in importance. The northern kingdom, which consisted of ten of the twelve Israelite tribes, and known confusingly as Israel, was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians. The southern kingdom, which consisted of two of the twelve tribes and known as Judah, managed to survive until the year 586 when the Babylonians came in and conquered and sent the people into exile.

The capital, Jerusalem, fell. Conquest and exile were events that normally would spell the end of a particular ethnic national group, particularly in antiquity. Conquered peoples would trade their defeated god for the victorious god of their conquerors and eventually there would be a cultural and religious assimilation, intermarriage. That people would disappear as a distinctive entity, and in effect, that is what happened to the ten tribes of the northern kingdom to a large degree. They were lost to history.

This did not happen to those members of the nation of Israel who lived in the southern kingdom, Judah.