“And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” Genesis 45:7

I’ve never been a shepherd, but I doubt it’s a life of wall-to-wall action. That at least is the impression I get from all the shepherd-related imagery I’ve taken in during my lifetime: countless images of boys (or girls) dozing under trees or staring glassily into the distance while the sheep dot the landscape like greasy little clouds. Other than fending off the occasional attack by a predator or assisting during a tricky birth, it’s got to be mostly about moving the team from field to field, making sure they’ve got enough to eat. True, you have the shepherds in the story of the Nativity of Christ, who are watching their flocks by night when they’re surprised by angels, but I expect they would have been surprised by anything.

Perhaps the last shepherds we know of to have been genuinely surprised were three Bedouin teenagers along the shore of the Dead Sea. This was in 1946, at a place called Qumran, where there are immense hills of golden-brown stone, worn into soft-looking, bulging shapes by time and weather, and pockmarked with many small caves. The boys – Muhammad, Khalil, and Jum’a – were passing time as boys often do: by throwing rocks at things.

In this instance, they were throwing rocks into the caves. One of the rocks Muhammad threw disappeared into a cave, and the boys were surprised to hear it land not with a clack of stone-on-stone, or the smack of a breaking rock, or even the plop of a rock falling into water. Instead, what they heard was the unmistakable sound of shattering pottery. When they went into the cave to investigate, they found several old, crumbling jars that contained old, crumbling parchment scrolls. These scrolls had writing on them that the boys could not read.

The boys took the scrolls back to their families. The Bedouin people pondered what to do with them for a while – clearly the scrolls were old, and someone would likely be interested in what was written on them. Eventually a visitor suggested an antiquities dealer, and, after initial skepticism from antiquarians and archaeologists, that was how the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light. In the nearly 80 years since, a total of 981 manuscripts or parts of manuscripts have been found in caves around the one Muhammad tossed his rock into.

Most of them are in Hebrew. Most of them are copies (or fragments of copies) of the Hebrew Bible. They shed light on the lives and beliefs of Jews who lived nearly two millennia ago – and on the holy scriptures today’s Jews, and billions of other believers, hold in such reverence.

I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.

Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 14: Genesis and Exodus, Part 2: A Posterity in the Earth. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.

This is our second episode on the first two books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis and Exodus. In the last episode, we talked about the story told in those two books: how the world was created, how the people known as the Israelites came to be God’s chosen people, how God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and how their prophet Moses communicated the laws of God to them while preparing them to settle in the Promised Land – the land of Canaan. We also talked a little bit about the historical context in which Genesis, Exodus, and the rest of the five books of Moses, known today as the Torah, were written and/or compiled: during a turbulent period of exile during the sixth century BCE, which had seen the city of Jerusalem and its temple destroyed by Babylonian invaders, and its elites forced into exile.

In this episode, we’re going to dive a bit further into the history of the society – well, societies – that created the Torah: the cultural and spiritual ancestors of today’s Jews. As hinted at in our opening anecdote about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that history is far from settled, and continues to be added to all the time. The questions we’ll take a look at include: Who were the ancient Israelites, and where did they come from? Is there any historical evidence outside the Bible for the events described in Genesis and Exodus? How did these monotheists emerge with all the polytheistic societies around them?

If you, like me, were subject to Christian religious instruction during your upbringing, these are questions you may never have considered – or, they’re questions you’ll have considered from a perspective that centers Christian concerns. That is, not taking this history for itself, but trying to force the history into a narrative that leads to Jesus Christ. (That narrative tends to also come with an attitude which, in my memory, indulges in a kind of soft antisemitism by treating the Jewish people as sadly misguided, spiritually childish people who couldn’t recognize the Messiah when he walked among them.) The actual history is really fascinating. We’re only going to scratch the surface today – maybe even just lightly brush it – but it’s worth doing.

First, I want to settle some terminology that’s been bothering me since the last episode: what do we call the people in these first few books of the Bible? The terms Israelite, Hebrew, Judean, and Jews often get used interchangeably. When we’re talking about the people who wrote the Hebrew bible, several of these terms can apply, but possibly not Jewish, not quite yet. In Judaism: A Very Short Introduction, the scholar and rabbi Norman Solomon explains that “Jewish” is an anglicization of the Hebrew word Yehuda, which is the name of one of the 12 tribes of ancient Israel. (Solomon 8).

At the time that Genesis and Exodus were written, there were two Hebrew kingdoms: Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, and Israel, north of Judah, with its capital in Samaria. Both were conquered by the Babylonians in the 580s BCE, and both re-emerged a generation later, after the Persians conquered the Babylonians in turn. However, it was the Kingdom of Judah that came out the other side in the strongest political position – a position so strong that its name became “synonymous with Israel as a whole.” (Solomon 8) It was these Judahite priests – not Judean, mind you, that’s a province of Rome that comes later – who created the Torah, and they wove many Israelite ideas into their work.

Rabbi Solomon explains that the religion these priests describe in the Torah – the religion of Abraham and his descendants, including Moses, establishes a God, a moral code, and some cultural practices that carry through to today, such as circumcision and the observation of Passover. But he also explains that this religion isn’t Judaism as such – after all, you don’t see animal sacrifice or blood-sprinkling happening in present-day Jewish worship. According to Solomon (and most of the other sources I’ve looked at), Rabbinic Judaism, which is the basis of modern Judaism, emerged much later, around 200 CE. (Solomon 19-21)

As far as I can tell from my reading for this episode, the religion of the ancient Judahites relates to modern Judaism the way that the religious and cultural practices of the people of the Rig Veda relates to modern Hinduism. It’s a foundation or a root stock of ideas from which today’s faith grew and developed, influenced by later events and evolutions in theology and philosophy. As Rabbi Solomon says,

“No religion is an abstraction. Its adherents may claim that God inspired it, or even that He dictated its texts, and that it is eternally valid. But the texts have to be interpreted by people and implemented in the lives of people.” (Solomon 4)

The people who wrote and edited the Torah are probably best described as Judah-ites, as confusing as that could be, due to where they were from and due to their goals in compiling the Hebrew scriptures. For the people described in the stories covered in the Torah – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all their progeny – I think the best answer to the question about how to refer to them is probably “ancient Israelites.” That’s what I’ll go with during this show. You can let me know if you think I’ve got that wrong.

So who were these ancient Israelites the creators of the Torah were writing about, the ones depicted in the stories of Genesis and Exodus? Were they totally legendary, or does history have anything to say about them?

First, it’s worth recapping what the Bible says about them. The scholar Avraham Faust outlines this in “The Birth of Israel”, the book chapter he contributed to the 2023 edition of The Oxford History of the Holy Land, describing the overall theme of the narrative as “the story of a family, and how it became a people.” (Hoyland 5-6)  That’s certainly what we get in Genesis: Abraham, a herdsman who has emigrated from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, binds himself by a covenant to God, and is promised he will become the father of a great nation. His grandson Jacob/Israel and his 12 great-grandsons, fathers of the tribes of Israel, migrate to Goshen in Egypt during a period of famine.

In Exodus, we learn how the ancient Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians and then liberated, wandering the wilderness for 40 years until arriving in the land of Canaan. Later books of the Bible tell how the tribes of Israel conquered Canaan, were united under the kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and how they built the temple in Jerusalem.

For centuries, scholars have used that narrative as their starting point for trying to find material evidence about the ancient Israelites. After all, the narrative helpfully includes details that allow us to pinpoint modern locations, or to narrow the time period of an event to fairly specific windows. But proceeding from that starting point, as Faust notes, often leads to places that undermine the biblical narrative. This isn’t surprising; the first books of the Bible were an attempt to stitch together disparate pieces of stories that had long been told orally, and key details may have shifted over time. But it’s possible to find some places where scripture and other evidence align. (Hoyland 8-9)

The ancient Israelites, as far as can be determined, emerged out of Canaan sometime between 1300 – 1250 BCE, in the Late Bronze Age. Canaan was a region and civilization located along the Mediterranean Sea, covering most of what we know today as Israel and the Palestinian territories, plus parts of Syria. Canaan was a culturally diverse society without strict political or religious uniformity. At that time, cities were flourishing in the land of Canaan, and the rulers of those cities were in regular contact with their neighbors within and without Canaan.

If you imagine a very overcomplicated map with circles drawn on it, showing how big the spheres of influence of all the various empires and states in this region were, Canaan would be one of the smallest circles. However, it would also be the one where virtually all the other big circles overlap. Whatever they called themselves, the people of Canaan’s hill country would, for centuries, be caught between – and occasionally crushed by – Egypt and whomever was ruling the roost in Mesopotamia, whether it was the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or (latterly) the Persians. As the historian Simon Schama put it in his The Story of the Jews, Volume I: Finding the Words,

“Jewish identity would eventually be formed somewhere between the two cultural poles of the Nile and the Euphrates, but the magnetic needle of attraction and repulsion swung unevenly.” (Schama 9)

He also notes that, in general, the Israelites and the Jews felt that the Euphrates was the good neighbor (or at least tolerable), while the Nile – Egypt – was the bad one. (Schama 10) Nevertheless, do you remember our episodes on The Tale of Sinuhe, that story from ancient Egypt about the scribe who has a panic attack and runs off to a foreign country for a few decades? It’s Canaan Sinuhe runs away to – the Egyptians called the place Retjenu. And it’s from those dastardly Ancient Egyptians that we get our first glimpses, in writing, of what Canaanite culture was like, thanks to some diplomatic letters written during the 1300s BCE.

These letters, inscribed on clay tablets, were written on behalf of various pharaohs, including Tutankhamen – King Tut. They were found at a place called Armana, which has led to them being called the Armana Letters. These letters, according to the scholar Andre Lemaire, include missives sent to the ruler of the city of Jerusalem, naming various Canaanite gods like Baal in salutations and closings. But they don’t mention Israel or Israelites, though there are some references to people called the Habiru. Lamaire says that this “very possibly” refers to the Hebrews, but other sources say there’s nothing definite. (Lamaire 11)

There isn’t anything definite, really, until a century after the Armana Letters, and again, it’s the Egyptians who provide the evidence. In 1207 BCE, the pharaoh Merneptah set up a stele, a victory monument with a narrative inscription on it. This particular stele proudly details all the nations, cities and tribes Merneptah has crushed like bugs. Part of this inscription says:

“Israel is laid waste, his seed is not;

Hurrin is become a widow for Egypt!

All lands together, they are pacified,

Everyone who was restless, he has been bound.” (Cline 88)

That’s the oldest-known mention of Israel outside the Bible. While going on foreign evidence isn’t necessarily reliable, it’s the only extra-Biblical evidence we have which can give a rough window of time for when the Israelites likely first appeared in Canaan – sometime between 1350 BCE, when the earliest Armana Letters were written, and the carving of this stele in 1207 BCE.

Now, how did they get to Canaan? Is there any evidence to support to the story of Exodus, in which the Israelites come out of Egypt to wander in the desert for 40 years first? Again, it’s sketchy. In his excellent book, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, historian Eric Cline digs into the historicity of the Exodus narrative. He notes that clues in the text of the Bible give us a pointer as to when the Israelites were enslaved there:

“Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Rameses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.” (Gen. 1:11-12)

Cline explains that the modern sites of these two cities, Pithom and Rameses, have been found, and that excavations there indicate that those sites were likely constructed around 1290-1250 BCE. That means they started in the reign of the pharaoh Seti I and ended in the reign of Rameses II – the pharaoh whose statue inspired the poem “Ozymandias” by Shelley, as you may recall from episode 4 of our show.

Cline suggests that Seti might be the “pharaoh who knew not Joesph” while Rameses would be the actual pharaoh Moses and Aaron pestered with their snakes, frogs, and rivers of blood. (Cline 85) Certainly that’s the pharaoh Cecil B. DeMille thought it was, casting Yul Brynner (a stone-cold historical hottie if ever there was one) to play Rameses in his 1956 epic The Ten Commandments.Cline also spends some time detailing how there’s no evidence for any of the plagues Moses reportedly inflicted on Egypt, but that seems a bit unnecessary to me – the rapid mass migration of supposedly 600,000 Israelites, as described in Exodus chapter 12 verse 18, seems like it would be far more likely to have left a mark.

Cline does point out some conflicting Biblical evidence in the First Book of Kings, which muddies the timing of Exodus. That passage suggests an earlier date around 1450 BCE under Thutmose III. But that stele by Merneptah we mentioned earlier is another item in favor of an Israelite Exodus date around the 1250s BCE. From 1250 to 1207 is 43 years – enough time for the Israelites to wander the desert. (Cline 86-87) Finally, Cline mentions that there’s also some evidence for, quote “the destructions of a number of cities in Canaan by an unknown hand” around 1200 BCE. The people doing the destroying could have been the Israelites, working their way north as they conquered the Promised Land. (Cline 87)

However, this is all sketchy and speculative, and relies on lots of ifs and possiblys. Cline notes, in passing, that there are other theories about where the Israelites came from: they could have arrived in the chaos that followed the main event of his book, the Late Bronze Age collapse just after 1200 BCE, which was when civilizations all around the Mediterranean suddenly went into precipitous declines or were even wiped out.

Cline’s entire book ultimately concludes (spoilers) that the Late Bronze Age collapse followed a perfect storm of drought-related famine and plagues. These led to civil unrest in many cities, and gave rise to desperate or opportunistic migratory raiders like the mysterious Sea Peoples. With regard to the Israelites, Cline speculates (and acknowledges the speculation) that the Sea Peoples could have been the ones to attack those mysteriously destroyed cities in Canaan, which could then have given the Israelites the opportunity to re-settle the land once the pillaging had stopped.

Could, if, possibly. There’s just not a lot we know about the Israelites in this time period outside of what’s in the Bible. But they arrived – or else they bubbled up from within Canaan itself and separated from the mainstream of Canaanite society – and they gradually established their own cities and unique cultural practices. There’s still active debate about whether they did this mainly via slow, peaceful migration or via force, as described in the Book of Joshua, among other parts of the Old Testament.

Right now, according to Avraham Faust, (Hoyland 25-28) the weight of the evidence suggests that the emergence of Israel, as you’d expect, involved many complex moving parts: some peaceful settlement and some force; some people coming out of Egypt, bringing their Exodus story with them, and some emerging from the local population within Canaan. (Hoyland 31)

So far, so reasonable: in the wake of massive societal upheaval, people move around and reconfigure their ways of life. But there was something different about the Israelites that set them apart from their neighbors. The various cultures around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia had, in very broad strokes, quite similar religions: pantheons of Gods and Goddesses, usually with ranks of minor deities below them, who would be worshipped via ritual sacrifices on altars situated in large, decorated temples with idol statues of those gods. The Israelites were an outlier in their time and region – they had the altars and the sacrifices, but they worshipped only one God, and they never made images of him. However, it wasn’t always that way. One clue in the Bible which tells us this? The names they give to God.

There are two names for God used in Genesis: there’s Yahweh, often written with just four letters as YHWH, and there is Elohim or El. In The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction (the VSI is a great book series, by the way, super inexpensive and helpful), the scholar Charles L. Cohen says that

“The lord to whom [the ancient Israelites] devoted themselves fused at least two figures: El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, and YHWH, a warrior god originally associated with people who had entered Canaan from the south.” (Cohen 8-9)

The existence of El is pretty well-attested throughout Canaan thanks to the ritual and devotional artefacts his worshippers left behind – evidence that includes bronze or golden figurines of bulls or cows, which were El’s symbol. (This fact, for me, sheds some light on the incident with the Golden Calf in Exodus – maybe there were some unreformed Canaanites among the Israelites who needed punishing?) The group of southerners – the Yahwists – can be traced from textual evidence.

In his book The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism, Andre Lemaire explains that the first mention of Yahweh in writing is from 880 BCE. Again, it’s in the context of a victory inscription written by a foreign king, in this case a king of the Moabites (you may remember that, according to Genesis, the Moabites descend from the incestuous child of Lot and one of his own daughters – I’m sure that was meant to be read as an insult to them). (Lemaire 14)

This inscription mentions, among other things, that the Moabite army recovered cultic objects associated with Yahweh from the captured and retreating Israelites in the land of Judah – the southern territory of the Israelites. Further evidence that Yahweh came up from the south is in the Bible itself: Yahweh’s name is often invoked in conjunction with geographic features in the desert regions south of Jerusalem, such as Mount Sinai and Mount Param. (Lemaire 20-21)

Lemaire takes this even further by suggesting that Yahweh originated in the land of Midian, which is where Moses settled after fleeing Egypt following his murder of an official. Moses marries the daughter of a Midianite priest, and it’s in Midian that God speaks to him from a burning bush on a mountaintop, revealing that his name is Yahweh. Finally, it’s Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, who first shows Moses and Aaron how to sacrifice to Yahweh – he officiates during the worship in Exodus chapter 18, after the Israelites have come out of Egypt. (Lemaire 24-28)

For a long while, it seems like Yahweh and El more or less co-existed in Canaan. Lemaire shows that archaeological excavations within southern Israel have shown that there were plenty of potentially Yahweh-related open-air sanctuaries there by 1000 BCE along with Canaanite temples. These are  particularly in evidence at the site of Shiloh, a city named in the Books of Samuel and Joshua as one of the places where the Ark of the Covenant rested. (Lemaire 32-34)

By 885 BCE, when the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were going to war with the Philistine city-states (centered around modern-day Gaza), Yahweh had gained the upper hand over El. This was because of King David – “a passionate supporter of Yahweh”, in Lemaire’s words. (Lemaire 36) Now, King David’s actual existence is up for debate – there is next to no actual material evidence for his reign – but what is certain is that the first temple of Jerusalem, the temple of Yahweh, was built during this period, too. It was designed as a kind of permanent version of the sacred tabernacle tent described in such detail in the back half of Exodus.

In Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Donald Harmen Akenson explains that Solomon, the king who built the first temple, also erected places where people could worship other gods. This is because, at first, the ancient Israelite religion was monolatrous, not monotheistic. That is, they acknowledged the existence of other gods while preferring theirs. Or, as Akenson says, “The point is that [Yahweh] is not a monotheistic god. He is simply the toughest god on the block.” (Akenson 48)

There’s also a clue to this in the language of the ten commandments in Exodus chapter 20:

“I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” (Ex. 20:2-6)

No other gods before me. A jealous god. Lemaire notes that other cultures surrounding Israel and Judah were also monolatrous, but they made statues and images of their gods, while the Yahwists didn’t. Instead, they had the Temple. Akenson posits that the temple itself became the Yahwist idol – the place where God lived among them, and the place that, when it was destroyed, seemed to take the heart right out of them, the way that the destruction of a cultic statue would devastate other societies. (Akenson 48-49) And it was after that destruction that Yahweh finally became the one true god, thanks to the compilation and composition of the Torah.

It’s worth reiterating that we don’t know who put the Torah together. According to Norman Solomon, the scholars who edited and refined the first five books of the Bible during the decades of the Babylonian Exile are referred to as stamaim, or “the nameless ones.” (Solomon 36) The stamaim are held in reverence because

“They collected tales and observations that would capture the imagination, often scaling the heights of moral and spiritual discernment, though occasionally betraying the prejudices of their age.” (Solomon 36)

And, you know, as an aside, we should all be so lucky. All any of us can hope to achieve as thinkers or writers (or parents or neighbors) is to transcend, now and then, the biases and the blinkered perspectives we were raised with. It’s the work of a lifetime to recognize other people as people, and I do wonder what beliefs I, a reasonably tolerant person, now hold that will seem like clanging bigotries to those who come after me.

Anyway. The stamaim. Among the prejudices of their age which they betrayed in the Torah were biases in favor of the superiority of Yahweh and the tribe of Judah as compared to the kingdom of Israel and its more Canaanite beliefs. Akenson points out several places in the Torah where this Judahist perspective becomes very obvious, particularly in Genesis, where Jacob/Isaac is giving his dying blessing to his 12 sons – the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel.

You’d think that Joseph, the son who miraculously survived slavery and then rescued his estranged family from a terrible, years-long famine, would get the most fulsome blessing from his father. Instead, it’s Judah:

“Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” (Gen. 49:8-10)

When you compare that with, say, Isaachar, who is described as “a strong ass couching down between two burdens” (Gen. 49:14), you see how strong the favoritism runs. The Books of Genesis, Exodus, and the rest of the Torah, says Akenson, “subsume into the history of Judah all the desirable aspects of the history of its ancient rival Israel, and simultaneously wiped the political entity [of] Israel from history’s slate.” (Akenson 40)

Another thing we don’t know is exactly when the writing began – how much of it was written before or after the deportation to Babylon, and we likely never will. (Schama 45) We can see some influence of Babylon in some places – the flood narrative which parallels Gilgamesh’s, for example, though Judahist or Israelite writers could have encountered the story pre-exile. But there are also very unique aspects to the idea of God presented by the Torah: aside from His singularity, God also enters into a covenant with the ancient Israelites.

Charles L. Cohen explains that, while the idea of a covenant was “a political commonplace” among the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age societies of that region, it’s only the Israelites who seem to have applied it in the spiritual and supernatural realms. (Cohen 9) The covenant between God and his Chosen People is the true through-line of Genesis, Exodus and the remainder of the Torah. Again and again, God makes and renews His covenants with Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Moses. From generation to generation, He reminds His people that if they will only obey him, they will flourish.

The covenant allows God to, as Cohen says “insist that the Lord cares deeply about human beings and watches over them ceaselessly.” (Cohen 18) Compare this to what we’ve seen of the gods in Gilgamesh or in Homer (to say nothing of the Ancient Egyptian gods): those gods are concerned by (and meddle with) the affairs of humans, but they have other interests, too. They have their own inter-divinity squabbles to manage. And, as you may remember from The Iliad, they’re not always watching, either – sometimes they’re too busy schtupping their sister-wife to notice that their favored side is suddenly losing a battle.

But they do always expect you to revere them, or at least to observe the formalities – Odysseus is punished for not making the proper sacrifices to Poseidon. Moses and the Israelites, on the other hand, are punished for failures of spiritual loyalty – for failures of the heart, for sin.

What we do know about the stamaim – those nameless geniuses of the Babylonian Exile – is why they created the Torah. They did it to preserve their memories. “Babylon might destroy Jerusalem and the Temple,” writes Simon Schama, “but it would not wipe out the faith.” (Schama 11) He goes on to say that:

“The Torah . . . was transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. With writing and human memory in sync, the people of YHWH could be broken and slaughtered, but their book would be indefatigable.” (Schama 37)

And the book has proved indefatigable. The Babylonian empire was smashed by Cyrus in 538 BCE, and the Israelite exiles, after nearly 50 years as strangers in a strange land, were allowed to return to Jerusalem – this time as vassals of the Persian Empire, but at least they were able to rebuild the temple and be more or less left to practice their singular faith as they liked. That would endure until Alexander the Great turned up (presumably with his copy of The Iliad tucked in a pocket) and took Jerusalem under Greek control.

What happened after that will likely be covered in later episodes, when we talk about the Book of Job and the Book of Isaiah early next year. Meanwhile, that is that for the first two books of the Bible. Thanks to my upbringing and to the general Christianist slant of the countries where I live, I really knew next to nothing about the historical origins of the Jewish faith and its people (I know a lot about medieval Jews in Europe, for odd reasons I’ll explain one of these days).

I feel like I have a much deeper appreciation for the Bible when I’m reading it for what it is rather than trying to tease out hints about how it foreshadows the coming of Christ, but I realize literally billions of people will disagree with me on that. I hope you’ve learned a few things, too, but if you have comments or corrections, please visit the website and drop a comment below the transcript for this episode. There’s a link in the show notes.

Next up, we are headed back to Greece to hear from history’s first advice columnist, Hesiod, who can explain where Zeus came from and tell you the best time to harvest your crops all in the same poem. Join me for episode 15, “Theogony and Works and Days, Part 1: Ask an Ancient Greek Farmer”, coming on Thursday, September 12^th.

Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Spaceman Lonnie’s Electric Hate Machine, formerly known as Twitter. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.

References and Works Cited:

Akenson, Donald Harman. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 

Cline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton University Press, 2021. 

Cohen, Charles L. The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Hoyland, Robert G., and H. G. M. Williamson. The Oxford History of the Holy Land. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Lemaire, André. The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism. Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007. 

Schama, Simon. The Story of the Jews. Volume One, Finding the Words: 1000 BC-1492 AD. Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017. 

Solomon, Norman. Judaism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014. 

The King James Bible. Project Gutenberg, 2004.