Just Who Were the Jews?? First invent your Jew, then invent your Christ…
Sacred History
But we have a story, a tale of tribal fidelity ? with frequent, and instructive, lapses ? to a protector god Yahweh, who had chosen this ?people? as his very own. For them, he has a divine purpose. In particular, their migration into Canaan is given an heroic re-interpretation. No longer do we have piecemeal migration over centuries but a single glorious conquest by a cohesive people. The ?idolatrous? city dwellers (of ?Jericho?, etc.) get their comeuppance and the whole land is promised to the Jews in perpetuity. They have, it would seem, arrived as a single group from Egypt, released from slavery by divine intervention.
The extraordinary thing about this ?history? - complete with verbatim dialogue between man and god - is that it was not written until more than a thousand years after the supposed events.
Records one historian,
"The first millennium of Jewish history as presented in the Bible has no empirical foundation whatsoever." ? Cantor, The Sacred Chain, p 51.
The impressive race history, tracing the Jews (the people of Judah), back through Hebrews in Canaan and Israelites in Egypt, to a noble ancestor called Abraham (father, it seems, of all the races, including Greeks and Arabs!), and the whole melodramatic story of the Exodus, was concocted at a much later date, after the tribal leadership of these Judaean tribesmen had been taken into exile and had learned the rudiments of civilization from their Babylonian captors. This was not at the dawn of time but in the seventh century BC, when Greece was already a civilization and Carthage had a maritime empire.
Earliest Jewish writings:
9th century
There was no written Hebrew before the 9th century BC. At that time, the Hebrews adapted the Phoenician script.
Phoenician Alphabet (alternates)
The original Hebrew/Canaanite occupants of Palestine did pass into history. Many, including the so-called ?lost tribes? of Israel (those living in northern Palestine) were assimilated by Assyrian conquerors during the eighth century.
But the ?victors?, a Persian-sponsored priesthood who settled in Judaea in the 6th century BC, wrote a sacred history, known to the Jews as the Torah (or Pentateuch ) and to the Christians as the first 'five books' of the Old Testament. Together with the 'Prophets' and 'Wisdom' literature this voluminous text purports to be an account of the trials and tribulations of the Jews through the previous two millennia. Rather oddly, its detail and obvious accuracy peters out the closer it approaches the time when it was actually written. Joshua, supposedly on the rampage in the thirteenth century BC gets vast reportage, whereas several 7th century kings known to history are omitted.
Indeed, the four hundred years between the last book of the Old Testament (the 5th century Malachi) and the first book of the New Testament echo in a biblical silence.
No biblical text gives the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great (in 323 BC) a mention. Ptolemaic Egypt?s loss of her Palestinian provinces to Syria in 198 BC is unrecorded. 'Minor' personages like Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great are overlooked. And the books of Maccabees ? which should tell us the ?recent? story of the successful Jewish rebellion against Greek rule in the second century BC ? are so blatantly filled with error and incoherence that even biblical editors shunted them into the ?Apocrypha? or omitted them entirely.
But of course we are not speaking of history but rather, of sacred testimony, designed to control, justify and inspire.
Anyone can be factual. In the Bible we have a book with a purpose.
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