A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age through the Jewish Wars by Walter Kaiser 1998

At 728 pages with more than 600 photographs, this was a heavy lift, and I must confess to skimming over sections of the book.  I don’t believe that skipping the recondite details of controversies between German and British archeologists during the 19th C seriously undermined my grasp of the material, but be fair warned.

I also read this book on my Kindle which I tend to use only while traveling, but this book was shockingly not available anywhere in the Minuteman System or even in my ‘never fails to have it’ backstop, the Harvard University library system.  Good old Amazon, however, was able to load it to my Kindle for a modest fee.  That modality did, however, suffer by providing microscopic maps and interrupted tables which made the reading much more difficult than a standard codex would have provided.

That said, this was a very interesting and valuable orientation manual for our trip to Israel and shed light on questions about the origin of the Jewish people in their historic homeland and how they interacted with the surrounding world.  The book is set up as a dialogue between the Biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Joshua, and Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and the archeological record and seeks to determine whether the Bible is a historical record or a founding myth. It turns out that there is precious little hard evidence for the stories of the Bible and the first real evidence for the Jewish story is the Babylonian diaspora and destruction of King Solomon’s First Temple that is well documented in 563 BCE. This scattering of the Jews is followed by their return to Canaan and uprising against the Greeks (Macabeean war in 161BCE), the Romans (destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the defeat of the Jewish Revolt (Akiva and Bar Kokbah, Massada), and the diaspora that resulted in Jews settling in England (thrown out in 1492), Spain (thrown out in 1492), Poland (where 3.3 million lived before WWII), etc.

The book provides important details on the earliest history of the Middle East beginning with the onset of the Bronze Age in 3000 BCE. Even at that time, the narrow land bridge between the two centers of civilization in Egypt and Mesopatamia (modern day Iraq) resulted in endless wars to control the movement of goods, people, and wealth.  After successive conflicts with Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians,  Hittites, Edamites, Philistines, and others, the Israelite people appear to have overcome the locals and established a kingdom in Canaan around the year 1400 BCE following their exodus from Egypt and their 40 years in the desert.  The building of the first Temple by Solomon in the mid-10th C BCE preceded the breaking up of the kingdom into two parts—Judea and the Northern Kingdom followed by the Babylonian exile.

The bottom line, as best I could tell, was that there is little or no evidence to support the Biblical narrative which likely began around 2100 BCE with Abraham’s departure from Ur in Mesopatamia and his travel to Canaan where Jacob’s 12 sons lived until famine drove them to Egypt where they multiplied until Pharaoh decided they were a threat and enslaved them for 400 years.  Around 1445 BCE, Moses led them to Canaan where Joshua overcame Jericho around 1400 BCE and Saul, David, and Solomon reigned until around 900 BCE followed by the two kingdoms and then the Babylonian exile in 586BCE.  Was this history or myth???  The story of the exodus,  that 600,000 Jewish men left Egypt and moved to Canaan with a group that probably numbered nearly 2 million,  is cast in doubt by the absence of any evidence of encampments in the Sinai or the destruction of Jericho or any other Canaanite city.  Could it be that the Passover story is but a metaphor and that the Jews, the only monotheistic religion in the world, managed to conquer Canaan without a battle by simply moving in slowly over decades and centuries?  Could Abraham and all his ancestors simply be creation myths?

Whatever the truth (whatever that is), the book provides a fascinating framework for understanding the time line of events in the Middle East and for that alone, it was an important read.