It does not take a Bible scholar to understand that one of the most significant people groups throughout history has been the Israelites. According to Biblical narrative, Israel is significant. An understanding of who the Israelites are and where they came from is necessary to understand the Bibles redemptive narrative. This paper will seek to provide insight as to how the Israelites came about and who they are.
Trying to answer the question of the Israelites origin is not without it’s difficulty. Niels Lemche notes, “it is important to note the simple fact that the ANE sources from the 3d and 2d millennia B.C. do not contain a single direct reference to any of the features mentioned in the OT narrative.” Therefore, scholars have used various
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The “conquest” model suggests that the Israelites infiltrated Canaan’s urban centers by military force. The “peaceful infiltration” model suggests that the Israelites gradually amalgamated with the Canaanites. Finally, the “peasant revolt” model, which holds to the idea that the early Israelites were peasant farmers. These farmers banned together and left their Palestinian home, traveling to Canaan, “who colonized new areas in the hinterland and thereby adopted a less stratified social order better suited to an agrarian society.” Dever notes, “some aspects of the “peasants’ revolt” formulation are now well attested archaeologically – a measure of support (if not confirmation) that no other model can boast.” Archaeological evidence best supports the idea that peasant farmers make up the nucleus of what came to be known as the Israelites. The other two models presented do not line up with current archaeological data. It should be emphasized again that all models are …show more content…
There are ancient historians who mention Israel. Flavius Josephus is one who retells the Israelite’s history in his writing, Antiquities of the Jews. He uses material and various sources from others: Menander of Ephesus, and Nicolas of Damascus. C. F. Pfeiffer notes, “These quotations, more than the work of Josephus himself, make his work a valuable source for the history of the Jews during the centuries immediately preceding the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70).” Though they are not as old as some ancient near eastern evidence, they serve to show that the Israelites definitely had historical
Joseph M. Bolton RELS 103-02 Online Old Testament Studies Spring Semester 2011 Session E May 8, 2011 to July 2, 2011 The Old Testament TimeLine Creation & Primeval History The Creation: * God creates the Heavens and the Earth * God creates man in his image. *
15. What were the three major groups of Israelites that formed in the wake of the Babylonian destruction, and how were they related to each other?
2. Why did the Israelites begin their story with the Exodus? Throughout the Old Testament, the one theme that continually appears is the Exodus (Tullock & McEntire, 2012, pg. 4). However, this was the supreme event in Israelite history. Israel becomes a people of God through
The Israelites possessed little worldly power or wealth, but they created a powerful religion, known as Judaism which is a form of
John H. Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible is broken up into fourteen chapters. Those fourteen chapters are each part of one of five sections. This book also contains over twenty historical images. Before the introduction, the author gives readers a full appendix of all images used in this published work. The author then gives his acknowledgements followed by a list of abbreviations.
According to the textbook, Premodern Judaism started with the help of the “myth of history” because history has to begin somewhere. Judiasm started when God made promises to Abraham. Moses helped people escape from slavery and took them to the “land of promise”. This is where Judiasm really starts and the “myths of history” flourished. The “myths of history” tells how God acts in time. Judaism developed through the experiences of Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. These stories are told throughout time and are the center of Judaism. This is why Judaism is considered to be unique. The stories of Moses
“The Pentateuch developed against the background of the Ancient Near Eastern culture first cultivated in and spread by Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires”. From this, we can see how Israelite religion was “shaped by responses to and reactions against this culture due both to contacts with neighboring Canaanites and to conflicts with Assyrian and Babylonian
• Wrote about Jewish wars that have corroborated by other historians and archaeological excavations. Pg. 81
The IDB provides a brief overview of Israel’s political setting after the invasions of Assyria in the first century.
The Israelite civilization dates back to between 1300 and 1200 BCE when they settled in Canaan from Mesopotamia. This was considered their homeland. The Israelites developed from the Cannanites, since their civilizations began together along with the Jebusites. They faced a lot of struggles, but after migrating to Egypt, and being separated into two kingdoms, they kept the faith that they would someday return to their homeland. The greatest achievements of the Israelites was their architecture, monotheistic religion, Ten Commandments, and their military. However, they were not enough to save the civilization. They fell due to the decline in leadership within the civilization, and attacks and conquest from the Assyrians and Babylonians.
Studying the religion of the Ancient Israelite People must be done in a careful manner. The ways in which biblical scholars frame significant ideas can have a major effect on how their point is received. Today’s ideas about the religious lives of Canaanites have been drawn on primarily from The Hebrew Bible and archaeological evidence. In their respective works, biblical scholars Benjamin Sommer and Carol Meyers choose to interpret these pieces of religious evidence is varying ways; Meyers takes a more cultural approach while Sommer’s has a theological leaning. Recognizing these different perspectives, I prefer the approach that Meyers takes because of its focus in anthropology.
Judaism being the oldest out of these three dominant religions was developed in the “third millennium BCE” (130). Canaan is where the Hebrews first prospered, until around 1500 BCE. At this time a famine struck, and influenced the Jewish people to move to Egypt. Egypt was lead by the Hyksos, which shared languages and cultural beliefs with the Hebrews. In Egypt “the Hebrews thrived over the next few centuries, until the Egyptian overthrew the Hyksos and enslaved the Hebrews” (130). At that time Moses (a man lead by God), rallied the Hebrews and helped them escape the slavery they endured in Egypt.
To study Genesis in terms of its literary and historical content is not to say that we are in any way being irreverent in our reading of this part of the Old Testament. In other words, it is possible to read Genesis in both a spirit of appreciation for its position as the opening exegetical narrative of the Bible and as a document that reflects literary and historical realities and influences during the time when it was being written down. This paper examines some of the contemporary sources that influenced the two sets of writers who recorded the events of Genesis.
Looking back, we can see glimpses of the lives of those who lived in the Ancient Near East, known as the ANE, through their stories and myths that have survived over centuries of time. Many of these stories contain unique elements that make each one personal to the civilization that they belong to, but there are common themes and ideas that are virtually shared between the traditional stories stemming from this region of the world. In fact, these parallels even extend into Old Testament literature; laced within the stories that we’ve come to know and love. It is not surprising that the Old Testament contains similarities found within ANE tradition, seeing that
To speak of the Hebrew Scripture is to speak of story, a story stretching from the very beginning of time to only a few centuries before the beginning of the Common Era. It is to speak of richness of content, of purpose and of reality and to engross oneself in an overarching narrative that, depending on your personal convictions, continues to the present day. Within this richness is found a wide variety of different events and experience, told through a series of genre ranging from foundational myth to apocalypse, law giving to poetry, genealogy to wisdom and many more. Within this diversity however, three broad sections can be discerned that speak to a shared purpose and content, these are the sections of Law, Prophecy and Writings. It