History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel

Based on Wikipedia: History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel

Here is a story that spans four thousand years. It begins not with a people arriving from somewhere else, but with a people emerging from somewhere right here—branching off from the Canaanites who had lived in the Levant for millennia, gradually developing a distinct identity around the worship of a single god named Yahweh.

That's perhaps the most surprising thing about Jewish origins, at least according to modern archaeology. The old story—of Abraham's family migrating from Mesopotamia, of Moses leading slaves out of Egypt, of Joshua's armies conquering Canaan—makes for powerful narrative. But the physical evidence tells a different tale. The Israelites didn't overtake the region by force. They grew out of it.

The Emergence of a People

Sometime around 1200 BCE, something interesting happened in the central highlands of Canaan. The area had been sparsely populated. Then, within just a few generations, a series of small villages sprang up on the hilltops.

These villagers were different from the Canaanites in the lowlands and the Philistines along the coast. Archaeologists can see it in what they left behind: their houses, their pottery, their dietary restrictions. They built three or four-room homes from mudbrick on stone foundations, clustered around common courtyards. They farmed terraced hillsides, tended orchards, and raised livestock. Each village was largely self-sufficient, with populations rarely exceeding a few hundred people.

What set them apart wasn't technology or wealth. It was belief.

While their neighbors worshipped the full Canaanite pantheon, these highland villagers focused their religious practice on Yahweh—originally just one deity among many in the Canaanite tradition. This practice, called monolatry (worshipping one god while acknowledging others exist), would eventually harden into true monotheism: the conviction that only one god exists at all.

The name "Israel" first appears in an inscription from around 1209 BCE, carved into a stone monument by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah. "Israel is laid waste," the pharaoh boasted, "and his seed is not." The pharaoh was wrong about that second part. But his boast tells us something important: even this early, the Egyptians perceived Israel as a distinct group—not yet an organized state, but significant enough to mention as a potential challenge to Egyptian power.

From Villages to Kingdoms

By the early Iron Age, roughly 1000 BCE, these scattered villages had coalesced into something more. The Bible describes a United Kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon. Modern historians debate how large and centralized this kingdom actually was—some argue it was a substantial state, others that it was more like a loose tribal confederation—but there's good evidence that David was a real historical figure. His name appears on two ancient inscriptions: the Tel Dan Stele and the Mesha Stele.

David's son Solomon, according to tradition, built the First Temple in Jerusalem. Whether or not you accept the biblical account of Solomon's wealth and wisdom, something happened in Jerusalem during this period. It became a religious center, a place where Israelites gathered to worship Yahweh collectively.

After Solomon's death, around 930 BCE, the kingdom split in two.

The northern kingdom kept the name Israel, with its capital eventually at Samaria. The southern kingdom took the name Judah, centered on Jerusalem. This is where the word "Jew" comes from—Yehudi in Hebrew, meaning a person from Judah. Originally, the term referred specifically to members of the tribe of Judah. Later, after the northern kingdom's destruction, it came to mean anyone from the Jewish religious community.

Two Kingdoms, Two Fates

The northern Kingdom of Israel flourished. Archaeological excavations reveal a prosperous society with growing cities, fortified walls, and sophisticated industries. The Israelites built the largest olive oil production facilities in the region, using multiple types of presses. They developed significant wine production. Cities like Dan, Megiddo, and Hazor had monumental walls and complex gate systems.

The southern Kingdom of Judah lagged far behind. In the tenth and early ninth centuries BCE, it appears to have been little more than a small tribal territory—perhaps just Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings. The countryside was sparsely populated, the settlements mostly unfortified. Whether Jerusalem itself was even significant during this period remains hotly debated among archaeologists.

But here's the thing about history: the more prosperous kingdom is not always the one that matters.

In 722 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered Israel. The Assyrians practiced a brutal but effective form of imperial control: mass deportation. They scattered the population of Israel across their empire and replaced them with settlers from other conquered territories. The people of the northern kingdom—the famous "Ten Lost Tribes"—dispersed into the broader population of the ancient Near East and largely disappeared from history. The Samaritan people, who still exist today, claim descent from those who remained.

Judah survived. Barely.

The Assyrian king Sennacherib tried to conquer Judah too. He boasted of destroying forty-six walled cities and laying siege to Jerusalem. But Jerusalem held. According to both Assyrian and biblical sources, King Hezekiah paid tribute and the Assyrians withdrew. During Hezekiah's reign, archaeologists find evidence of significant building projects: the Broad Wall, the famous Siloam Tunnel that brought water into the besieged city.

For the next century, Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal. Not independent, but intact. Then, in the late seventh century BCE, the Assyrian Empire suddenly collapsed—one of history's most dramatic reversals of fortune. An empire that had dominated the ancient Near East for centuries fell to an alliance of Medes and Babylonians in just a few years.

Judah found itself caught between the new powers competing to fill the vacuum: Egypt to the south, Babylon to the east. In a series of campaigns between 597 and 582 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Judah, destroyed Solomon's Temple, and exiled the Judean elites to Babylon.

Exile and Return

The Babylonian exile lasted about fifty years. It could have been the end. Other peoples conquered and deported by ancient empires simply melted into the population. The northern Israelite tribes had disappeared this way just two centuries earlier.

The Judeans didn't disappear. They developed something unprecedented: a religious identity that could survive without a temple, without a kingdom, without a homeland. In Babylon, they refined their scriptures, developed new forms of communal worship, and hardened their monotheism into absolute conviction. They emerged from exile not weaker but transformed.

In 538 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon. Unlike the Assyrians and Babylonians, Cyrus practiced a policy of relative tolerance toward subject peoples. He permitted the Judean exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple.

Many did return. They built the Second Temple, smaller and less grand than Solomon's original, but sacred nonetheless. This temple would stand for nearly six hundred years—longer than the first—and become the center of Jewish religious life. The period from the return to the temple's destruction is called the Second Temple period, and it's when Judaism as we recognize it today took shape.

The Greek Interlude

In 332 BCE, a young Macedonian king named Alexander the Great swept through the ancient Near East, conquering the Persian Empire in a campaign of breathtaking speed. The Judeans, like everyone else in the region, came under Macedonian rule.

Alexander died young, and his empire fragmented among his generals. Judea eventually came under the control of the Seleucid dynasty, based in Syria. And here a new kind of conflict emerged—not between kingdoms, but between cultures.

Greek culture, called Hellenism, was seductive. It offered philosophy, athletics, art, a cosmopolitan worldview. Some Jews embraced it enthusiastically. Others saw it as a mortal threat to their distinctive way of life. This split—between traditionalists and assimilationists—would echo through Jewish history for millennia.

The crisis came to a head in 167 BCE, when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes banned Jewish religious practices and desecrated the Temple by installing a statue of Zeus. A priest named Mattathias and his sons launched a revolt. The most famous of these sons was Judah, nicknamed Maccabeus—"the Hammer."

Against all odds, the Maccabees won. In 165 BCE, they rededicated the Temple—an event commemorated to this day in the festival of Hanukkah. The Hasmonean dynasty they founded ruled an independent Jewish state for about a century, the last time Jews would govern their own homeland until 1948.

Rome

In 64 BCE, the Roman general Pompey arrived in the Levant. The Hasmonean kingdom, weakened by civil war, became a Roman client state. By 6 CE, Rome had converted it into a full province.

Roman rule was efficient and brutal. The Romans built roads, imposed order, collected taxes. They generally tolerated local religions, including Judaism. But they demanded submission, and they didn't tolerate rebellion.

In 66 CE, the Jews revolted. The Great Revolt, as it's called, lasted four years. In 70 CE, Roman legions breached Jerusalem's walls and destroyed the Second Temple. The slaughter was immense. Survivors were sold into slavery throughout the empire.

But even this wasn't the end. Jewish communities remained in Palestine, especially in Galilee. In 132 CE, another revolt erupted under a leader named Simon bar Kokhba. Some Jews hailed him as the Messiah. For three years, the rebels controlled significant territory. Then Rome crushed them utterly.

The Emperor Hadrian, determined to end Jewish resistance once and for all, renamed the province Syria Palaestina—the origin of the name Palestine. He banned Jews from Jerusalem. He attempted to erase Jewish identity from the land entirely.

He failed, but he came close. The Jewish population, which had been the majority in the region since ancient times, collapsed. Jews became a minority almost everywhere except Galilee. The great diaspora—the scattering of Jews across the world—had truly begun.

The Long Shadow

What followed was nearly two thousand years of foreign rule. The Romans gave way to the Byzantines, who increasingly favored Christianity. By the time Muslim armies conquered the Levant in 638 CE, the number of Jewish settlements had declined from over 160 to around 50. Scholars debate what percentage of the population remained Jewish—estimates range from 10 percent to a still-majority share—but the trend was clear.

The Crusaders, who briefly established a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem, persecuted the remaining Jews. The Ottoman Turks, who conquered the region in 1517, were generally more tolerant. Small Jewish communities persisted in cities like Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias—never entirely gone, but always a small minority.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, something new emerged: Zionism, the movement to reestablish a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. Waves of Jewish immigrants arrived, first in trickles, then in floods as persecution intensified in Europe. The British took control of the region after World War I. In 1948, following the horrors of the Holocaust and decades of conflict, the State of Israel declared independence.

It had been 1,813 years since the Bar Kokhba revolt. But the Passover prayer—"Next year in Jerusalem"—had never been forgotten.

What It Means

This history matters beyond its particulars. It's a case study in the persistence of identity. How does a people survive the destruction of their temple, the loss of their homeland, dispersion across three continents, and two millennia of persecution? The Jewish experience suggests some answers: sacred texts that can travel anywhere, communal practices that create belonging, a narrative of exile and return that gives meaning to suffering.

But the history also complicates simple narratives. The Israelites emerged from the Canaanites—they weren't outsiders who conquered the land. The biblical stories of conquest appear to be national mythology rather than historical memory. Modern Israelis and Palestinians both have deep roots in this contested landscape, though the forms those roots take are very different.

The word Yehudi, Jew, comes from the Kingdom of Judah—the smaller, poorer, less sophisticated of the two Israelite kingdoms. The northern kingdom was wealthier and more powerful. It was also destroyed so thoroughly that its people vanished from history. Judah's poverty may have been its salvation; the Assyrians didn't consider it worth the effort of complete deportation.

Sometimes what looks like weakness becomes the condition for survival. The Jews who went into Babylonian exile couldn't have known they were developing the spiritual and communal resources to outlast every empire that conquered them. The choice to maintain distinctiveness, to remember, to pass down texts and traditions across generations—these seemed like stubbornness at the time. In retrospect, they were survival strategies of extraordinary effectiveness.

Four thousand years. Empires rose and fell: Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman, British. The Jews outlasted them all.