Unit 11 · The History Books and the Ancient Near East

The book of Joshua opens where Deuteronomy ends. Moses has died. The text says God tells Joshua, his helper, to lead the people across the Jordan River into Canaan. In the Jewish Bible, Joshua is the first of the Former Prophets, the books that tell Israel’s story in the land. Christians count it as the first of the historical books of the Old Testament.

The most famous scene is Jericho (Joshua 6). The story says the people march around the walled city once a day for six days. Priests carry the ark and blow rams’ horns. On the seventh day they march seven times, the horns sound, the people shout, and the wall falls flat. Only Rahab, a woman of Jericho who hid Israel’s spies, is saved with her family.

The text then describes a hard practice. Jericho and other cities are put under the ban, a rule that the city and its people are destroyed as an offering. Readers have wrestled with these chapters for centuries. Jewish and Christian teachers have read them as history, as a warning about idol worship, or as a story shaped to teach later readers. Many scholars note that the book itself says the land was not fully taken (Joshua 13:1).

The second half of Joshua is mostly a map in words. The land is divided by lot among the twelve tribes, the large family groups named for Jacob’s sons. The book ends at Shechem, where Joshua asks the people to choose whom they will serve, and they renew the covenant.

The word archaeology means the study of the past through what people left in the ground. That means walls, pots, bones, and writing. It cannot tell us what people believed or who was right. It can tell us when a city was lived in and when it burned. For the time of Joshua and the judges, the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, the ground gives a mixed answer.

At Jericho, an English dig in the 1930s found fallen walls and said they were Joshua’s. Kathleen Kenyon dug again in the 1950s. She dated those walls many centuries earlier. In her view, Jericho was small or empty around 1200 BCE, the time many readers place Joshua. Hazor is different. Its upper city burned around 1230 BCE, which fits Joshua 11:11. Other cities in the list show no sign of a burning at that time.

Two finds matter most. The Merneptah Stele is an Egyptian stone from about 1208 BCE. It names "Israel" as a people in Canaan, the oldest mention outside the Bible. And surveys of the hill country show that hundreds of small farming villages appeared after 1200 BCE where few had been before. These villages had simple houses, no temples, and almost no pig bones.

Scholars read the evidence in different ways. Some hold that a quick conquest happened much as Joshua tells it. Others think tribes moved in slowly. Others think many early Israelites were Canaanites who left the cities for the hills. Many today combine these ideas. The Bible’s own books leave room for this: Joshua describes a sweeping victory, while Judges 1 lists many cities the tribes did not take.

The book of Judges covers the years between Joshua and the first kings. A judge here is not a person in a courtroom. A judge is a leader who rises up in a crisis, usually to fight off an enemy. The book has a pattern that repeats like a wheel. The people turn from God, an enemy oppresses them, they cry out, God raises a judge, and the land rests. Then it starts again (Judges 2:11-19). Scholars call this the cycle of Judges.

Deborah is a prophet who judges under a palm tree (Judges 4-5). She sends the general Barak against Sisera, whose army has iron chariots. The text says a storm and flood defeat the chariots, and a woman named Jael kills Sisera in her tent. Judges 5 retells the battle as a song. Many scholars think this poem is among the oldest writing in the Bible.

Gideon hides from the Midianites until a messenger calls him a mighty warrior (Judges 6-8). The story says God cuts his army from thousands to three hundred men. They win at night with torches, jars and horns. Samson is the strongest and the strangest judge (Judges 13-16). He is set apart from birth with uncut hair. He fights the Philistines alone, is betrayed by Delilah, and dies pulling down a temple.

The judges get worse as the book goes on. The last chapters tell of civil war. The book’s final verse gives its verdict: in those days there was no king, and everyone did what seemed right to them. Readers disagree about that line. Some hear it asking for a king. Others hear it asking for people to keep the covenant. Either way, it sets up the books of Samuel.

The books of Samuel begin with a woman who cannot have children. Hannah prays at the shrine at Shiloh, and the story says her son Samuel is born and given to serve there (1 Samuel 1-3). Samuel grows up to be a prophet, a person who speaks a message from God, and the last of the judges. Meanwhile the Philistines press in from the coast. They even capture the ark, the gold-covered chest that held the tablets of the law (1 Samuel 4).

When Samuel is old, the elders come to him with a demand (1 Samuel 8). They want a king like the other nations. Samuel is not pleased. The text says God tells him the people have rejected God as their king, but to give them what they ask. Samuel warns them what a king will do. He will take their sons for his army, their daughters for his kitchens, and a tenth of their crops. The people insist.

Samuel then finds Saul, a tall young man from the tribe of Benjamin. He pours oil on his head to anoint him, that is, to mark him as chosen (1 Samuel 10). The Hebrew word for an anointed one is mashiach, which gives English the word messiah. Saul wins a battle, and the people confirm him as king.

Readers have long noticed that 1 Samuel speaks with two voices. Some chapters treat the king as a gift from God. Others treat kingship as a mistake. Jewish and Christian teachers have read both as true at once: a king can protect the people and also fail them. Many scholars think the two voices come from different sources that an editor joined.

Saul’s reign goes wrong in the text. Twice he disobeys Samuel’s instructions, and Samuel tells him God has rejected him (1 Samuel 13 and 15). Samuel then secretly anoints a shepherd boy from Bethlehem named David. David enters Saul’s court as a harp player, kills the giant Goliath, and becomes close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. Saul grows jealous and tries to kill him. David flees and lives as an outlaw. Saul dies fighting the Philistines on Mount Gilboa (1 Samuel 31).

Second Samuel tells of David’s rule, which the text places around 1000 BCE. He is king of Judah first, then of all the tribes. Historians call this the united monarchy. David captures Jerusalem from the Jebusites and makes it his capital (2 Samuel 5). He brings the ark there. He does not build a temple, but in 2 Samuel 7 the prophet Nathan brings him a promise: his house, meaning his family line, will last.

That promise is read in more than one way. Jewish tradition sees in it the hope for a future king from David’s line, the messiah, who will rule in a time of peace. Christians believe Jesus, whom the Gospels call the son of David, is that king. Historians read 2 Samuel 7 as the founding charter of the Davidic dynasty that ruled Judah for four centuries.

The text does not hide David’s faults. He takes Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and has her husband Uriah killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). Nathan confronts him with a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s one lamb. David condemns the rich man and then hears the words, You are the man. His later years bring a revolt by his son Absalom. The Bible’s picture of its greatest king is a mixed one.

David’s son Solomon takes the throne after a struggle among his brothers. Early in his reign the text says God offers him anything, and Solomon asks for wisdom to judge the people (1 Kings 3). The story of two women who each claim the same baby shows that wisdom in action. Solomon offers to cut the child in half, and the true mother gives it up to save it. Later tradition tied the book of Proverbs to his name.

Solomon’s great work is the Temple (1 Kings 6-8). The text says it took seven years to build, with cedar from Lebanon sent by King Hiram of Tyre. It had a courtyard, a main hall, and an inner room called the Holy of Holies, where the ark was placed. Many scholars date its completion to the 950s BCE. No part of it has been excavated, because the site in Jerusalem is holy to Muslims and Jews today and is not dug.

The text also records the price. Solomon used forced labor gangs and heavy taxes to build his palace, cities and fleet (1 Kings 5 and 9). He married many foreign wives, some for treaties, and 1 Kings 11 says he built shrines for their gods. The book blames these shrines for the troubles that follow. The queen of Sheba’s visit (1 Kings 10) shows how far his fame had spread, in the text’s telling.

Archaeologists debate how large Solomon’s kingdom really was. Some see gates at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer as his work, matching 1 Kings 9:15. Others date those gates a century later. What is not in doubt is the Temple’s place in the story. For the rest of Kings, the Temple in Jerusalem is the center that every king is measured against.

When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam went to Shechem to be made king (1 Kings 12). The northern tribes asked him to lighten the heavy burden of labor and taxes. His older advisers told him to say yes. His young friends told him to answer harshly, and he did. The text says the north replied with a cry: What share do we have in David? To your tents, Israel! Most scholars date this break to about 930 BCE.

From then on there were two kingdoms. The northern one, with ten tribes, kept the name Israel. Its first king was Jeroboam, and its capital moved until King Omri built Samaria in the 870s BCE. The southern kingdom was Judah, with Jerusalem, the Temple, and kings from David’s line. To keep his people from going to Jerusalem, the text says Jeroboam set up golden calves at Dan and Bethel. Kings calls this the sin of Jeroboam and never lets it go.

The books of Kings grade every ruler with one sentence: he did what was right, or what was evil, in the eyes of the LORD. The test is loyalty to God and to the Temple in Jerusalem, not wealth or victories. By that test every king of Israel fails, even strong ones like Omri and Ahab. In Judah, a few kings pass. Many scholars think the books were written or finished in Judah, which explains the grading.

The two kingdoms were often at war with each other and sometimes allied. Israel was larger and richer, with better farmland and trade routes. Judah was smaller and poorer but had the Temple and the Davidic line. Prophets such as Elijah and Elisha worked in Israel; Isaiah and Micah worked in Judah. The story of both kingdoms runs side by side through 1 and 2 Kings.

Assyria was an empire in the north of what is now Iraq, with great cities at Ashur and Nineveh. From the 800s BCE its armies marched west almost every year. Smaller kingdoms could pay tribute, that is, yearly gifts of silver, gold and goods, or be crushed. A carved black stone in the British Museum, the Black Obelisk of about 825 BCE, shows Israel’s King Jehu bowing before the Assyrian king. It is the only known picture of an Israelite king.

Under Tiglath-pileser III, from 745 BCE, Assyria began taking land, not just tribute. Second Kings 15 says he carried off people from Israel’s north. When Israel’s last king, Hoshea, stopped paying and looked to Egypt for help, Assyria besieged Samaria. The city fell in 722 BCE after about three years (2 Kings 17:5-6). Assyrian records agree, and King Sargon II claims the victory and says he carried off about 27,000 people.

The practice of deportation was Assyria’s policy. Leaders, craftsmen and soldiers were moved to distant parts of the empire, and other peoples were settled in their place. Second Kings 17 says foreigners were brought to Samaria’s towns. Israel’s northern tribes never returned as a group. Later legends spoke of ten lost tribes. Jewish tradition connects the mixed population of the region with the Samaritans of later centuries.

The text explains the fall in its own way. Second Kings 17 gives a long sermon: Israel fell because it worshiped other gods and ignored the prophets. A historian would add Assyria’s strength, Hoshea’s gamble on Egypt, and Samaria’s position on the road to Egypt. Both explanations are in the chapter, one stated and one visible in the events.

Judah watched Samaria fall and lasted another 136 years. King Hezekiah, who ruled from about 715 BCE, cut a tunnel through rock to bring water inside Jerusalem’s walls. Visitors can still walk it. Then he rebelled against Assyria. In 701 BCE King Sennacherib invaded, destroyed the city of Lachish, and camped around Jerusalem. Second Kings 18-19 says the prophet Isaiah told Hezekiah the city would stand, and that an angel struck the Assyrian camp. Sennacherib’s own record says Hezekiah paid heavy tribute. Both agree Jerusalem was not taken.

Two generations later King Josiah, who ruled from about 640 BCE, led a reform. Second Kings 22 says workers repairing the Temple found a book of the law, and Josiah tore his clothes when it was read. He closed shrines outside Jerusalem and kept a great Passover. Many scholars think the book was an early form of Deuteronomy. Josiah died in battle at Megiddo in 609 BCE, and his reform faded.

By then Assyria was collapsing. Its capital Nineveh fell to Babylon and its allies in 612 BCE. Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar became the new master of the region. Judah’s kings switched sides between Babylon and Egypt. In 597 BCE Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and carried off King Jehoiachin with thousands of others. Clay tablets found in Babylon list food rations for Jehoiachin, king of Judah, by name.

The last king, Zedekiah, rebelled again. Babylon’s army besieged Jerusalem for about a year and a half. In 586 BCE the walls were breached, the Temple was burned, and more people were deported (2 Kings 25). Some scholars date the fall to 587 BCE. The book of Kings ends in Babylon, with Jehoiachin released from prison and eating at the king’s table. It is a quiet ending that leaves a door open.

A stele is a standing stone with words or pictures cut into it. Ancient kings set them up to record victories and to warn enemies. Most steles from Israel’s neighbors have been lost or broken. That makes the three pieces found at Tel Dan in 1993 and 1994 unusual. They had been reused as building stones in a wall, which is why they survived.

The inscription is in Aramaic. The king who set it up was from Aram, the kingdom around Damascus. Most scholars think he was Hazael, who fought Israel in the 840s BCE and appears in 2 Kings 8-13. He boasts that he killed a king of Israel and a king of the House of David. The names are damaged, but the surviving letters fit Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah. Second Kings 9 says those two kings died together, though it credits Jehu, not Hazael.

The stone matters for two reasons. First, it shows that in the 800s BCE Judah was known by its neighbors as the dynasty of David. Second, it shows how two records can tell one event differently. Hazael claims the kills. Kings gives them to Jehu, a general who may have acted with Aram’s support. A historian holds both accounts and asks what each writer wanted readers to believe.

A few scholars argued that bytdwd could mean something other than House of David, such as a place name. Most scholars reject those readings. The stele is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It cannot tell us whether David fought Goliath or wrote psalms. It tells us that a kingdom carried his name.

Moab was a kingdom east of the Dead Sea, in what is now Jordan. Second Kings 3 says Moab’s King Mesha had paid Israel tribute in lambs and wool, and that he rebelled when King Ahab died. In 1868 a missionary named Frederick Klein was shown a black stone near the town of Dhiban. It was covered in writing. Before it could be bought, local people broke it in pieces, but a paper copy of the writing had been made. The stone was pieced together and is now in the Louvre in Paris.

The stone is Mesha’s own account, in the Moabite language, which is very close to Hebrew. Mesha says that Omri, king of Israel, had oppressed Moab for many years because Chemosh, the god of Moab, was angry with his land. Then Chemosh gave Mesha victory, and he took back towns and built cities. The stele, from about 840 BCE, names Israel, Omri, and the God of Israel by the letters YHWH. It is one of the oldest inscriptions to do so.

Read the two accounts together. Kings says Israel, Judah and Edom invaded Moab and won until Mesha made a terrible sacrifice on the wall. Then the armies pulled back (2 Kings 3:27). Mesha says nothing about losing. He tells only of victories. Both writers give their god credit for what happened. Both leave out what would make their own side look bad.

This is how ancient royal writing worked. A king’s stone is not a newspaper. It is a claim. The books of Kings are not a newspaper either. They are a story told to teach. Historians hold the two beside each other and look for what neither writer had reason to invent, like the names of kings and cities.

Assyrian kings kept annals, year-by-year records of their campaigns, written on clay. Sennacherib’s annals were pressed into a six-sided clay prism in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia. Three nearly complete copies survive. One, the Taylor Prism, is in the British Museum. One is in the Israel Museum. The third is at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, which bought it in 1919. Students in Illinois can stand in front of it.

The prism describes the campaign of 701 BCE. Sennacherib says he took 46 walled cities of Judah and many villages, and drove out more than 200,000 people and their animals. Then comes the famous line about Hezekiah: Sennacherib says he shut him up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage. He lists Hezekiah’s tribute, including 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver.

Now open 2 Kings 18-19. It agrees that Sennacherib took Judah’s fortified cities and that Hezekiah paid 30 talents of gold, though it says 300 talents of silver. It agrees that Jerusalem did not fall. It disagrees about why. Kings says an angel struck the Assyrian camp and Sennacherib went home. The prism never claims to have entered Jerusalem, which is unusual for an Assyrian king. Historians have suggested disease, trouble at home, or a deal.

Sennacherib also had the siege of Lachish carved on his palace walls at Nineveh. Those carvings, now in the British Museum, show battering rams, captives, and the king on his throne. The Bible mentions Lachish only in passing. An Assyrian king put it at the center of his palace. Each side told the part of the story that made it look strong.

The word exile means being forced to live away from your homeland. Babylon carried off the people of Judah in stages. In 597 BCE King Jehoiachin, his court, craftsmen and soldiers were taken. The text says thousands went (2 Kings 24:14). In 586 BCE, after the Temple burned, more were deported. Only the poorest were left to work the land (2 Kings 25:12). Some others fled to Egypt, taking the prophet Jeremiah with them.

Unlike Assyria, Babylon did not scatter the exiles. It settled them in groups. The prophet Ezekiel lived among exiles at a place called Tel Abib by the Chebar canal (Ezekiel 3:15). Clay business records found in Iraq name a village the Babylonians called the town of Judah. They show Judeans farming, paying taxes and using names built on their God’s name, decades after the fall.

The exiles’ feelings survive in their poems. Psalm 137 pictures captives sitting by Babylon’s rivers, hanging up their harps, unable to sing when their captors ask for a song. The book of Lamentations mourns Jerusalem in five poems. Jewish communities still read Lamentations each year on the fast of Tisha B’Av, which remembers the Temple’s destruction.

Historians call these years the Babylonian exile, from 586 to 538 BCE. The number of people involved was small, perhaps tens of thousands. Their effect was large. Many scholars think much of the Hebrew Bible was gathered, edited or written in this period and the one that followed, by people asking why the disaster happened and what came next.

Before 586 BCE, religion in Judah centered on the Temple. Priests offered sacrifices there, and pilgrims came for festivals. In Babylon there was no Temple, and the law did not allow building another one elsewhere. The exiles needed a way to be faithful without an altar. The answers they found shaped Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam.

One answer was the written word. Many scholars think the exile is when the Torah, the five books of Moses, took something close to its final form, along with the story from Joshua to Kings. The prophets’ words were collected into books. A people that could not gather at a building could gather around a scroll. The Hebrew word for this kind of study and reading, and for the book itself, would later be central to Jewish life.

Another answer was practice. The Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, could be kept anywhere. So could circumcision and the food laws. In a foreign land these marked who belonged. Many scholars also place the roots of the synagogue, a house of prayer and study, in these years, though the oldest clear evidence for synagogue buildings comes centuries later.

Prophets living among the exiles gave the third answer: hope. Ezekiel sees a valley of dry bones that stand up and live again. The text says this means the house of Israel will return (Ezekiel 37). Isaiah 40 opens with the words Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. Many scholars think the chapters from Isaiah 40 onward were written in the exile. Jewish and Christian readers alike have turned to them in hard times.

Babylon’s power lasted less than a century. In 539 BCE the army of Cyrus, king of Persia, entered the city. Persia’s empire would stretch from what is now Turkey to India, the largest the world had seen. Persian kings ruled through local governors and let subject peoples keep their gods, languages and laws, as long as they paid tribute and kept the peace.

The Cyrus Cylinder, found in Babylon in 1879, is Cyrus’s announcement of his new rule. In it he says the god Marduk chose him. He says he took Babylon without a fight. He says he sent captive peoples, and the statues of their gods, back to their home shrines. Judah is not named. The cylinder states a general policy. It was written for Babylonians, in the style Babylonian kings had used before him.

The book of Ezra opens in the first year of Cyrus, 538 BCE. It quotes a decree, an official order. In it Cyrus says the God of heaven has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem. He invites the exiles to go up and build it (Ezra 1:2-4). Ezra 6 quotes a second copy of the order, found in the royal archives. The text says Cyrus also returned the Temple’s gold and silver vessels. Nebuchadnezzar had taken them.

The Bible’s prophets treat Cyrus with wonder. Isaiah 45:1 calls him the LORD’s anointed, the only non-Israelite given that title in the Bible. Historians note that the cylinder and Ezra fit together well, even though neither mentions the other. Cyrus had reasons of his own: loyal subjects near Egypt’s border were useful. The text sees a different reason. Both can be described without deciding between them.

Not every exile went home. Many families had built lives in Babylon, and a Jewish community stayed there for over a thousand years. Those who returned found Jerusalem in ruins and its land held by others. Judah was now Yehud, a small province of the Persian empire, ruled by a governor. The first returns were led by Sheshbazzar and then Zerubbabel, a grandson of King Jehoiachin, and the priest Jeshua.

Ezra 3 says the builders first set up the altar and then laid the Temple’s foundation. Old people who remembered Solomon’s Temple wept, while younger people shouted for joy. Then the work stopped. Neighbors, whom Ezra calls the enemies of Judah, offered to help and were refused. They then wrote to the Persian court to block the work. The prophets Haggai and Zechariah pushed the people to start again.

The Temple was finished in 515 BCE, in the sixth year of King Darius (Ezra 6:15). Historians call it the Second Temple, and the whole period from 515 BCE to 70 CE the Second Temple period. Haggai admits that next to the first one it looked like nothing (Haggai 2:3). There was no ark; the text never says what became of it. Yet this building, later enlarged by Herod, is the Temple of the Gospels.

The returnees also had to decide who belonged. Ezra and Nehemiah draw a sharp line around the people who came back from exile. Their books record lists of families and a painful dispute over marriages with local women. Readers have handled these chapters in different ways. Some see a small community protecting its identity; others see exclusion. Both note that the book of Ruth, about a Moabite woman who joins Israel, was read alongside them.

Two leaders came from Persia in the 400s BCE. Ezra was a priest and a scribe, an expert in writing and in the law. The text says the Persian king sent him with a letter giving him authority to teach the law of his God (Ezra 7). Scholars debate the exact year of his arrival. Nehemiah was the king’s cupbearer, a trusted servant. In about 445 BCE he asked King Artaxerxes for leave to rebuild Jerusalem’s wall and was made governor.

Nehemiah’s book reads like a memoir. He rides around the broken wall at night, then organizes families to each rebuild one section. Neighbors mock and threaten, so the builders work with weapons at their sides. The text says the wall was finished in fifty-two days (Nehemiah 6:15). A wall meant Jerusalem was a real city again, able to protect its people and its Temple.

The most important scene is in Nehemiah 8. On the first day of the seventh month, the people gather in a square, and Ezra reads the book of the law of Moses aloud from morning until noon. He stands on a wooden platform. Levites move through the crowd explaining the meaning. The people weep when they hear it, and the leaders tell them to eat, drink and rejoice instead. Then they keep the festival of Sukkot as the book describes.

Many scholars see this moment as a turning point. The people’s guide is now a book, read in public and explained, not only a king or a priest. Jewish tradition honors Ezra as a second Moses who restored the Torah. The practice of reading the Torah aloud and explaining it, which continues in every synagogue today, has its first clear picture in this chapter.

The Bible tells the story of the kings twice. Samuel and Kings tell it once. First and Second Chronicles tell it again, and many scholars think they were written after the exile, in the Persian period. The Hebrew name for the books means the events of the days. Reading the two versions side by side is one of the best ways to see how a writer shapes a story.

Chronicles begins with nine chapters of genealogies, lists of families reaching from Adam to the people who returned from exile. Then it tells David’s story, but not all of it. The affair with Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah and Absalom’s revolt are left out. Instead David gathers materials and plans for the Temple. Solomon builds it. The northern kingdom of Israel almost drops from view; the writer follows Judah and the Temple.

Chronicles also adds. Second Chronicles 33 says the wicked King Manasseh repented in Babylon and was restored, a story Kings does not tell. Prayers, songs and priests fill the pages. The books end with the decree of Cyrus, the very words that open Ezra. In the Jewish order of the Bible, Chronicles is the last book of all, so the Tanakh ends with the call to go up to Jerusalem.

Why tell the story twice? The writer, whom scholars call the Chronicler, wrote for a small community with a Temple and no king. He gave them a past that pointed at their present: worship at the Temple, order in its music and priesthood, and hope in David’s line. Christian Bibles place Chronicles right after Kings, as history. Jewish Bibles place it among the Writings, at the end. Both placements say something about how each tradition reads it.

Esther is set in Susa, a Persian royal city, under a king the text calls Ahasuerus. Many scholars identify him with Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 to 465 BCE. The story opens with a banquet and a queen, Vashti, who refuses the king’s order to appear. She is removed. A search for a new queen brings in Esther, a young Jewish woman raised by her cousin Mordecai. On Mordecai’s advice she keeps her people a secret.

The villain is Haman, the king’s chief official. When Mordecai will not bow to him, Haman persuades the king to order the killing of all Jews in the empire on one day, chosen by lot. The word for lot is pur. Mordecai sends word to Esther. To approach the king uninvited could mean death. Mordecai asks who knows whether she came to the throne for such a time as this. Esther fasts, goes in, and over two banquets exposes Haman. He is hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai.

The book is unusual in several ways. It never mentions God, prayer or the Temple. It is full of reversals: the day chosen for killing becomes a day of rescue. It is also the only book of the Hebrew Bible not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some ancient readers questioned whether it belonged in scripture. A Greek version adds prayers and God’s name; those additions are in the Apocrypha of Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.

Esther is the story behind Purim, a spring holiday. Jewish communities read the whole book aloud from a scroll. They make noise at Haman’s name. They give food to friends and gifts to the poor, and many wear costumes. Many readers see in the book a picture of life in a foreign empire. There is hidden identity, sudden danger, and survival through courage and wit.

The book of Daniel is set in Babylon during the exile. Daniel and three friends, young men from Judah, are trained for the king’s service. The first six chapters are court tales, stories about serving a foreign king without giving up one’s faith. Daniel refuses the king’s food and thrives on vegetables. He explains dreams that no Babylonian wise man can read. Later the writing on a wall spells out the fall of King Belshazzar.

Two stories are famous. In Daniel 3, the three friends refuse to bow to a golden statue and are thrown into a furnace. The text says they walk out unharmed. In Daniel 6, Daniel keeps praying toward Jerusalem against a royal ban and is thrown to the lions, and the text says he survives the night. In both, the men say they will obey God whether or not they are rescued.

Chapters 7 to 12 change form. They are apocalyptic visions. Beasts rise from the sea. A figure like a son of man comes with the clouds. Empires rise and fall in coded numbers. Part of the book, from 2:4 to 7:28, is written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. The visions follow the history of the Persian and Greek empires closely, down to a king who attacks the Temple.

Readers date the book differently. Jewish and Christian tradition has read it as Daniel’s own work from the 500s BCE. Many scholars think the visions were written or completed around 165 BCE, during the crisis under the Greek king Antiochus IV, to encourage people suffering then. Both readings agree on the book’s message: empires pass, and faithfulness under pressure matters.

Persian rule ended fast. Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, beat the Persian army and marched down the coast of Judea in 332 BCE. He died in Babylon nine years later, and his generals divided his empire. Judea was ruled first from Egypt, by the Ptolemies, and after 200 BCE from Syria, by the Seleucids. Greek became the language of trade, government and learning. Historians call this mix of Greek and local ways Hellenism.

Hellenism reached Jewish life everywhere. Cities got Greek names, theaters and gyms. Some Jews took Greek names and studied Greek philosophy. Others held tighter to Torah and worried about losing themselves. Both attitudes appear in the books written in these years. The tension between them helped bring on the revolt described in the next lesson.

The most lasting product of this period was a translation. In Alexandria, Egypt, the largest Jewish community outside Judea spoke Greek, not Hebrew. Beginning around 250 BCE, the Torah and then the other books were translated into Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy, after a legend that seventy-two scholars produced it.

The Septuagint mattered far beyond Egypt. It was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews, and later of the first Christians. Most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow its wording. It also included books written in this period, such as the Maccabees, which is one reason Catholic and Orthodox Bibles contain books that the Hebrew Bible does not.

In 167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned the practice of Judaism. First Maccabees says he outlawed Sabbath and circumcision, burned Torah scrolls, and set up a foreign altar in the Temple. A priest named Mattathias refused to obey and fled to the hills with his five sons. His son Judah, nicknamed Maccabee, which may mean the hammer, led a guerrilla war against far larger armies.

In 164 BCE Judah’s forces retook Jerusalem. They cleaned the Temple, built a new altar and rededicated it, that is, set it apart for worship again. First Maccabees 4 says they celebrated for eight days. The holiday of Hanukkah, which means dedication, remembers this. The story of a single day’s oil burning for eight days is not in Maccabees. It appears later, in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b). Judah’s family, the Hasmoneans, ruled Judea as priests and kings for about a century.

The story is told in 1 and 2 Maccabees, written in the 100s BCE, one in Hebrew and one in Greek. These books are part of the Apocrypha. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include them in the Old Testament and call them deuterocanonical. The Hebrew Bible does not include them, so most Protestant Bibles leave them out or print them in a separate section, as the King James Bible of 1611 did. Jewish tradition knows the story mainly through later writings.

Second Maccabees also tells of a mother and her seven sons who die rather than break the law. These are among the earliest stories of martyrs, people killed for their faith. The same book contains the earliest clear statement in Jewish writing of hope that the dead will rise. Both ideas became important to Jews and Christians in the centuries that followed.

The Hasmonean kingdom ended in 63 BCE, when the Roman general Pompey marched into Jerusalem. From then on Rome ruled, sometimes through local kings and sometimes through governors. In 37 BCE Rome made Herod king of Judea. He ruled until 4 BCE. He was a great builder and a feared ruler. Around 20 BCE he began enlarging the Second Temple into one of the largest sanctuaries in the Roman world. Its outer walls still stand in Jerusalem.

Jewish life in this period had several centers. The Temple in Jerusalem, with its priests and sacrifices, drew pilgrims at festivals. Synagogues in towns and villages gathered people for Torah reading and prayer every Sabbath. People spoke Aramaic at home, Greek in trade, and heard Hebrew in scripture. Jewish communities lived from Rome to Babylon.

Jews also disagreed about how to live by the Torah. The ancient historian Josephus describes several groups. The Pharisees taught in synagogues and valued oral traditions alongside the written law. The Sadducees, many of them priests, held to the written Torah and the Temple. The Essenes withdrew to live in strict communities; many scholars connect them to the Dead Sea Scrolls found near Qumran in 1947. Others hoped for a messiah who would end Roman rule.

This is the world of the Gospels. When the New Testament mentions Herod, the Temple, synagogues, Pharisees and Sadducees, it is describing this period. Jewish tradition traces rabbinic Judaism to the Pharisees. Christians trace their church to a Jewish teacher from Galilee in this same world. The Second Temple period ended in 70 CE, when Rome destroyed the Temple. Both traditions took shape in the years after.