Having defined the Middle East historically and geographically, we will start with two areas within it: the Fertile Crescent – roughly today’s Iraq – and then Egypt. For these two civilizations are pivotal to the beginnings not just of the Middle East but to life as we know it in the West.
One of this book’s main points is that our world is also Middle Eastern in origin, and that unless we understand, for example, ancient societies such as the Sumerians and the Egyptians, our grasp of what made our civilization will be incomplete. Our globe was a much more connected place than we have given it credit for in the past, and the dawn of our part of it, the West, began long before Greece and Rome, and in a place well beyond the confines of Europe.
The Sumerian civilization is one of the very oldest on earth, with clear signs of human activity as early as around 5000 BC. It is thought that they came from what is now Turkey and Iran. This, however, is one of the many interpretations, and here I agree with Colin Renfrew in his popular 1980s work Archaeology and Language and in his more academic contribution in 2002 to Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Renfrew’s basic thesis is that the spread of language and civilization goes together with the spread of agriculture. But he states that there is still no scholarly consensus on the issue – that there remains ‘an acute sense of problem’ even though work on DNA has made migration easier to follow. He argues, surely correctly, that new groups coming into an area and spreading their genes and language successfully must have the economic means to enable a population increase to happen. They do this through agriculture, and in terms of the Indo-Europeans from whom the present-day inhabitants of Europe and Iran descend, this all began with ancestors who settled in Anatolia and west Asia around 8,000 years ago. Ethnically speaking, DNA research has shown that these last three groups are closely related – the linguistic links between, for example, ancient Greek, Celtic, Iranian and Hindi having been proved as long ago as the eighteenth century.
By around 3500 BC Sumerians were settled in cities in the Fertile Crescent, that strip of land bordered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in which it was possible to live, in an otherwise arid desert climate. It was from one of these cities, Ur, that a nomad called Abram, later known as Abraham, ventured out to become the reputed ancestor of many of today’s Semitic races (see p. 7). Ur was inhabited from around 5000 to 300 BC, and is best known for the spectacular royal tombs that date to around 2500 BC, many of whose artefacts have managed to survive in the museums of Baghdad, including the looting in 2003. Ur was excavated from 1922 to 1924 by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley.
As well as inventing bureaucracy, their most famous discovery, again around 3500 BC, was the wheel. This was a vital tool that we take all too much for granted. But, for example, it was unknown to highly advanced contemporary American civilizations such as the Olmec and Maya. The Sumerians were known for their stepped pyramidal structures, or ziggurats, and to them we also owe the sixty-minute hour, the 360 degrees that form a circle, and also faience, which some believe to be the world’s first ever synthetic material. The Sumerians also developed an early form of alphabet, cuneiform, and along with Chinese, which developed separately, and a long distance away, the Sumerian script is the oldest known written language.
(Semitic is a term used in two senses. Ethnically, it applies to present-day Jews and Arabs and in the past also applied to groups such as the Babylonians and Assyrians. Linguistically it is part of the large Hamito-Semitic family of languages, encompassing northern Africa and south-west Asia, including not just Hebrew and Arabic, but many interrelated languages, such as those of the Tuareg peoples of Africa, the Ethiopian Amharic language and several others.)
Another important group in ancient times was the Hittites, an Indo-European group (see below) based on the Anatolian plateau, where present Turkey is situated. They have been credited with introducing the Iron Age, using iron weapons instead of those of bronze and copper. Some think they may be ancestors of the Kurds, who are also Indo-European, but this is now difficult to prove.
The Hittite Empire lasted some 600 years. It began around 1800 BC – two centuries after the Hittites arrived in the region – reached its zenith in terms of power and size, around 1380–1350 BC, and was finally destroyed by a group known to history as the Sea Peoples, thought to be from around present-day Libya and other parts of Northern Africa in around 1200 BC.
(Indo-European is now used as a language term, to include languages as far apart geographically as English, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hindi. While its origins remain disputed, the proto-Indo-European ancestral language is thought by most to have originated in what is now southern Russia, and to have existed as a single language until between 3000 and 2000 BC – the wide range here perhaps indicating that there is no real consensus. But in the early twentieth century German philologists all agreed, and experts have continued so to agree, that Hittite is an Indo-European language, as, for example, is Tocharic, a branch of the linguistic family as far away as Central Asia.)
The Phoenicians – a Semitic people – began their rise to prominence in what is now Lebanon around 3000 BC. (They should not be confused with the quite separate Mediterranean-bordering race, the Philistines.)
Among the ancient world’s greatest traders, they managed to explore beyond the Pillars of Hercules at the end of the Mediterranean as far as Britain. They founded the Carthaginian colony in North Africa, which produced the Romans’ enemy Hannibal, and also settled in Sicily and in southern Spain. Their god Baal was a source of constant temptation to the Jewish peoples, as, alas, was their belief in child sacrifice. Their main claim today, however, is the fact that they invented the first ever phonetic alphabet, from which all others derive.
3000 BC, or thereabouts, saw the dawn of another famous ancient civilization, the Assyrians, the successor to that of the Sumerians. Their first major empire was conquered by the Babylonians, who had begun to emerge around 2000 BC. One of the most notable Babylonian rulers, Hammurabi, was famed as a law-giver; his legal codes established principles of equivalence in punishment and retribution (such as taking just one eye for one eye) that still exist today. The memory of the Babylonians has been kept alive as a source of pride in the region down to modern times, with the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, active in rebuilding Babylon not far from the current capital, Baghdad. He also had a Hammurabi Division in his army.
For a while, no particular group held predominance. But then around 1200 BC the Assyrians discovered iron, possibly from the Hittites. This gave them an advantage over still-Bronze Age tribes, and the Assyrian Empire began slowly to rebuild.
In 745 BC their new king, Tiglath-Pileser III – known to generations of irreverent Victorian and Edwardian schoolboys as It Tickleth Me Fancy – began another series of conquests which included the Jewish northern kingdom of Israel, at which we will look later. It was the Assyrian King Sennacherib (d. 681 BC) who moved the capital to Nineveh, which was situated on the Tigris opposite the present-day city of Mosul. (Nineveh’s famous Ishtar Gate can be seen today in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin). Eventually the Assyrian Empire stretched from Turkey to the Persian Gulf and across to Egypt. But then it began to implode, and was taken over by a neo-Babylonian grouping we know as the Chaldeans.
This meant a return to Babylon as the capital, under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II, in 605 BC. In 586 the Chaldeans captured the remaining Jewish kingdom, Judea, and took the Jews into exile. The so-called Hanging Gardens of Babylon have stayed in the memory as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, along with the pyramids of Egypt.
The Chaldeans also left an important linguistic legacy – the Aramaic language. Much of the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Scriptures is written in this language and it is also the one that Jesus himself spoke. While it only exists today in the liturgical language of Syriac, its close relative, Arabic, is spoken worldwide, both by Arabs as their own language, and by Muslims of all nationalities as the official language of the Islamic faith, usually, in the latter case, in the classical version in which the Quran is written.
But as we see dramatically in Rembrandt’s famous picture of Belshazzar’s Feast, even this mighty dynasty did not last for ever. In 539 BC Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great, the first member of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty, whose ancestors had ruled over the kingdom of Elam in what is now southwestern Iran. Cyrus had begun his imperial journey by subduing the Mede kingdom in the north-west of modern Iran and founded an empire that was to last until it was overcome by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, over 200 years after its foundation. As a result of these conquests the empire Cyrus established is sometimes known as that of the Medes and Persians, and he would be especially revered by his new Jewish subjects for allowing them to return to their homeland in 516 after seventy years in exile.
The Persian Empire used Aramaic as its official language, and introduced the idea of hierarchical rule, since considerable power was devolved from the centre to local commanders, or satraps. They also employed the Phoenician alphabet as their script, thereby getting rid of the ancient cuneiform of the Sumerians.
Linguistically, there are links between the languages of these ancient civilizations – for example that of the main Fertile Civilization groups, the Akkadians, and successor languages, such as the one spoken by Jesus – and those used in our own times. (Akkadian is a term for the proto-Babylonian and proto-Aramaic languages, as well as for the earlier rulers of Sumer, the most powerful of whom was Sargon, who ruled over the area in around 2350 BC.) Because we do not learn such ancient languages in the West even if we increasingly learn Arabic, we forget that there is a remarkable degree of linguistic continuity between what we think of as distant times, and the ordinary languages spoken in the region in our own day. We thus miss a fascinating thread linking, for example, modern Iraq to Nineveh and the languages of the Bible.
While we might have problems, for example, in understanding someone from Chaucer’s time, we can usually understand Shakespeare, or the King James (Authorized) Version of the Bible. It is the same with present-day Arabic speakers and the ancient language of Aramaic, which was spoken not just by Jesus in the first century, but was the official lingua franca of the Medo-Persian Empire several centuries before.
Take, for example, the words for the numbers one to ten, spoken in three ancient languages. These are Akkadian from around the twenty-third to sixth centuries BC; Aramaic, of the sixth century BC to around the sixth century AD; and present-day twenty-first-century Arabic, taken from Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler.
| Number | Akkadian | Aramaic | Arabic |
| one | isten | had | wahid |
| two | sina | tren | ithnayn |
| three | salas | talata | thalatha |
| four | erba | arbaa | arbaa |
| five | hamis | hamisa | xamsa |
| six | sess | sitta | sitta |
| seven | sebe | saba | saba |
| eight | samane | tamaniya | thamaniya |
| nine | tise | tisa | tisa |
| ten | eser | asra | asra |
As Nick Ostler notes, counting from one to ten has not really changed over 4,000 years – the degree of linguistic continuity is remarkable. Whether the ancient Akkadian rulers, the prophet Daniel (who spoke Aramaic), Jesus, Muhammad and a modern Arab could all understand each other easily is debatable. But they could certainly have grasped a good deal of what the other was saying. An interesting modern parallel would be the similarity between the Flemish spoken in Belgium, the Dutch of the Netherlands and the Frisian of north Holland and adjacent parts of Germany and Denmark.
While it is accepted intellectually that ancient Egypt is in the Middle East, there is still a tendency somehow to dissociate it with the region, as we perceive it today. Since this is a tendency that extremist Muslims also share because the Egypt of the Pharaohs is pre-Islamic, it is important to combat such perceptions as we look at the unfolding story of the Middle East, from ancient times to the present.
Egyptian civilization also developed from around 3500 BC. (It is important to remember that Lower Egypt is in the north, and Upper Egypt in the south.) In approximately 3100 BC came the first ruler, or Pharaoh, of a united Upper and Lower Egypt, known to us as Menes.
The Egyptians themselves, certainly so far as their language goes, were (and are) clearly a Hamito-Semitic group, with both Semitic and Hamitic in their language. Archaeology now takes their roots far back to Palaeolithic times, with strong evidence of African as well as Mediterranean elements. We know the ancient Egyptians mainly for their extraordinary skill at building the pyramids. But they were also skilled agriculturalists, with most inhabitants living not too far from the river Nile, which has been the lifeblood of the region for millennia. Egyptians were also traders and eager astronomers, and, for much of the history of Pharaonic Egypt, they were a major regional power, frequently ruling well beyond their natural borders, to the south in Nubia and to the east in parts of Palestine.
Their language was not known or decipherable until the decoding of the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s by a young French scholar, Champollion. This object can be seen today in the British Museum, having originally been discovered by French soldiers invading Egypt in 1798. It had a decree in the original Egyptian hieroglyphs, in a later form of the language called Demotic, and also in ancient Greek, a language well known to the stone’s European discoverers.
Egyptian hieroglyphics appear to us as pictures, but are in fact symbols representing sounds, and so are, like Chinese characters today, an alphabet. The language itself has been called Hamito-Semitic, so is related to many of the other contemporary ancient tongues. Today’s Coptic, still spoken in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, is its direct descendant.
Ancient Egypt also had a very stylized form of portraiture that did not change much over thousands of years. By around 2800 BC they began to write using papyrus, an aquatic plant found in Egypt, from which a paper-like substance could be made. Because of the dryness of the climate, these materials have survived to the present day in unusually high numbers for manuscripts that are so old. One example, the Harris Papyrus, is over 30cm long and dates to around 1160 BC.
Religion and its numerous gods and goddesses, many with animal shapes, lay at the heart of Egyptian life and society. The ancient Egyptians believed strongly in the afterlife, one of the key doctrines of their religion that affected the way in which they behaved, as the enormous monuments to the dead attest. The Pharaoh himself (there were a few female Pharaohs such as Hatshepsut, but they were rare) was regarded as divine. Numerous dynasties ruled over the millennia, mostly Egyptian, but some, such as the Semitic Hyksos, and the ethnically Greek Ptolemies, were from other races. Some, notably in the book Black Athena, have suggested African origins for some parts of Egyptian civilization, but this is not a majority view.
Egyptian chronology is now in dispute outside mainstream archaeological circles. But here, by way of introduction, is the majority view, well enunciated for years by the distinguished British Egyptologist and doyen in the UK and USA of its current archaeology, Kenneth Kitchen.
Prehistoric Egypt lasts to around 3100 BC, and is then followed by what we call the Archaic Period, of roughly 3100 to 2680 BC, the first two dynasties of a succession of ruling families that reigned over Egypt until 30 BC.
Then we have the Old Kingdom, from roughly 2680 to 2180 BC, what Kitchen describes as the first flowering of Egyptian culture, much of which has now been excavated. These are the Pharaohs of dynasties three to six. They include the earliest of the pyramids, the Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser, the earliest cut-stone building still surviving anywhere in the world. Dynasty four saw the creation of the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Kheops, about which much astrological and other similar nonsense has been written, and which, in reality, was simply an enormous tomb. During this time the Egyptians also managed to get as far down south as Nubia, in today’s Sudan.
Next we have the first of what Egyptologists describe as an ‘Intermediate Period’, one in which the power of the Pharaohs diminished, and no one single ruler was truly in control. The First Intermediate Period, dynasties seven to eleven, takes us down to 2040 BC.
The Middle Kingdom, dynasties eleven and twelve, is the second major period of Egyptian civilization. Here power of the Pharaohs extended as far as Syria and they seem to have invented the short story as a form of literature. Amun-Re emerged as a synthesis of various pre-existing gods as a major deity in the Egyptian pantheon, with Osiris as a significant god for the afterlife.
Next comes another gap, the Second Intermediate Period, of dynasties thirteen to seventeen, lasting from about 1786 to 1540 BC. The Pharaohs in this period include those from the Hyksos, a group of non-Egyptian Semitic-Asiatic interlopers – the term literally means ‘foreign people’ – whose leaders constituted the fifteenth dynasty and were overlords to the sixteenth. The fact that these foreigners were able to subdue Egypt shows how weak that power had temporarily become. It has been suggested that the Biblical Joseph lived in Egypt in the Hyksos period, since his Semitic origins would not have been a problem to the equally non-Egyptian Hyksos rulers. This is if the Kitchen chronology is right, which revisionists dispute.
Finally, after this interval of chaos comes the last great period of Egyptian independence and international power, the New Kingdom: dynasties eighteen to twenty, lasting from around 1552 to 1069 BC. This is the time of the greatest of all Pharaohs, Rameses II, and also of the Exodus, as described so vividly in the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament). The Exodus, the central motif of the Jews, was a political act – the dawn of a new power – as well as an event of profound religious significance. Dating this epochal adventure is very hard, as there is little consensus even among those who take a fairly conservative view of when most of the events in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history happened. One date that appears to have much credence is circa 1280 BC, though even that is open to question. Nevertheless, the escape from slavery and the slow invasion of new territory was a defining time in the history of the Jewish people.
This is also the period of the one supposedly monotheistic Pharaoh, known to history as Akhenaten, who will be considered in the next chapter. But in no time the Egyptians were worshipping the old gods again and the brief theological experiment, if that is what it was, was over.
So too, soon, was the power of ancient Egypt itself as an independent entity. While we might, justifiably, be awed by the treasures of the boy ruler, Tutankhamun, already the power of Egyptian-born Pharaohs was on the wane. Kenneth Kitchen describes Pharaoh Rameses III of the twentieth dynasty (he came to power in around 1190 BC) as the last of the great local rulers.
We therefore come to the Third Intermediate Period, one that mainstream Egyptologists believe lasted from 1069 to 332 BC, that of dynasties twenty-one to thirty-one. It is a period of sharp decline, with what Kitchen calls occasional but brief periods of recovery. By 332 the area had been conquered several times by foreign armies, including those of the Persians and in 332 the first of the Greek-born Ptolemaic dynasty came to power. This inaugurated a period of Hellenistic rule that lasted down to 30 BC, when Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire. Not until Colonel Nasser and his revolutionaries assumed power in a coup in 1952 were Egyptians again ruled by their own people.
Of all those living in the Middle East in ancient times, one group was to make a permanent difference to global history, and to our own world as well. This was the Israelites, the ancestors of today’s Jews. Since their main and lasting contribution was religious, we shall consider them in more depth in the next chapter. Here an overview of their history will serve to place their faith into its historical context.
After many years of growth and then of struggle, the Children of Israel were to occupy what they regarded as the Promised Land. As the Hebrew Scriptures – the Bible – show this took some time and much fighting, including against tribes that practised gruesome rituals forbidden to the Jews, such as child sacrifice and temple prostitution. Archaeologists do not agree upon exactly how long or when the conquest occurred. The date many give for the period of the ‘Judges’ – that part of Jewish history between the Exodus and the establishment of the first kingdom – is roughly 1240–1050 BC. Therefore the conquest, which the consensus seems to think began in around 1220 BC, did not take place overnight. But whenever it did take place, the process of gaining a new land left its permanent mark upon the psyche of the conquerors – it remains an immensely significant issue in the twenty-first century for those Israelis who want the borders of a Greater Israel to be shared with those conquered by Joshua, the Jewish leader who succeeded Moses and launched the invasion of the new homeland. Such a state would comprise modern Israel, together with territory currently in Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas. This shows how the events of thousands of years ago continue to resonate powerfully today; for the rest of us this is just ancient history, but for the inhabitants of the Middle East it could have happened last week.
Initially, the new state in which the different tribes settled was a kind of theocratic republic. The people were ruled by prophets speaking on behalf of the one God, a being who the Jews realized was not just a tribal deity, or even simply their tribal deity, but the one and only God who existed. This was the era the Hebrew Bible describes as the time of the Judges. But, very approximately, some time before 1000 BC the Jewish people decided that, like all the nations around them, they too had to have a king. Their first attempt, Saul, proved a failure, their second, David, a success.
David, who some think reigned around 1010 to 970 BC, is a character known in scripture, but not necessarily to archaeologists. Even within Israel, theologically conservative specialists agree with his existence, those of a more sceptical bent do not. Billions around the world do, however, and a book such as the IVP Bible Dictionary (InterVarsity Press) gives helpful archaeological details for those for whom the traditional view is convincing.
It was under King David that the Jews first occupied their new capital, Jerusalem, literally the City of Peace, in roughly 1000 BC. Previous to this the city had been the headquarters of another tribe, the Jebusites, and Jerusalem had been occupied, for certain, as far back as 1800 BC. After David’s conquest, it functioned as the Jewish capital until the exile in 586 BC, and then again after the return seventy years later, until the Romans turned it into a pagan city in AD 135. Yet whether ruled by the Jews or not, Jerusalem has traditionally been regarded as the capital of both the Jews and Judaism.
David also expanded the borders of the Jewish kingdom, and it is his boundaries that are still deemed to be the natural frontiers of any Jewish state by religious Jews today. In that sense, what David was able to conquer three thousand years ago remains a major issue for our own time.
David, not only a warrior, was also a poet, and numerous of the Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures are attributed to him. As well as being high poetry, they are also wonderfully human, as the psalmist wrestles with many of life’s complexities, which we still, as fallible human beings, find hard to resolve. It is not surprising that people in the twenty-first century sing them with as much fervour as they were first chanted thousands of years ago.
It was David’s son Solomon who built the first large-scale temple. He too protected the infant state’s borders, but also, the Bible records, allowed a major degree of syncretism – the absorption of elements of local religions or cults – to enter the country. Solomon’s son Rehoboam proved to be a tyrant, and the ten northern tribes rebelled, splitting the original kingdom permanently into two in 931 BC. Only the two southern tribes – Judah and Benjamin – remained under the Davidic dynasty based in Jerusalem that continued to rule down to 586 BC. Israel was to have a shorter existence; conquered in 722 BC by the Assyrians it lasted well over a century less as an independent state than its southern neighbour. Many groups around the world claim a descent from the ‘lost’ ten northern tribes, but only the tiny extant remnants of the Samaritans – the mixed-race descendants of the Jews of the northern kingdom of Israel who had intermarried with the local inhabitants, also Semitic but not regarded as Jewish – have a genetically proven claim.
If one reads the Hebrew Scriptures, the history of Judah is one of continual struggle to keep to the original Jewish faith, and to avoid following the local gods, with their practice of child sacrifice and similar gory beliefs. By and large, from what the scriptural account tells us, Judah was slightly more successful at this than Israel, though as the author of Chronicles makes clear, standards in the southern kingdom were often lacking as well.
Some kings succumbed; others, such as Josiah, resisted. Their actions are relevant to us in the West because their behaviour was often used as a historical role model, especially after the Reformation. England’s Edward VI was likened to Josiah by his enthusiasts, for example, as explored in more detail by Oxford church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in his book Tudor Church Militant.
The notion of a godly kingdom also applied to many of the Puritans who founded colonies in the United States and derived, in their instance, from their understanding of the Old Testament. They believed profoundly that the New World was a later equivalent of the Jewish Promised Land. As well as this, they saw themselves as pioneers in a new territory which they believed God had given to them in the same way that God had bestowed the original Promised Land on the Jews, the first chosen people.
The Americans derived much of this thinking from the English Puritans, who felt similarly about the Commonwealth and Protectorate period in Britain from 1649 to 1660. During Cromwell’s rule, England was likened to the Kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon (i.e. before its division) and thereafter to Judah by many of his supporters, and by writers and soldiers on what we would now describe as the radical left of the Parliamentary movement. The cultural and religious influence of the Judaic kings therefore lasted for thousands of years, down to our own time.
American exceptionalism, as it is now often called, therefore has roots going back to the New England Puritans. It is a recurring theme in American history, and several books, including the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall’s work Promised Land, Crusader State examine this motif in America’s self-image from 1776 to the present day.
Adrian Hastings explored this theme in more detail in his influential work The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Significantly, the lectures upon which the book was based were given in Northern Ireland. There the hard-line Protestants, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, harbour similar sentiments to those of the Scottish (and thus mainly Protestant) settlers in seventeenth-century Ulster. They too, the legend goes, were God’s people creating a new land for God. Since many of the subsequent settlers in the New World – such as the Scotch Irish in the Valley of Virginia – were of Protestant Ulster origin, the myth of a divinely led people creating a new frontier land for God was perpetuated.
This excursus into present-day national myths and troubles is relevant, because history is permanently being rewritten and reinterpreted. Ultimately, it can be argued that it is a matter of opinion whether or not the ‘three centuries of darkness’ did or did not happen. (See discussion of Peter James’ book for details.) But how America sees itself globally in the twenty-first century is important, and the theological underpinning of such a world view, even if we do now live in more secular times, does matter.
Likewise, strife in Northern Ireland, and the continuing, far worse, conflict in Palestine, all harks back to how people today interpret what a brave band of Jewish exiles from Egypt did then, even if it was thousands of years ago. We are never fully free from the effects of history, however much we would like to be.
Judah was in the unenviable position of being sandwiched between two major rival powers, that of Egypt to its west and south, and whoever controlled Babylonia to its east and north. While the kingdom lasted longer than that of Israel, it proved unable to preserve its independence, and eventually the Jews were taken to exile in Babylon.
(Many Jews remained in the region until 1948, when they were expelled from Iraq – a British survey of Baghdad in the 1920s revealed that the biggest single ethnic group in that city was Jewish. For example, today’s Saatchi and Sassoon families are of Iraqi Jewish descent.)
According to the Hebrew Scriptures, the main exile lasted for seventy years. Some scholars, such as Bernard Lewis in The Middle East, ascribe enormous importance theologically to this period of exile, and in particular the realization that there is a Devil who opposes God and his people.
There is no archaeological evidence to show how it is that Jews of that time began to believe which particular doctrines. Conservative scholars tend to give older dates to Biblical doctrines, and those of a more liberal persuasion usually ascribe later dates and give greater credence to outside influences, such as those of the Zoroastrians. However, it is true to say that unlike the contemporary Zoroastrian religion, in which the good and bad gods are effectively co-equal until the end of time when Ahura Mazda wins, in Judaism Satan is less powerful, although the cosmic struggle is very real.
Since the struggle between good and evil carries forward into both Christianity and Islam, it has proved to be a vital doctrine, however or whenever it arose. Even in today’s post-religious age, it remains a powerful concept, both in popular belief and even in fiction like Harry Potter. It is also a key component of what the writer Paul Johnson, in his A History of the Jews, calls ‘ethical monotheism’, which he considers one of the greatest contributions of the Jewish people to the rest of us in the millennia that have followed.
Our modern system of ethics is becoming increasingly post-religious, as people, at least in the European part of the West, have less faith than their forbears. Even so, one could argue that our basic ethical system is the grandchild of that of the ancient Jews, via Christianity, and that our conceptual frameworks go back perhaps to the Jewish flight from Egypt (taking a conservative view). If other interpretations are correct, such ethical monotheism derives from later Kings of Judah such as Josiah, and the ruminations of exiles in Babylon, wrestling with the problem of why it all went so wrong, because God’s chosen people had been defeated and exiled by a pagan army.
Eventually the remnants of the Judaic exiles were able to return by the remit of the Persian ruler Cyrus who, as Bernard Lewis reminds us, is afforded a degree of praise given to no other pagan ruler in the Bible. But once back, the Jews were no longer independent, and were under the authority of whoever controlled the bulk of the Middle East. For just under 200 years (536 to 331 BC), this remained the great Persian Empire, which, at its peak, stretched from present-day Egypt to the Hindu Kush.
Then around 331 BC Alexander, a warrior prince from the hitherto backwater kingdom of Macedonia, founded a huge new empire, destroying that of the Achamaenid kings. His moniker ‘the Great’ reflects the scale of his conquests, which stretched from Greece to Afghanistan.
Alexander’s empire split after his early death aged thirty-three in 323 BC, but the successor dynasties were Greek – the Seleucids in the former Persian domains, and the Ptolemies (down to Cleopatra) in Egypt – and the Greek language, Greek culture and Hellenic civilization (Hellenic after Hellas for Greece) remained highly influential in the Middle East for over two thousand years. Greek now became the international lingua franca of regions either directly under Greek rule, or strongly influenced by it culturally. In Bactria, in present-day Central Asia, Greek artistic and cultural influence combined with Buddhism to form a unique blend that influenced regional iconography for millennia afterwards.
While most ordinary people continued life unchanged, the effect of Greek thought made a powerful impact on the collaborator classes needed to make Greek rule work and on the intellectuals. The Greeks themselves set up new cities, many named Alexandria after Alexander himself. As we shall see, the influence of all this on the Jews was to be considerable and long lasting.
Some writers, especially in the United States, have referred to the contest between what they call Jerusalem vs. Athens in terms of trying to see which tradition, Jewish religious or secular Greek, has had the most influence on the West. This is surely a false dichotomy, since the two are not always as separate as some people think, nor are they necessarily so opposed. Jewish ethical monotheism has been highly influential in quite different arenas as, for example, Greek mathematics and geometry. In addition, Hellenism, the Greek way of thinking, especially in disciplines such as philosophy, had an enormous influence on the post-exilic Jewish people as well.
It is significant, for example, that the early Christian gospels were all written in Greek – or, strictly speaking, its popular or koine version – as this was the common language that could be understood by literate people across a radius of thousands of miles.
Hellenic can be used, therefore, instead of the ethnically more restricted word Greek. As E. A. Judge has pointed out, in this period ‘Hellenist’ effectively meant ‘civilized’ and did not apply just to those of Greek ancestry. There were places of actual Greek settlement – the Decapolis in the Holy Land, for example, and cities as far away as those in the Hindu Kush, whose descendants still have strong European features to this day as explorers down to Michael Palin have discovered. But there did not need to be actual ethnic Greeks present for Hellenism to flourish, and it remained influential long after much of the once enormous Greek Empire had been conquered by the Romans and further east by many different local tribal kingdoms.
As Judge also points out, the intellectual centres of Hellenic thought were not limited to the Greek ethnic homeland. Towns such as Pergamum, in today’s Turkey, along with Alexandria (now in Egypt) and similar cities came to wield enormous influence on the lives of the different peoples around them. (Visitors to Berlin can see the remains of much of Pergamum in the Pergamon Museum.) Jews, as we shall soon see, also fell under Greek influence, following the Greek translation in the Hellenistic city of Alexandria of the Hebrew Scriptures we call the Septuagint.
The region we now refer to as Israel and Palestine itself remained under Seleucid rule until around 165 BC, when a new and Semitic dynasty called the Hasmoneans was able to re-establish semi-independence. Then in 63 BC, the great Roman general, Pompey (later a rival of Julius Caesar) conquered much of the Middle East, and the Hasmoneans were forced into the role of vassal kings.
The Hasmoneans were not descendants of King David, however, and so lacked religious legitimacy in the eyes of many strict Jews. Temple worship had already begun again, and the Hasmoneans were able to rebuild Solomon’s temple to yet greater magnificence. The most famous Hasmonean was King Herod, familiar to many a singer of Christmas carols. He was the ruler who organized the massacre of the innocent children, killed on his orders when he heard about the birth of a child who some were already describing as the legitimate Jewish Messiah, or liberator.
At this same time, various sects arose in the Jewish world, each with their own interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Zealots were highly political, and there were several rebellions against outside rule, culminating in a major revolt from AD 66–70, and the mass Jewish suicide at the fortress of Masada in AD 73.
The Sadducees were the official establishment, controlling the Temple and many of the key religious posts on the Sanhedrin, the official Jewish religious body that decided all religious issues. They were also collaborators, and had close links with whichever secular power was in office – the Romans by the time that Jesus came. They believed in what we call the Old Testament, but not in what they thought were extraneous beliefs, which in their case included, for example, resurrection from the dead and an afterlife.
The Pharisees were equally religious, and believed in a parallel, oral tradition of rabbinical teachings that had evolved over the centuries addition to the Scriptures called the Torah, in the same way that the Roman Catholic Church – unlike the Protestants – would argue that the tradition of the Church is of equal weight theologically to the Bible itself. Becoming a Pharisee was open to people of all social backgrounds, unlike the often high-born Sadducees. By the time of Jesus the Pharisees were very proud of their extensive religious knowledge but, as the New Testament argues, they had perhaps become almost too proud of it, and become sadly enmeshed in the letter rather than the spirit of the law.
Finally there were small, often remote, groups such as the Essenes, who lived separate from the rest of society in special communities, rather like the monks in Christian and Buddhist traditions. The Essenes were ascetics, who rejected the Hasmonean monarchy, and have become famous today because of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the twentieth century, which has preserved their teaching.
Then, from the despised, culturally backward province of Galilee, came a Jewish teacher who was a member of none of the above groups. This rabbi was, to use a phrase employed of his early disciples, to turn the world upside down. He was to change not only the Middle East, in which he was born, but the West as well, since Western civilization today lives in the shadow of his birth religion and the one that he founded. I am describing Judaeo-Christian civilization and its founder, Jesus Christ.