A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
21.THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS
And now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so important in their own time as in their influence upon the later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000 B.C., and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt to the south and the changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these latter powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a
written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles,
psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political utterances
which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the
Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the fourth or
fifth century B.C.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have
already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian Empire
while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and
Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated and
slain at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and
when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in Babylon, rolled
back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up
puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred
his Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break up this
little state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against
the northern empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant
of the people was carried off captive to Babylon.
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then
collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country
and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or
united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write.
In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible
being read; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The
Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They
returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and
political people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the
Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as
we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had many of
the other books that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch
into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for
example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the
Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar
Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the common beliefs
of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson
have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham
and onward begins something more special to the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon.
He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader
must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons
and grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He
travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story,
promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his
children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in
the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham,
grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from
the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen
between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian records of Moses
nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they
did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of
the promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the
Canaanites but of newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and
their cities, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully
withstood the Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of
Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in
incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes
about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The reader will
find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles and disasters
during this period. For very largely it is a record of disasters and
failures frankly told.
Map: The Land of the Hebrews
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there was any
rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders of the
people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose themselves a
king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul’s leading was no great
improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished under the hail
of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa, his armour went
into the temple of the Philistine Venus, and his body was nailed to the
walls of Beth-shan.
MOUND AT BABYLON
THE MOUND AT BABYLON
Beneath which are the remains of a great palace of Nebuchadnezzar
His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David
dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to
know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phœnician city of
Tyre, whose King Hiram seems to have been a man of very great
intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the
Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally Phœnician trade went
to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder
at this time; there may have been other obstructions to Phœnician trade
along this line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest
relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon.
Under Hiram’s auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose,
and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A
very considerable trade passed northward and southward through
Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence
unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given a
daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax
of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little
city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his
death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty, had
taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendours. The account of
Solomon’s magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is
questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to and
exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible
account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it appears at the
first reading. Solomon’s temple, if one works out the measurements,
would go inside a small suburban church, and his fourteen hundred
chariots cease to impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument
that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand to the
Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative
that Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his
people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off from
Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem
remained the capital city of Judah.
THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON
THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON
The bulls are in richly coloured enamel on baked brick
The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died, and
the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong
again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah
becomes a history of two little states ground between, first, Syria,
then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It
is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster.
It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C.
the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians
and its people utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in
604 B.C., as we have told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be
details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the
days of the Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true
story which squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of
Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century.
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and
evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the
command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge
from those who had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization.
In the development of their peculiar character a very great part was
played by certain men, a new sort of men, the Prophets, to whom we must
now direct our attention. These Prophets mark the appearance of new
and remarkable forces in the steady development of human society.