The Story of My People

It groups the books by kind. First comes the Law, then the history, then the poems, then the prophets. So the prophets come after the history books, even though they lived in the middle of that history. Amos is near the end of your Old Testament, but he preached in the years told in 2 Kings 14. Many people read the prophets for years without knowing which king was on the throne or which empire was at the gates.

So before we take the books one at a time, here is the whole story, from the beginning to the year I was born, told once and straight through. When a book of your Bible belongs to a part of the story, its name is in bold. At the end there is the same story again on a single page.

The stories before history

My people’s story begins with the world itself. Genesis tells how God made the heavens and the earth, how the first man and woman were sent out of the garden, how the flood came, and how the nations were scattered at Babel.

Then the story narrows to one family. God calls Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq and Turkey, for the land of Canaan. That is the narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the desert that you know as Israel and Palestine. Abraham’s son is Isaac. Isaac’s son is Jacob, whom God renames Israel. Jacob’s twelve sons become the twelve tribes, and by the end of Genesis the whole family has gone down to Egypt to escape a famine.

No one can put dates on these stories. No record from their own time outside the Bible mentions Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. They are the stories my people told about where they came from, and they were written down many centuries later. But this is where the story starts, and every child in my village knew it by heart.

Slaves, and set free

Exodus begins with Jacob’s descendants as slaves in Egypt, building storage cities for Pharaoh. God hears their cry and sends Moses. After ten plagues, Pharaoh lets them go, and they cross the sea on dry ground.

At Mount Sinai, God makes a covenant with them and gives them the Law. Leviticus sets out how the priests and the people are to worship and live, given while they camp at the mountain. Numbers follows them through forty years in the wilderness, because the generation that left Egypt was afraid to go into the land. Deuteronomy is Moses’s farewell, a long speech on the edge of the land, before he dies on a mountain looking across the Jordan.

These five books are the Law. For my people, the exodus was the center of everything. Our God was the God who sets slaves free, and we retold the story every year at Passover.

Egypt kept careful records, and none of them mentions Moses or the escape of a nation of slaves. Many scholars think the story grew from the memory of a smaller group, and its date is argued over. The first time the name Israel appears anywhere outside the Bible is on a stone set up by the Egyptian king Merneptah around 1208 BC. By then, Israel is already a people living in Canaan.¹

The land

Joshua tells how Moses’s successor led the tribes across the Jordan, brought down the walls of Jericho, conquered the land and divided it among the tribes. Judges tells a messier story. The tribes live among the Canaanites, turn to other gods, are crushed by their neighbors, and are rescued again and again by leaders called judges, such as Deborah, Gideon and Samson. Ruth, a short and gentle story about a foreign widow who becomes the great-grandmother of King David, is set in the same years.

Archaeology tells a quieter story than Joshua’s. Around 1200 BC, hundreds of small new villages appear in the hill country, built by farmers. The excavators of Jericho found little sign of a walled city there at that time. Most archaeologists now think Israel took shape slowly, mostly from people already in the land, not in one swift conquest.²

Kings

The tribes asked for a king, so that they could be like the other nations. The prophet Samuel warned them what a king would cost. He would take their sons for his chariots, their daughters for his kitchens, and a tenth of their harvests and their flocks (1 Samuel 8:11–17). They wanted one anyway.

The first king was Saul. The second was David, a shepherd from Bethlehem, who took Jerusalem around 1000 BC and made it his capital. His son Solomon built the Temple there. 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel and the first chapters of 1 Kings tell their story.

In my day, people remembered David’s kingdom as the golden age, and waited for a son of David to bring it back. That is why people called out to me as son of David. The scriptures remember the dark side too: David’s adultery and the murder he arranged to hide it, and Solomon’s forced labor and his seven hundred wives.

Many of the Psalms carry David’s name, and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs are linked to Solomon. Most of them were written or gathered later, as you will see in their chapters.

For a long time some scholars doubted that David had existed at all. Then, in 1993, pieces of a broken stone were found at Tel Dan, in the far north. On it, an enemy king of the 800s BC boasts of a victory over the house of David.³

Two kingdoms

When Solomon died, around 930 BC, the north refused to keep paying for his son’s court and broke away. From then on there were two kingdoms. Israel, in the north, was the larger and richer, and its capital in the end was Samaria. Judah, in the south, kept Jerusalem, the Temple and the family of David. 1 Kings and 2 Kings tell their stories side by side, king by king.

Remember this, because the prophets make no sense without it. When a prophet speaks to Israel or Ephraim, he usually means the north. When he speaks to Judah or Zion, he means the south.

The north had powerful kings, such as Omri and his son Ahab, and both are named in records outside the Bible.⁴ It also had prophets who stood up to them. Elijah confronted Ahab and his queen Jezebel. In the 700s BC, in good years for the rich and ruin for the poor, Amos and Hosea preached in the north. A prophet named Jonah is mentioned in the same years (2 Kings 14:25), though the book of Jonah was written much later.

Assyria

Then came the first of the great empires, Assyria, from what is now northern Iraq. Its armies were famous for terror.

In 722 BC, Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom and took Samaria. Its people were deported and scattered, and foreigners were settled in their place (2 Kings 17). The ten northern tribes never came back as tribes.⁵

In the south, Isaiah and Micah preached in Jerusalem through those years. In 701 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded Judah, destroyed its walled towns and shut King Hezekiah up in Jerusalem. Jerusalem survived. Sennacherib’s own record boasts that he trapped Hezekiah in his city like a bird in a cage, but it never claims that he took the city (2 Kings 18–19).⁶

Assyria fell in its turn. Its capital, Nineveh, was destroyed in 612 BC, and the little book of Nahum is a poem of joy at its fall.⁷

The last kings of Judah

Judah outlasted the north by more than a century. In 622 BC, under King Josiah, a scroll of the law was found in the Temple (2 Kings 22), and Josiah used it to purge the land of other gods. Many scholars think that scroll was an early form of Deuteronomy. Zephaniah preached in Josiah’s reign.

Josiah was killed in battle in 609 BC, trying to stop an Egyptian army. Soon after, Babylon, which had helped destroy Nineveh, became the new master of the whole region. Habakkuk asked God why he would use such a cruel nation. Jeremiah warned for forty years that Babylon would take the city, and was beaten and imprisoned for saying so.

In 597 BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and carried off the young king and thousands of its leading people. Among them was a priest named Ezekiel. Years later the king Babylon had put on the throne rebelled, and in 586 BC the Babylonians broke through the walls, burned the Temple and took most of those who were left to Babylon (2 Kings 25).⁸

Lamentations is five poems of grief for the ruined city. Obadiah condemns Edom, the neighboring people who joined in the looting.

Exile

This was the great disaster of my people’s history. No king, no Temple, no land. Many thought God had abandoned them, or had been beaten by the gods of Babylon. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion (Psalm 137:1).

But the exile is also where much of the Old Testament took its shape. In Babylon the exiles copied and gathered their scrolls, edited the history of their kings, and asked why it had all happened. Ezekiel saw visions there of God’s glory leaving the Temple and of a valley of dry bones coming back to life. An unnamed prophet whose words were added to Isaiah’s scroll, in chapters 40 to 55, promised that the exile would end. The stories of Daniel are set in Babylon in these years, though the book was finished much later.

Babylon’s own clay tablets list rations of oil for Jehoiachin, king of Judah, and his sons, held there as prisoners. The Bible remembers him there too. At the very end of 2 Kings, a later Babylonian king frees Jehoiachin and gives him a daily allowance for life (2 Kings 25:27–30).⁹

Coming home

In 539 BC, Cyrus the Persian took Babylon. The next year he allowed the exiles to go home and rebuild their Temple (Ezra 1). Isaiah’s scroll even calls him the LORD’s anointed, the LORD’s messiah, a foreign king (Isaiah 45:1).¹⁰

Not everyone went back. Those who did found a ruined city in a poor little province of the Persian empire. Haggai and Zechariah urged them in 520 BC to finish the Temple, and it was completed in 515 BC. This was the Second Temple, the one I knew, though by my time Herod had rebuilt and enlarged it on a vast scale.

Ezra, a priest and scribe, came from Persia to teach the Law, most likely in the 400s BC, and Nehemiah, a Jew who served at the Persian court, came as governor in 445 BC and rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls. Malachi scolded the priests of the rebuilt Temple. Esther is set among the Jews who stayed in Persia. Later, probably in the 300s BC, 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles retold the whole history, from Adam to Cyrus, for the people who had come back. Many scholars place Joel, Job and the book of Jonah somewhere in these Persian centuries too, and the Psalms were gathered into something close to the collection you have now.

It was in this Persian period, most scholars think, that the five books of the Law reached their final form.

The Greeks

In 332 BC, Alexander the Great swept through on his way to Egypt, and the land passed from the Persians to the Greeks. When Alexander died young, his generals divided his empire. For about a century the land belonged to the Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies. Then, from about 200 BC, it belonged to the Greek kings of Syria, the Seleucids.

Greek became the language of the whole eastern world. In Alexandria, Jews translated the scriptures into Greek, the translation I told you about in the opening essay. Many scholars date Ecclesiastes to the end of the Persian age or the start of the Greek one.

The Maccabees

Then a Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, tried to force my people to give up their law. In 167 BC he banned circumcision and the Sabbath, and he had an altar to a Greek god set up in the Temple. A priest named Mattathias and his sons rose in revolt. The most famous son, Judah, was nicknamed Maccabee, which probably means the Hammer. In 164 BC they took back the Temple and dedicated it again, and my people still keep that feast as Hanukkah. John’s gospel puts me in the Temple at that feast (John 10:22).¹¹

Most scholars think the book of Daniel was finished during this crisis, about 165 BC, to give hope to people who were being tortured for their faith. That makes it the latest book of the Hebrew scriptures. The story of the revolt is told in the books of the Maccabees, which are in some Bibles and not in others.

The family of the Maccabees, called the Hasmoneans, made themselves kings and high priests. For about eighty years my people ruled themselves again. It was the last time.

Rome

In 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem and walked into the Holy of Holies, the inner room of the Temple, where only the high priest went, once a year. From then on, my people lived under Rome.¹²

Rome ruled through kings it chose. The most famous was Herod, whom the Roman Senate named king of Judea in 40 BC. He ruled by fear, killed members of his own family, and rebuilt the Temple more splendidly than ever. He died in 4 BC.

I was born near the end of his reign. That is the world I was born into: a people who had been slaves and been freed, had kings and lost them, been carried off and come home, and then been ruled by one empire after another. They had the scriptures. They had the memory of David. And they had a Temple run by priests who worked with Rome.

Every book in this volume was written somewhere inside this story. When I quoted them, I quoted them to people who knew it.

The story on one page

• No dates possible — Creation, the flood, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Joseph in Egypt. (Genesis)
• Unknown; often placed in the 1200s BC — Slavery in Egypt, the exodus, the Law at Sinai, forty years in the wilderness. (Exodus to Deuteronomy)
• About 1200–1000 BC — Israel takes shape in the hill country. The judges. (Joshua, Judges, Ruth)
• About 1000 BC — David makes Jerusalem his capital. Solomon builds the Temple. (1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings)
• About 930 BC — The kingdom splits: Israel in the north, Judah in the south. (1 and 2 Kings)
• 700s BC — Amos and Hosea preach in the north; Isaiah and Micah in Jerusalem.
• 722 BC — Assyria destroys the northern kingdom. (2 Kings 17)
• 701 BC — Assyria besieges Jerusalem, and the city survives. (2 Kings 18–19)
• 622 BC — King Josiah’s reform. Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk and Jeremiah preach in Judah’s last years. (2 Kings 22–23)
• 597 and 586 BC — Babylon takes Jerusalem, then destroys it and the Temple. Ezekiel, Lamentations and Obadiah. (2 Kings 24–25)
• 539–538 BC — Persia takes Babylon, and Cyrus lets the exiles go home. (Ezra 1)
• 520–515 BC — The Temple is rebuilt. Haggai and Zechariah. (Ezra 5–6)
• 500s–400s BC — Malachi. Ezra and Nehemiah. Esther is set in these years. Chronicles follows later.
• 332 BC — Alexander the Great. The Greek age begins.
• 167–164 BC — The Maccabees revolt and win back the Temple. Daniel is finished.
• 63 BC — Rome takes Jerusalem.
• About 4 BC — I am born, near the end of Herod’s reign.