A history of the people of Israel, c. 1800 B.C.-A.D. 1980

PREFACE: The dramatic and often tragic story of the people of Israel during more than three and a half milleniums is about a community bound together by its belief that, in a unique way, it is the people of God. This book surveys and interprets Israel’s story, with special attention to the Biblical period. Beginning with Abraham, the father of the faithful, Israel’s long succession of larger-than-life individuals is reviewed against the historical background and main events of Old Testament times and also of the two centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. In the many transformations of Israel’s history, as sketched in the first six parts of this book, we meet: patriarchs, priests, prophets, warriors, tribal chiefs, kings, queens, governors, revolutionaries. Despite their formidable and often difficult-to-pronounce names, and the almost inconceivable situations they faced, these people emerge from the remove past as human beings basically like ourselves. To complete the story, the last two sections of this book trace Israel’s survival and the vicissitudes of the land of Palestine from Roman times to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Because the aim of this volume is to shed light on the Scriptures, many Biblical references are given, with the hope that these may induce readers to go to the original documents themselves and fill out this necessarily concise account. Chronology being the backbone of historical understanding, many dates are cited, not because they are hard and fast–most dates of the B.C. era are open to question–but because they help to establish the relationship of events. The story of the people of Israel is important to us, partly because Abraham’s descendants live in our midst today, bearers of the oldest surviving civilization of the Western world. Many aspects of their ancient story forcibly remind us of ourselves and our own predicaments. Moreover, the Biblical history is, in a sense, our history…