IN THE BEGINNING...

In the late second millennium BCE a Semitic tribal confederation from the east began migrating westward into the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a place known as Canaan. These tribal groups became known as the Hebrews because of their language, and as Israelites because they claimed descent from an eponymous ancestor named Israel (Jacob). Their tribal traditions of origin describe their migration into Canaan as escaped slaves from bondage in Egypt who then became conquerors in Canaan, but archaeologically and textually (outside of the Torah), there is no evidence of any massive “Exodus” of Hebrew slaves at any point in Egyptian history. (cf. renowned Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, William G. Dever’s “Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?” Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003.)

Along the lines of pursuing a fuller understanding of the past as a key to gaining a clearer understanding of the present, we will begin our historical tour at a point in time scholars of the Middle East have designated as the beginnings of the “Iron Age.” By roughly 1100 BCE, the world’s three superpowers – the Babylonia of the Kassite kings, the Anatolia of the Hittites, and Ramesside Egypt – basically ran out of gas, so to speak, and gave way to a political power vacuum whereby new kingdoms and smaller powers took advantage of the situation and developed themselves into independent polities without the usual interferences of the three larger powers, who were all now in decline. By this time, the tribes called Israel had, as is shown by Syro-Palestinian archaeology, conquered most of the hill country of Canaan, and by ca. 1010 BCE, the Israelites were able to establish an independent kingdom in Canaan under David, who in turn was succeeded by Solomon around 970 BCE. With the death of King Solomon in 926, his son Rehoboam took the throne of Israel. Unfortunately, King Rehoboam was a headstrong and ambitious leader who shunned the wise counsel given to him by the elders of his father’s court. With only the tribes of Benjamin and Judah on his side, he provoked the ten northern tribes of Israel into a revolt, which was led by the future king of the north, Jeroboam. When this unified kingdom, built and maintained for eighty-four years by David and Solomon, was split into two rival, hostile polities – the northern one of “Israel” under King Jeroboam and the southern “Judah” (including Jerusalem) under King Rehoboam – a period of history began when a series of critically bad political decisions were made by the leaders of the Hebrew tribes, and these decisions affected, for centuries, the lives of the common people, who always seem to have to bear the suffering which comes as a result of their leaders’ headstrong follies in politics and war.(3)

The rivalry between these two small kingdoms – Israel and Judah – was so great that King Jeroboam of Israel established two temples of worship, one in Bethel, and one in Dan, just to keep his people from going to Jerusalem in the south. To separate his kingdom’s religion from the practices of Judah, he also instituted the worship of Yahweh in the form of a golden calf. He installed one golden calf-Yahweh in the temple at Bethel and another in the temple he had built at Dan.(4) Within the 5th or 6th century BCE oral traditions and collective ‘historical memories’ of the scribes and scholars who wrote down and compiled the books of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the Jews in the “Book of Exodus,” who while waiting for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai, reverted to paganism and began to worship the “graven image” of a golden calf, could very well have had its origins in the historical 9th century BCE religious innovations and heresies introduced by King Jeroboam.