Once again, politics has crossed over into the pop culture world as Ed Sheeran has been forced to weigh in on the subject of Palestine. As in our current culture, silence from a celebrity is the same as acceptance of the Palestinian genocide. Macklemore, in the meantime, has announced his own “Free Palestine” tour. All this attention is keeping the issues in Israel/Gaza at the forefront.
One of the main issues that continues to dominate the debate is colonization. As long as Jews are seen as colonizers, then nothing they do matters because they are simply at fault. The question is then debated as to who colonized whom. Yet, when we look at this area, that question is not so simple, because who has the rightful claim is not a simple issue.
When we ask who has a historical claim to the land that is today Israel and Palestine, it is important to remember that the modern idea of national ownership does not fit neatly onto the ancient world. For thousands of years, the land was inhabited, conquered, divided, and ruled by different peoples and empires. Both the Bible and archaeology provide evidence for parts of this history, although they do not always tell the same story. The clearest way to understand the competing historical connections is to follow the people and kingdoms that lived and ruled there over time.
As I wrote last week, the earliest people specifically associated with Israel today were the Canaanites (the closest connections to today’s Palestinians). Long before there was an Israelite kingdom, Canaan was home to numerous cities and peoples spread throughout what was known as the Levant. Archaeology confirms the existence of a distinctive Canaanite culture. The Bible itself acknowledges that when Abraham arrived, “the Canaanite was then in the land.” According to the Bible, Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt and Joshua conquered the land from the Canaanites. Archaeology cannot confirm the exodus exactly as described in the Bible, and instead researchers believe Israel probably grew as a separate people from the Canaanites. What we do know, however, is that by approximately 1200 BC, a people called Israel were clearly present in the region.
Picking up where I left off, the next step was that the Israelites eventually developed a monarchy. According to the Bible, Saul became the first king, followed by David and
then Solomon. David established Jerusalem as his political center, and Solomon is credited with building the First Temple there. The historical evidence for the early monarchy is not as extensive as the biblical narrative, but a broken monument from an Aramean king in the ninth century BC, called the Tel Dan Stele, refers to the “House of David.”
As for the Canaanites, they continued to live among and alongside the Israelites. Some Canaanite populations were gradually absorbed into Israelite and neighboring societies, while others remained distinct, particularly in cities and areas outside Israelite control. At roughly the same time, the Philistines established themselves along the southern Mediterranean coast. Unlike the older Canaanite population, the Philistines appear to have arrived in the region around 1200 BC, probably as part of the movements of the Sea Peoples, and developed their own distinct culture before becoming increasingly influenced by the surrounding Israelite and Canaanite societies. The Philistines became one of Israel’s principal rivals during the reigns of the kings, while Canaanite populations continued to live within and around the Israelite kingdoms. Thus, during the period of the Israelite monarchy, Israelites, Canaanites, Philistines, and other peoples were all living in the same broader region, sometimes peacefully and sometimes in conflict.
After Solomon’s death, the kingdom divided. The northern Kingdom of Israel centered on Samaria, with Mount Gerizim as God’s holiest place, while the southern Kingdom of Judah centered on Jerusalem. They were independent kingdoms, although they shared Israelite religious traditions and a common heritage. They were surrounded by other peoples and kingdoms, including the Philistines, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites. The land was therefore never occupied solely by one people.
The next major occupiers were the Assyrians, from what we now call northern Iraq. In the 720s BC, they captured Samaria and destroyed the independent Kingdom of Israel. Much of its population was deported, and Israel became an Assyrian province. Judah survived for another century, although it also became subject to Assyrian power in 701 BC.
Judah eventually faced an even greater conqueror, the Babylonians from southern Iraq. After the Babylonians defeated Assyria, they inherited control of much of the region. In 586 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple, and deported a significant portion of Judah’s population to Babylon, marking the end of the independent kingdom of Judah. Yet the Judean people did not disappear. They maintained their religious and cultural identity in exile, and some eventually returned to Jerusalem.
By the time the Babylonians conquered Judah, the Canaanites were no longer a clearly identifiable separate people in the way they had been centuries earlier. Their culture and identity had largely been absorbed through intermarriage and assimilation. They adopted new languages and religions and became part of the Israelites, Judeans, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, and other local populations.
Next, the Babylonian Empire itself was conquered by the Persians from today’s Iran in 539 BC. Persian rule lasted for roughly two centuries. The Persians permitted the Jews to return to their homelands and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The land was therefore once again populated by a substantial Jewish population, but it was part of the larger Persian Empire rather than an independent Jewish kingdom.
This land continued to be a favorite place to conquer. Persia fell to Alexander the Great and the Greeks in 332 BC. After Alexander’s death, control shifted between Egypt and Syria. Greek language and culture became increasingly influential among most of the peoples, including the ancient ancestors of the Palestinians, while Jewish religious and cultural traditions remained strong. Eventually, the Maccabean revolt (think Hanukkah) overthrew Syrian rule and established a period of Jewish independence beginning in the second century BC.
This brings us to the New Testament and the colonization by the most famous of the conquerors, the Romans. By this time, the land had an extraordinarily complicated history, making it difficult for anyone to make a claim. The Canaanites were there first but had basically dissolved as a civilization as they assimilated into the many different peoples and societies that conquered the region. At the same time, most of the Israelites from the northern kingdom had ceased to exist as a distinct group. The one group that seemed to remain relatively intact was the Jews, Benjaminites, and Levites from the southern kingdom. Yet all that would soon change under the Romans.
