The Land of Israel – Historic Palestine – lies at the center of the national narratives and collective imaginations of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. Here we have tried to provide a very brief survey of the land’s history from ancient times until modern. Through it, the reader should be able to better understand the backdrop of the modern national movements and historical developments described in the main body of this briefing book.
For thousands of years prior to the appearance of the ancient Israelites in the territory, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea had been a land bridge connecting the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent with ancient Egypt. Known during this period as Canaan, the land was witness to repeated incursions and occupations by empires from beyond the Nile and Euphrates, as well as periods of greater or lesser independence by local Canaanite tribes. These were semitic peoples with varying polytheistic/pagan religions, and no independent political entity ever comprised its bulk.
Archaeologists first detect organized settlement that is recognizably Israelite in the central hill-country of Canaan in the thirteenth century BCE. During the first half of the first millennium BCE, we see a plethora of archaeological and ancient documentary evidence of two major Israelite kingdoms in Canaan: Israel in the north (with its capital at Samaria) and Judah in the south, whose capital was Jerusalem. Both of these kingdoms were centered in the central hills, while much of the coastal plain to the west was controlled by the Philistines, an Aegean people who first migrated to the area around the same time. The Philistines and the Israelites were often at war.
Researchers are divided as to what weight to accord the Hebrew Bible as a historical source. While many of the stories contained therein are unverifiable or based on supernatural assumptions, others match the archeological record. Numerous scholars view the broad strokes of biblical narrative from the book of Kings (roughly 1000 BC) onward as historically reliable to some extent. Despite the impossibility of verifying it, the biblical account of the proto-history of Israel is still of great significance to Jewish and Israeli identity and self-imagination, and so we will provide a summary of it here.
According to the Bible, all the ancient Israelites were descended from the single patriarch Abraham, through his son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob, whose own twelve sons were the eponymous ancestors of Israel’s twelve tribes. In the book of Genesis, Abraham, born in Mesopotamia, first immigrated to Canaan at the command of God, who promised him:
Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you. […]
And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother's son […] and they went to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan. And Abram passed through the land, until the place of Shechem [Nablus], until the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanites were then in the land. And the Lord appeared to Abram, and He said, "To your offspring I will give this land." (Genesis 12:1–7)
God’s promise to Abraham regarding the inheritance of the land is repeated several times in the book of Genesis. Although Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, only Isaac became Abraham’s heir (Genesis 15:4). Isaac himself has two sons, Esau and Jacob, but again the inheritance was restricted to the latter (Genesis 28:13). Jacob’s twelve sons and their families descended to Egypt from Canaan due to the exigencies of famine, and there they multiplied and became a great nation.
After the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, God heard their cries of suffering and sent the prophet Moses to redeem them from Egypt and bring them to the promised land of Canaan. The biblical books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua describe the journey of the Israelites to Canaan and their conquest of it under the leadership of the prophet Joshua, Moses’s heir. The land was gifted to the Israelites on the condition that they live up to certain moral and religious standards (see e.g., Leviticus 18:26). God promised that if the people did not meet these standards, exile would follow, but that if they repented, he would return them and restore their fortunes (Deuteronomy 30).
This drama – God’s promise of the land to the Israelites as reward for obedience and threat of exile if they refuse – is a major theme of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah also prescribes ritual commandments specific to the Land of Israel, mainly the laws related to agriculture, the monarchy, and the Holy Temple. This makes the Land of Israel inextricably linked to the Jewish faith.
In the continuation of the biblical story, after several hundred years of decentralized tribal rule among the Israelites, a united monarchy was instituted under King Saul, followed by David and his son Solomon. The reign of the latter is portrayed in the Bible as the golden age of Israelite political independence, with Solomon ruling an empire that stretched from the Sinai desert to the Euphrates River. Solomon also built a magnificent Temple to God in his capital of Jerusalem, which would be a site of pilgrimage and the focal point of all Israelite worship until its destruction four hundred years later. According to the Bible, the Temple was built on the spot where God had tested Abraham hundreds of years earlier by ordering him to sacrifice his son Isaac and then intervening at the last minute to save him. To this day, the site where that ancient Temple is believed to have stood (now known as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s old city) remains the point toward which all Jews turn in prayer.
After the death of Solomon, the unified Israelite kingdom split in two. Rather than continue to serve Solomon’s oppressive son Rehoboam, the northern ten tribes of Israel split off and founded their own state. Rehoboam maintained the allegiance of his own tribe, Judah, and the capital of Jerusalem with the Temple. (The twelfth tribe, Levi, formed a priestly caste that had no territory of its own and was scattered among the others.)
From this point onward, both the biblical account and external historical sources agree the Israelite kingdoms fell under the shadow of the major Mesopotamian empires. In 732 BCE, following an appeal by king Ahaz of Judah, who was at war with the northern kingdom of Israel, Tiglath Pileser III of Assyria invaded the northern kingdom and exiled its inhabitants. In 586 BCE, following a revolt by the kingdom of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonian empire destroyed Jerusalem, together with the Temple, and took its people captive in Babylon.
After the Persian King Cyrus conquered the Babylonian Empire around 538 BCE, the exiled Judahites (now called Jews) were gradually allowed to return to Jerusalem from their exile. in 515 BCE they completed rebuilding a second Temple on the site of the first. Judea was an autonomous province of the Persian Empire ruled by a Jewish governor, a High Priest, and a supreme council of law (the Sanhedrin), all situated in Jerusalem. This system of governance continued under the empire of Alexander, but cultural and religious Hellenization began to threaten Jewish traditions and ways of life, climaxing under a series of persecutory laws by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215–164 BCE). The Jews successfully rebelled, achieving a state of full independence under the Hasmonean dynasty of priest-kings that would last more than one hundred years. This victory is commemorated today by the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.
In 63 BCE, weakened by civil strife among the Hasmoneans, Judea submitted to Pompey and became a client kingdom of Rome. The Romanized Jewish king Herod the Great (72–4 BCE) was the most notable king during this period, and he started a significant enlargement of the Temple Mount that was finished in 37 BCE. The rebuilt Second Temple that resulted was colossal, dwarfing its predecessors and constituting an architectural monument famous the world over. This was the Temple in which Jesus preached and worshipped. Soon, however, the Jews rebelled again, this time against the Romans. In 70 CE, three legions of the Roman army led by Titus conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, putting an end to the revolt. The majority of Jews were exiled and dispersed across the empire, beginning the great Jewish Diaspora. In 132 CE, a group of remaining Jewish fighters revolted once more against Roman rule under the leadership of Simon Bar Kokhba but were eventually crushed in the battle of Beitar in the Judean Hills. Subsequently, the Romans utterly wiped out what was left the Jewish community in Judea. They renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina” after the emperor Hadrian, and they began to call Judea “Palaestina” in memory of the Jews’ old nemeses, the Philistines. The Philistine peoples themselves had not existed for many hundreds of years; they too had been conquered by the Babylonians and their civilization destroyed. The Roman use of this name was an effort to weaken Jewish identification with the land. The few Jews that remained in the land of Israel moved to northern towns in the Galilee. In the five centuries that followed, Jerusalem remained under Roman and then Byzantine Christian rule. Until the Arab conquest in 637 CE, Jews were forbidden to enter the city.
The most important remnant of the Second Temple that is accessible today is the outer western retaining wall of the Second Temple compound: “the Western Wall” (“Wailing Wall” or “Kotel”). The Western Wall derives its significance from its proximity to the site of the Temple, whose inner sanctum, “The Holy of Holies,” is the most sacred site in Judaism. Today, the Western Wall is the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray. The Temple Mount itself is under the administration of the Muslim Waqf, which has forbidden non-Muslim prayers on the compound.
After the destruction of Jewish independence by the Romans, the hope of seeing it restored became a central component of Jewish religious consciousness and an expression of the belief in future redemption. The first exile by the Babylonians and subsequent return in the Persian period had been seen as foretold by the biblical prophecies. Now the prayer for a second return to Zion (another biblical name for Jerusalem and, by metonymy, for the Land of Israel as a whole) after this new exile was indelibly etched on the Jewish consciousness and expressed in countless rituals, prayers, and texts. The following excerpt from the book of Psalms is one of the more famous passages expressing the longing to return to Zion: