History of ancient Israel and Judah

For the pre-history of the region, see Pre-history of the Southern Levant. For an overview of the history of the general region, see History of the Levant. For an overview of the history of the region called Palestine, see History of Palestine.

The Iron Age kingdom of Israel (blue) and kingdom of Judah (tan), with their neighbours (8th century BCE)

Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms of the ancient Levant. This history of ancient Israel and Judah runs from the first mention of the name Israel in the archaeological record in 1209 BCE to the end of a nominally independent Judean kingdom in 63 BCE, with its conquest by Pompey. Sources for this history include the biblical narratives, epigraphy, and the material archaeological record.

The two kingdoms arose on the easternmost coast of the Mediterranean, the westernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, between the ancient empires of Egypt to the south; Assyria, Babylonia, and later Persia to the north and east; and Greece and later Rome across the sea to the west. The area involved is relatively small, roughly 100 miles north to south and 40 or 50 miles east to west.

Israel and Judah emerged from the indigenous Canaanite culture of the Late Bronze Age, and were based on villages that formed and grew in the southern Levant highlands (i.e., the region between the coastal plain and the Jordan Valley) between 1200 and 1000. Israel became an important local power in the 9th and 8th centuries before falling to the Assyrians in 722; the southern kingdom, Judah, enjoyed a period of prosperity as a client-state of the greater empires of the region before a revolt against Babylon led to its destruction in 586. Judean exiles returned from Babylon early in the following Persian period, inaugurating the formative period in the development of a distinctive Judahite identity in the province of Yehud, as Judah was now called. Yehud was absorbed into the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the 2nd century BCE, the Judaeans revolted against the (Hellenistic) Seleucid Empire and created an independent Hasmonean kingdom, which was conquered by Pompey in the 1st century BCE and became first a Roman client state and was later combined with other territories into a Roman province which historians refer to as Iudaea province.

Periods and chronology

• Late Bronze Age: 1550–1200 BCE
• Iron Age I: 1200–1000 BCE
• Iron Age II: 1000–586 BCE
• Babylonian: 586–539 BCE
• Persian: 539–332 BCE
• Hellenistic: 332–53 BCE

Sources

The sources for the history of ancient Israel and Judah can be broadly divided into the biblical narrative (essentially the Hebrew Bible, but also Deuterocanonical and non-biblical works for the later period) and the archaeological record. The latter can again be divided between epigraphy (written inscriptions) and the material record (everything else).

The Bible narratives are ascribed to the eras they depict by Bava Batra 14b ff. (Talmud) and early Church Fathers. Modern critic Michael Coogan sees Joshua 1–12 as a carefully constructed idealized etiological narrative rather than an objective record of history.

The Bible contains a mixture of narrative history, religious hymns, wisdom literature and other works – all of them can provide historians with information on the history of ancient Israel and Judah. There is general agreement, however, that the narrative history in particular is not simple reportage of events, but was written in order to advance a particular ideology in which Israel was depicted as the Chosen People of God and Palestine as their Promised Land. The authors of this history are unknown, as are the sources they may have used, although there is again general agreement that the bulk of it was composed in the 6th century BCE.

Late Bronze Age

The Canaanite god Ba'al, 14th–12th century BC (Louvre museum, Paris)

The eastern Mediterranean seaboard – the Levant – stretches 400 miles north to south from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai desert, and 70 to 100 miles east to west between the sea and the Arabian desert. The coastal plain of the southern Levant, broad in the south and narrowing to the north, is backed in its southernmost portion by a zone of foothills, the Shephalah; like the plain this narrows as it goes northwards, ending in the promontory of Mount Carmel. East of the plain and the Shephalah is a mountainous ridge, the "hill country of Judah" in the south, the "hill country of Ephraim" north of that, then Galilee and the Lebanon mountains. To the east again lie the steep-sided valley occupied by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the wadi of the Arabah, which continues down to the eastern arm of the Red Sea. Beyond the plateau is the Syrian desert, separating the Levant from Mesopotamia. To the southwest is Egypt, to the northeast Mesopotamia. "The Levant thus constitutes a narrow corridor whose geographical setting made it a constant area of contention between more powerful entities".

Canaan was dominated by Egypt throughout the Late Bronze period and into the earliest part of the Iron Age (c. 1550–1150). Settlement was concentrated in cities along the coastal plain and along major communication routes; the central and northern hill country which would later become the biblical kingdom of Israel was only sparsely inhabited (25 villages in the Late Bronze), although letters from the Egyptian archives indicate that Jerusalem was already a Canaanite city-state recognising Egyptian overlordship. Each city had its own ruler, constantly at odds with his neighbours and appealing to the Egyptians to adjudicate his differences.

The Canaanite city-state system broke down at the end of the Late Bronze period, and Canaanite culture was then gradually absorbed into that of the Philistines, Phoenicians and Israelites. The process was gradual rather than swift: a strong Egyptian presence continued into the 12th century, and, while some Canaanite cities were destroyed, others continued to exist in Iron I.

Iron Age I

The Merneptah Stele (JE 31408), the earliest record of the name "Israel" (Cairo Museum)

The first record of the name Israel occurs in the Merneptah stele, erected for Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah c. 1209 BCE, "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not." William Dever sees this "Israel" in the central highlands as a cultural and probably political entity, well enough established to be perceived by the Egyptians as a possible challenge to their hegemony, but an ethnic group rather than an organised state.

The number of villages in the highlands increased to more than 300 by the end of Iron Age I (more and larger in the north), with the settled population rising from 20,000 in the twelfth century to 40,000 in the eleventh. The villages probably shared the highlands with other communities such as pastoral nomads, but only villagers left remains. These highlanders are usually identified with the "Israel" of Merneptah and of the bible, but their origin is a matter of ongoing dispute. Archaeologists and historians see more continuity than discontinuity between the highland settlements and the preceding Late Bronze Canaanite culture: certain features such as collar-rimmed jars and four-roomed houses were once identified as intrinsically "Israelite," but have been found to belong to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Palestine, and and the absence of pig bones from highland sites, their sole genuinely unique feature, has complicated roots, probably relating to survival strategies among new arrivals. McNutt says, "It is probably safe to assume that sometime during Iron Age I a population began to identify itself as 'Israelite'", differentiating itself from the Canaanites through such markers as the prohibition of intermarriage, an emphasis on family history and genealogy, and religion.

Iron Age II

A reconstructed Israelite house, 10th–7th centuries BCE. Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv.

Unusually favourable climatic conditions in the first two centuries of Iron Age II brought about an expansion of population, settlements and trade throughout the region. In the central highlands this resulted in unification in a kingdom with the city of Samaria as its capital, possibly by the second half of the 10th century when an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Shoshenq I, the biblical Shishak, records a series of campaigns directed at the area. It had clearly emerged by the middle of the 9th century BCE, when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III names "Ahab the Israelite" among his enemies at the battle of Qarqar (853 BCE), and the Mesha stele (c. 830 BCE) left by a king of Moab celebrates his success in throwing off the oppression of the "House of Omri" (i.e. Israel) and the Tel Dan stele tells of the death of a king of Israel, probably Jehoram, at the hands of an Aramaen king (c.841 BCE). In the earlier part of this period Israel was apparently engaged in a three-way contest with Damascus and Tyre for control of the Jezreel Valley and Galilee in the north, and with Moab, Ammon and Damascus in the east for control of Gilead; from the middle of the 8th century it came into increasing conflict with the expanding neo-Assyrian empire, which first split its territory into several smaller units and then destroyed its capital, Samaria (722 BCE). Both the biblical and Assyrian sources speak of a massive deportation of the people of Israel and their replacement with an equally large number of forced settlers from other parts of the empire – such population exchanges were an established part of Assyrian imperial policy, a means of breaking the old power structure. The former Israel never again became an independent political entity.

Surface surveys indicate that during the 10th and 9th centuries the southern highlands were divided between a number of centres, none with clear primacy. Unification (i.e., state formation) seems to have occurred no earlier than the 9th century, a period when Jerusalem was dominated by Israel, but the subject is the centre of considerable controversy and there is no definite answer to the question of when Judah emerged. In the 7th century Jerusalem became a city with a population many times greater than before and clear dominance over its neighbours, probably in a cooperative arrangement with the Assyrians to establish Judah as a pro-Assyrian vassal state controlling the valuable olive industry. Judah prospered under Assyrian vassalage, (despite a disastrous rebellion against the Assyrian king Sennacherib), but in the last half of the 7th century Assyria suddenly collapsed, and the ensuing competition between the Egyptian and Neo-Babylonian empires for control of Palestine led to the destruction of Judah in a series of campaigns between 597 and 582 BCE.

Babylonian period

The Ishtar Gate of Babylon

Babylonian Judah suffered a steep decline in both economy and population and lost the Negev, the Shephelah, and part of the Judean hill country, including Hebron, to encroachments from Edom and other neighbours. Jerusalem, while probably not totally abandoned, was much smaller than previously, and the town of Mizpah in Benjamin in the relatively unscathed northern section of the kingdom became the capital of the new Babylonian province of Yehud Medinata. (This was standard Babylonian practice: when the Philistine city of Ashkalon was conquered in 604 BCE, the political, religious and economic elite (but not the bulk of the population) was banished and the administrative centre shifted to a new location). There is also a strong probability that for most or all of the period the temple at Bethel in Benjamin replaced that at Jerusalem, boosting the prestige of Bethel's priests (the Aaronites) against those of Jerusalem (the Zadokites), now in exile in Babylon.

The Babylonian conquest entailed not just the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, but the liquidation of the entire infrastructure which had sustained Judah for centuries. The most significant casualty was the State ideology of "Zion theology," the idea that Yahweh, the god of Israel, had chosen Jerusalem for his dwelling-place and that the Davidic dynasty would reign there forever. The fall of the city and the end of Davidic kingship forced the leaders of the exile community – kings, priests, scribes and prophets – to reformulate the concepts of community, faith and politics. The exile community in Babylon thus became the source of significant portions of the Hebrew Bible: Isaiah 40–55, Ezekiel, the final version of Jeremiah, the work of the Priestly source in the Pentateuch, and the final form of the history of Israel from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings Theologically, they were responsible for the doctrines of individual responsibility and universalism (the concept that one god controls the entire world), and for the increased emphasis on purity and holiness. Most significantly, the trauma of the exile experience led to the development of a strong sense of identity as a people distinct from other peoples, and increased emphasis on symbols such as circumcision and Sabbath-observance to maintain that separation.

The concentration of the biblical literature on the experience of the exiles in Babylon disguises the fact that the great majority of the population remained in Judah, and for them life after the fall of Jerusalem probably went on much as it had before. It may even have improved, as they were rewarded with the land and property of the deportees, much to the anger of the exile community in Babylon. The assassination of the Babylonian governor around 582 BCE by a disaffected member of the former royal house of David provoked a Babylonian crackdown, possibly reflected in the Book of Lamentations, but the situation seems to have soon stabilised again. Nevertheless, the unwalled cities and towns that remained were subject to slave raids by the Phoenicians and intervention in their internal affairs from Samaritans, Arabs and Ammonites.

Persian period

Babylon was conquered by Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE and Judah (or Yehud medinata, the "province of Yehud") remained a province of the Persian empire until 332 BCE. Cyrus was succeeded as king by Cambyses, who added Egypt to the empire, incidentally transforming Yehud and the Philistine plain into an important frontier zone; his death in 522 was followed by a period of turmoil until Darius the Great seized the throne in about 521. Darius introduced a reform of the administrative arrangements of the empire including the collection, codification and administration of local law codes, and it is reasonable to suppose that this policy lay behind the redaction of the Jewish Torah. After 404 BCE the Persians lost control of Egypt, which now became Persia's main enemy outside Europe, causing the Persian authorities to tighten their administrative control over Yehud and the rest of Palestine. Egypt was eventually reconquered, but soon afterward Persia fell to Alexander the Great, ushering in the Hellenistic period in the Levant.

Judah's population over the entire period was probably never more than about 30,000, and that of Jerusalem no more than about 1,500, most of them connected in some way to the Temple. According to the biblical history, one of the first acts of Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, was to commission the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, a task which they are said to have completed c. 515 BCE. Yet it was probably only in the middle of the next century, at the earliest, that Jerusalem again became the capital of Judah. The Persians may have experimented initially with ruling Yehud as a Dividic client-kingdom under descendants of Jehoiachin, but by the mid–5th century Yehud had become in practice a theocracy, ruled by hereditary High Priests and a Persian-appointed governor, frequently Jewish, charged with keeping order and seeing that tribute was paid. According to the biblical history Ezra and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century, the first empowered by the Persian king to enforce the Torah, the second with the status of governor and a royal mission to restore the walls of the city. The biblical history mentions tension between the returnees and those who had remained in Yehud, the former rebuffing the attempt of the "peoples of the land" to participate in the rebuilding of the Temple; this attitude was based partly on the exclusivism which the exiles had developed while in Babylon and, probably, partly on disputes over property. The careers of Ezra and Nehemiah in the 5th century were thus a kind of religious colonisation in reverse, an attempt by one of the many Jewish factions in Babylon to create a self-segregated, ritually pure society inspired by the prophesies of Ezekiel and his followers.

The extent of the Hasmonean kingdom

Iudaea Province and surrounding area in the 1st century

The Persian era, and especially the period 538–400 BCE, laid the foundations of later Jewish and Christian religion and the beginnings of a scriptural canon. other important landmarks include the replacement of Hebrew by Aramaic as the everyday language of Judah (although it continued to be used for religious and literary purposes), and Darius's reform of the administrative arrangements of the empire, which may lie behind the redaction of the Jewish Torah.

Hellenistic period

On the death of Alexander the Great (322 BCE) his generals divided the empire between them. Ptolemy I seized Egypt and Palestine, but his successors lost Palestine and Judea to the Seleucids, the rulers of Syria, in 198 BCE. At first relations between the Seleucids and the Jews were cordial, but the attempt of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (174–163 BCE) to impose Hellenic culture sparked a national rebellion, which ended in the expulsion of the Syrians and the establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmonean kingdom was a conscious attempt to revive the Judah described in the Bible: a Jewish monarchy ruled from Jerusalem and stretching over all the territories once ruled by David and Solomon. In order to carry out this project the Hasmoneans kings forcibly converted to Judaism the one-time Moabites, Edomites and Ammonites, as well as the lost kingdom of Israel.

In 64 BCE the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and made the Jewish kingdom a client of Rome. In 40–39 BCE Herod the Great was appointed King of the Jews by the Roman Senate, and in 6 CE the last ethnarch of Judea was deposed by the emperor Augustus and his territories were combined with Idumea and Samaria and annexed as Iudaea Province under direct Roman administration.

Religion

Pre-monarchical period

The religion of the earliest Israelites, c.1200 BCE, was based on the cult of the ancestors and the worship of family gods, especially El and Baal. This changed with the emergence of the monarchy in Israel: the king promoted his own family god, Yahweh, as the god of the kingdom, and the Exodus narrative as a national charter myth. The destruction of the Israelite kingdom c.721 BCE meant the end of both the Israelite state religion and of family religion; their place was taken by a national religion and personal devotion. The key group in this transformation were the Deuteronomists, an intellectual and religious movement based in the prophetic tradition of Israel. Moving to Judah after the fall of Samaria, they introduced sweeping reforms in Jerusalem which declared illicit the forms of traditional religion, centralised worship in a single national Temple, and promoted worship of one god through the Law.

Despite the Canaanite origins of the Israelites, Yahweh was not a Canaanite god; he seems to have originated in Edom and Midian to the south, and may have been brought north to Israel by the Kenites and Midianites, although the matter remains speculative. He subsequently assimilated the older Canaanite god El.

Monarchical period

It is generally accepted among modern scholars that the narrative of Israel's history found in the biblical Books of Kings is not an accurate reflection of the religious world of Iron Age Judah and Israel. Contrary to the biblical picture, Israelite monotheism was not a primordial condition, but the end result of a gradual process which began with the normal beliefs and practices of the ancient world.

Israel and Judah inherited the religion of late first-millennium Canaan, and Canaanite religion in turn had its roots in the religion of second-millennium Ugarit. In the 2nd millennium, polytheism was expressed through the concepts of the divine council and the divine family, a single entity with four levels: the chief god and his wife (El (deity) and Asherah); the seventy divine children or "stars of El" (including Baal, Astarte, Anat, probably Resheph, as well as the sun-goddess Shapshu and the moon-god Yerak); the head helper of the divine household, Kothar wa-Hasis; and the servants of the divine household, including the messenger-gods who would later appear as the "angels" of the Hebrew Bible.

In the earliest stage, Yahweh was one of the seventy children of El, each of whom was the patron deity of one of the seventy nations. This is illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint texts of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, in which El, as the head of the divine assembly, gives each member of the divine family a nation of his own, "according to the number of the divine sons": Israel is the portion of Yahweh. The later Masoretic text, evidently uncomfortable with the polytheism expressed by the phrase, altered it to "according to the number of the children of Israel"

Between the eighth to the sixth centuries El became identified with Yahweh, Yahweh-El became the husband of the goddess Asherah, and the other gods and the divine messengers gradually became mere expressions of Yahweh's power. Yahweh is cast in the role of the Divine King ruling over all the other deities, as in Psalm 29:2, where the "sons of God" are called upon to worship Yahweh; and as Ezekiel 8–10 suggests, the Temple itself became Yahweh's palace, populated by those in his retinue.

It is in this period that the earliest clear monotheistic statements appear in the Bible, for example in the apparently seventh-century Deuteronomy 4:35, 4:39, 1 Samuel 2:2, 2 Samuel 7:22, 2 Kings 19:15, 19:19 (=Isaiah 37:16, 37:20), and Jeremiah 16:19, 16:20 and the sixth-century portion of Isaiah (43:10–11, 44:6, 44:8, 45:5–7, 45:14, 45:18, 45:21, and 46:9). Because many of the passages involved appear in works associated with either Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings) or in Jeremiah, most recent scholarly treatments have suggested that a Deuteronomistic movement of this period developed the idea of monotheism as a response to the religious issues of the time.

The first factor behind this development involves changes in Israel's social structure. At Ugarit, social identity was strongest at the level of the family: legal documents, for example, were often made between the sons of one family and the sons of another. Ugarit's religion, with its divine family headed by El and Asherah, mirrored this human reality. The same was true in ancient Israel through most of the monarchy – for example, the story of Achan in Joshua 7 suggests an extended family as the major social unit. However, the family lineages went through traumatic changes beginning in the eighth century due to major social stratification, followed by Assyrian incursions. In the seventh and sixth centuries, we begin to see expressions of individual identity (Deuteronomy 26:16; Jeremiah 31:29–30; Ezekiel 18). A culture with a diminished lineage system, deteriorating over a long period from the ninth or eighth century onward, less embedded in traditional family patrimonies, might be more predisposed both to hold the individual accountable for his behavior, and to see an individual deity accountable for the cosmos. In short, the rise of the individual as the basic social unit led to the rise of a single god replacing a divine family.

The second major factor was the rise of the neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires. As long as Israel was, from its own perspective, part of a community of similar small nations, it made sense to see the Israelite pantheon on par with the other nations, each one with its own patron god – the picture described with Deuteronomy 32:8–9. The assumption behind this worldview was that each nation was as powerful as its patron god. However, the neo-Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in ca. 722 challenged this, for if the neo-Assyrian empire were so powerful, so must be its god; and conversely, if Israel could be conquered (and later Judah, c. 586), it implied that Yahweh in turn was a minor divinity. The crisis was met by separating the heavenly power and earthly kingdoms. Even though Assyria and Babylon were so powerful, the new monotheistic thinking in Israel reasoned, this did not mean that the god of Israel and Judah was weak. Assyria had not succeeded because of the power of its god Marduk; it was Yahweh who was using Assyria to punish and purify the one nation which Yahweh had chosen.

By the post-Exilic period, full monotheism had emerged: Yahweh was the sole God, not just of Israel, but of the whole world. If the nations were tools of Yahweh, then the new king who would come to redeem Israel might not be a Judean as taught in older literature (e.g. Psalm 2). Now, even a foreigner such as Cyrus the Persian could serve as the Lord's anointed (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1). One god stood behind all the world's history.

Biblical Israel

The "Israel" of the Persian period included descendants of the inhabitants of the old kingdom of Judah, returnees from the Babylonian exile community, Mesopotamians who had joined them or had been exiled themselves to Samaria at a far earlier period, Samaritans and others.

See also

Time periods in the region of Palestine Bible Biblical archaeology Canaan Jew Israelites United Monarchy Chronology of the Bible Hebrew Bible Jewish diaspora Yehud Medinata History of Levant History of Israel Kingdom of Judah Old Testament Tanakh Torah Timeline of Christianity

Notable people Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Benjamin, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Gideon, Deborah, Samson, Samuel Kings of Israel Main: List of the Kings of Israel Saul, Ish-bosheth, David, Solomon, Jeroboam, Nadab, Baasha, Elah, Zimri, Omri, Ahab Ahaziah, Jehoram, Jehu, Elisha, Jehoahaz, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, Zachariah, Shallum, Menahem, Pekahiah, Pekah, Hoshea Kings of Judah Main: List of the Kings of Judah Rehoboam, Abijam, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, Ahaziah, Athaliah, Jehoash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon, Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jeconiah, Zedekiah

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• Middlemas, Jill Anne (2005). The Troubles of Templeless Judah. Oxford University Press.
• Miller, James Maxwell; Hayes, John Haralson (1986). A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 066421262X.
• Miller, Robert D. (2005). Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries B.C. Eerdmans.
• Nodet, Étienne (1999) [Editions du Cerf 1997]. A Search for the Origins of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah. Sheffield Academic Press.
• Smith, Mark S. (2001). Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century. Hendrickson Publishers.
• Smith, Mark S.; Miller, Patrick D. (2002) [Harper & Row 1990]. The Early History of God. Eerdmans.
• Soggin, Michael J. (1998). An Introduction to the History of Israel and Judah. Paideia.
• Thompson, Thomas L. (1992). Early History of the Israelite People. Brill.
• Van der Toorn, Karel (1996). Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel. Brill.
• Van der Toorn, Karel; Becking, Bob; Van der Horst, Pieter Willem (1999). Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2d ed.). Koninklijke Brill.
• Vaughn, Andrew G.; Killebrew, Ann E., eds. (1992). Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period. Sheffield. {{cite book}}: |first2= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Cahill, Jane M. "Jerusalem at the Time of the United Monarchy". {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) Lehman, Gunnar. "The United Monarchy in the Countryside". {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Wylen, Stephen M. (1996). The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction. Paulist Press.
• Zevit, Ziony (2001). The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches. Continuum.

Further reading

• Avery-Peck, Alan, and Neusner, Jacob, (eds), "The Blackwell Companion to Judaism (Blackwell, 2003)
• Boadt, Lawrence, "Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction" (Paulist Press, 1984)
• Brettler, Marc Zvi, "The Creation of History in Ancient Israel" (Routledge, 1995), and also review at Dannyreviews.com
• Cook, Stephen L., "The social roots of biblical Yahwism" (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004)
• Day, John (ed), "In search of pre-exilic Israel: proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar" (T&T Clark International, 2004)
• Gravett, Sandra L., "An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: A Thematic Approach" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008)
• Grisanti, Michael A., and Howard, David M., (eds), "Giving the Sense:Understanding and Using Old Testament Historical Texts" (Kregel Publications, 2003)
• Kavon, Eli, "Did the Maccabees Betray the Hanukka Revolution?" (The Jerusalem Post, 26 December 2005)
• Levine, Lee I., "Jerusalem: portrait of the city in the second Temple period (538 B.C.E.–70 C.E.)" (Jewish Publication Society, 2002)
• Na'aman, Nadav, "Ancient Israel and its neighbours" (Eisenbrauns. 2005)
• Penchansky, David, "Twilight of the gods: polytheism in the Hebrew Bible" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)
• Provan, Iain William, Long, V. Philips, Longman, Tremper, "A Biblical History of Israel" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003)
• Stackert, Jeffrey, "Rewriting the Torah: literary revision in Deuteronomy and the holiness code" (Mohr Siebeck, 2007)
• Vanderkam, James, "An introduction to early Judaism" (Eerdmans, 2001)
• Velazquez, Efrain, "The Persian Period and the Origins of 'Israel': Beyond the Myths", (Bible and Interpretation, July 2009)