ISRAEL'S ANTIQUITY

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What is the evidence for the antiquity of Israel?

The earliest mention of Israel outside the Bible, and the only mention of Israel in Egyptian records discovered so far, is a line of the Merneptah Stela (also spelled Merenptah). The stela, discovered in 1896 in Merneptah's mortuary temple in Thebes, is a poetic eulogy to pharaoh Merneptah, who ruled Egypt after Rameses the Great, in the last decades of the 13th Century B.C. Of significance to Biblical studies is a short section at the end of the poem describing a campaign to Canaan by Merneptah in the first few years of his reign, approximately 1210 BC. One line mentions Israel:

• Israel is laid waste, its seed is not.

The Merneptah Stela implies Israel was well established by the end of the 13th century BC and could not have come into being later as some scholars have asserted. In the stela, Israel is identified by as a socioethnic unity powerful enough to be mentioned along with other major city-states that were also neutralized by Merneptah.

The first use of Israel in the Old Testament appears as the new name of Jacob after his encounter with God. In Genesis, Chapter 32:8 God says to Jacob:

• Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.

Israel became the name of the whole people, the Israelites, during the Exodus from Egypt. Exodus, Chapter 1:1 reads:

• Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob."

The Israelites went on to the Land of Canaan where, under the leadership of Joshua, they overcame the Canaanites who already lived there, and established their nation under Kings Saul, David, and Solomon. The land was then called by the name Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), first stated in I Samuel 13:19.

The First Temple was planned by David and erected by Solomon at a commanding position on Mount Moriah, now called the Temple Mount, dedicated in 953 BC. The First Temple stood for 374 years, until it was totally destroyed by the Babylonians led by King Nebuchadnezzar on the 9th day of Av, 586 BC.

After the reign of Solomon (approx. 950 BC), the Israelite kingdom broke up into two states: Israel, with its capital at Samaria, and Judah (origin of the name 'Jew'), under the house of David, with its capital at Jerusalem. The two kingdoms were later conquered by expanding Mesopotamian states, Israel by Assyria (approx. 720 BC) and Judah by Babylonia (586 BC). Jewish government was established again in Judea, but was finally lost until modern times after invasion by the Romans and the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, not many years after it was constructed by Herod the Great in 19 or 20 BC.

Sources and additional reading on this topic:

• The Temple Mount in Jerusalem
• The origins of Israel?
• David and Jerusalem
• History of ancient Israel and Judah
• The Emergence of Civilizations to 500 BCE