A missing chapter · The ancient Near East

Ancient Israel and Judah

A small kingdom in the hills between the great empires, and the written and carved evidence that it was really there.

Standards alignment
New York State Social Studies Framework, Key Idea 9.1, Development of Civilization (the First Civilizations). Grade 9, Global History & Geography I.

Three thousand years ago, in the hill country between the great empires of the ancient Near East, a people called the Israelites built villages, towns, and kingdoms. They lived in the same world as Egypt and Mesopotamia, traded and fought with the powers around them, and left behind writing, cities, and objects that archaeologists still dig up today.

The evidence they and their neighbors left behind is unusual. Some of the strongest evidence that ancient Israel existed comes from its enemies: the kings of Egypt and Assyria carved monuments boasting about defeating Israel. Alongside those outside witnesses are the objects the Israelites made themselves: letters, seals, and inscriptions in their own early Hebrew. Together they let us study ancient Israel and Judah the way we study any ancient civilization: through its cities, its writing, its government, its religion, and the record it left in the ground.

Where and when

Ancient Israel sat in the hill country of Canaan, the historic name for the land along the eastern Mediterranean coast that today includes Israel and the Palestinian territories. Unlike Egypt on the Nile or Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, Israel was not a river-valley society. It grew up in the highlands between those great powers, on the land bridge between Africa and Asia, astride the trade routes that joined them. That location shaped its history: a small people living in the path of much larger empires.

The earliest archaeological trace of a distinct Israelite population appears in the highlands from around 1200 BCE: hundreds of small new villages. Most archaeologists identify their settlers with the early Israelites, partly from the near-absence of pig bones, a pattern their neighbors did not share, though none of the markers is proof by itself. By about 1000 BCE, according to the biblical account, a united kingdom under David and then Solomon centered itself on Jerusalem, where Solomon built the First Temple. Modern reckonings of the biblical chronology date it to around 957 BCE. Historians debate how large that early kingdom really was, since little of it has yet turned up in the ground. The First Temple itself is known from written sources rather than from digging. The platform where it stood, the Temple Mount, has never been excavated. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque stand on it today, and it is among the most sacred and contested sites in the world. What the outside evidence confirms is narrower but firm: kingdoms called Israel and Judah, and a royal line remembered as the “House of David,” that really existed. Around 930 BCE, in the biblical account, the kingdom split in two: the northern Kingdom of Israel, with its capital at Samaria, and the southern Kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem. The word “Jew” comes from “Judah.”

The evidence that Israel was there

Historians know ancient Israel the way they know Egypt or Assyria: from objects in the ground and writing on stone, clay, and pottery.

An Egyptian pharaoh names Israel

The oldest mention of Israel anywhere outside the Bible was carved by an enemy. Around 1208 BCE the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah set up a tall granite stele, a standing stone with a message carved on it, to boast about peoples he claimed to have crushed. In one line, written with the Egyptian sign meaning “a people,” appears the name Israel. The boast was almost certainly exaggerated. The monument meant to celebrate wiping Israel out is instead the earliest evidence outside the Bible that Israel was there.

An Assyrian empire records a war with Judah

In 701 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib, ruler of the empire centered in what is now Iraq, invaded the southern Kingdom of Judah. He destroyed the fortified city of Lachish and besieged Jerusalem, where King Hezekiah ruled. We have this story twice over: in the Bible (2 Kings 18–19), and in Sennacherib’s own words and pictures.

Sennacherib lined a room of his palace at Nineveh with carved stone panels showing the assault on Lachish, soldiers driving battering rams up ramps, archers firing, the city’s defenders fighting from the walls. It is among the most detailed pictures of ancient siege warfare to survive. His scribes also wrote the campaign onto a six-sided clay prism in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia. On it, Sennacherib boasts of capturing forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled towns and trapping the king of Judah “like a bird in a cage” inside Jerusalem.

Sennacherib records Hezekiah’s tribute, but he never says he took Jerusalem. In his own annals, the boast stops at the city walls. The Bible says Jerusalem was spared when the Assyrian army withdrew.

An enemy names the House of David

The Bible tells of a king named David who founded a royal line in Jerusalem. For a long time, no evidence of him had been found outside the Bible, and some scholars doubted he was a real person at all. Then, in 1993 and 1994, archaeologists digging at Tel Dan in northern Israel found pieces of a broken basalt monument carved in Aramaic, the language of a neighboring kingdom to the north.

The monument was a victory boast, most likely set up by Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, a kingdom in what is now Syria, around 840 BCE. On it, the Aramean king brags of defeating two enemies: the king of Israel and the king of a place written in Aramaic as bytdwd, the “House of David.” Most scholars read this as the dynasty that traced itself back to David, as the Bible describes. A few have proposed other readings, but the majority view is that this is the earliest mention of David’s line outside the Bible. Once again, the evidence came from an enemy: a foreign king, with no reason to invent a Judahite dynasty, named it while bragging about beating it.

A people who wrote

Ancient Israel and Judah had scribes and officials who wrote, and they left writing behind. They used an older form of the Hebrew alphabet, now called Paleo-Hebrew. The square Hebrew letters used today came later, adapted from the Aramaic script. From the city of Lachish come the Lachish letters: military messages written in ink on ostraca, broken pieces of pottery (the cheap scrap paper of the ancient world), during the last desperate days before Babylon’s conquest. Unlike the enemy monuments, these are Judah’s own record, in its own hand.

In Jerusalem itself, a six-line Hebrew inscription was found in 1880 carved into the wall of a water tunnel cut through solid rock. It describes the moment two crews of diggers, working from opposite ends, broke through to each other. The tunnel is usually linked to King Hezekiah, who the Bible says “brought the water into the city” (2 Kings 20:20). The Siloam Inscription is now in Istanbul.

Officials owned personal seals, small carved stones pressed into wet clay to sign documents and mark property. One black stone seal, now in the Israel Museum, carries the figure of an archer and a name in old Hebrew letters: Hagab. The archer suggests a man with a military connection, though the seal itself states only his name. It records one named person from the late First Temple period, a man who was neither a king nor a prophet.

The religion the prophets argued for, and against

Ancient Israel is best known for an idea: monotheism, the belief in a single God. It became one of the most influential ideas in human history. The Bible’s own prophets show that this belief was not settled from the start, and the archaeology points the same way.

Archaeologists have found hundreds of small clay pillar figurines of a woman in ordinary Judahite homes. Scholars debate their purpose: protection, childbirth, or the goddess Asherah. They are physical evidence that everyday people made and kept household religious images of the kind the Bible’s prophets condemned. Many historians read them as a sign that belief in one God took hold slowly, against older practices all around it.

Conquest, exile, and return

Assyria conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and deported part of its people, 27,290 by the conqueror’s own count, settling others in their place. The deportees gave rise to the later tradition of the “ten lost tribes.” Judah held on until 586 BCE, when the Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and carried much of the population into exile in Babylonia.

The exile lasted about fifty years, long enough that many of those who returned had been born in Babylonia. In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylonia. The next year, according to the Book of Ezra, he permitted the exiles to return and rebuild their Temple. Not all returned: a large community stayed in Babylonia and became one of the most important centers of Jewish life for the next two thousand years.

The people of Judah, who gave the Jews their name, carried their history from these hill-country villages to the present, across more than 3,000 years.

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