Best Guess

 

Here's my best guess as to the composition of what we know as the Bible, and I'll briefly mention the foundation of several other religions as well.  A couple notes, first: the word "Bible" is derived from a Greek term, biblia, which is plural, thus signifying "books" rather than "book".  "Biblia" is the root of many words in many languages which mean "library," and that's what the Bible, as we know it today, is: a library of many books.  Each of these books came from different sources, and often an individual book had multiple sources.  

The Bronze Age: 

Sumer 

Starting somewhere around 5300 BCE, and for many, many centuries after that, Sumerian culture was developing, in the form of several city-states - Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Larsa, Kish, Umma, etc. - in the southern region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, from which they continually struggled against their ancient rivals over the Zagros mountains, the Elamites.

Archaeologists and historians have been studying the Sumerians for centuries now, ever since Henry Crenswicke Rawlinson began to translate cuneiform in the early 19th century, yet there is still much we don't know. To start with, we don't know where they came from. Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that it has no relationship with any other known language.  But many linguists believe that the vast majority of languages in the ancient world were language isolates, until more recent times when languages from the major language families took over, by way of imperialism (this belief, however, is difficult to prove conclusively).

Agriculture had been developed by humans by at least something like 9000 BCE in the "fertile crescent," which is just north and east of what is now Iraq, and it seems to have spread fairly quickly into ancient Iraq (which people sometimes call Mesopotamia), perhaps also bringing knowledge of ceramics.  Somewhere around 3300 BCE, Sumer had become a center for the production of bronze as well.  The use of copper was already widespread, and for thousands of years there was some knowledge of arsenic bronze, a copper alloy that can be either naturally forming or human invented.  But true bronze was invented when humans began to alloy copper with tin - a process that seems to have begun among the Maykop culture along the Black Sea, and quickly spread into Sumer - which is significant, because tin is not naturally occurring in region of Sumer.  This implies that there must have been a fairly extensive trade network already existing to bring tin into Sumer - at least over the Zagros mountains into what is now Iran, but possibly much further.  Some suspect trade networks extended as far east as China and as far west what are now Italy or even Spain.  The trade routes that would eventually become known as the "Silk Road" and the "Spice Road" are difficult to put definitive beginning dates on, but people have been traveling east and west on the Pontic Steppe for a long, long time.  There's archaeological evidence of humans bringing wheat and barley from Sumer to western China by about the 3rd millennium BCE or earlier, so it's not impossible. 

The Sumerians are also generally credited with the invention of writing, and some would go so far as to credit them with the invention of civilization, though there are many other regions with powerful arguments in favor of both of these claims - China, India, etc..  (Personally I would nominate Egypt as the first civilization.)

Many historians believe that in an earlier phase of Sumerian civilization, these city-states were theocracies, led by a priest caste known as the ensi.  The temple ("E") was central to each city-state and conceived as a literal house, in which lived the god that was the patron god of that city.  Inanna, the all-important goddess of war, love, and fertility was the patron goddess of Uruk, Nanna the moon goddess was the patron goddess of Ur, Enki was the patron god of Eridu, Ningursu of Lagash, Enlil of Nippur, and so on.  In addition to the one god that was sacred to each city, there were also shared gods that were more universal, usually relating to some natural phenomenon.  For instance, some of these tutelary deities were regarded as the children of An, the god of heaven, and Ki, the goddess of the Earth.  Interestingly Enki and Enlil have quite parallel stories and are both, in different places, regarded as the firstborn son of An and Ki (notice that Enki, the word, even sounds like a combination of An and Ki). I think it's possible that Enlil and Enki were originally two different names, used in different places (perhaps Eridu and Nippur), to refer to the same god - but as these parallel traditions elaborated and further differentiated and then these two cultures came into contact, they eventually came to be regarded as two different gods.

At each temple, the high priest would perform a ritual known as a Me.  During this ritual, the patron god who resided in that temple was understood to incarnate the person who was performing the ritual. 

The temple also functioned as the storehouse of the most valuable, most holy treasures, and effectively served as the bank, the economic center of society.  In the early centuries of bronze-making, when arsenic bronze predominated and bronze was not strong enough for effective weapons or tools, bronze was chiefly used for decorative, economic, and ritual purposes, including the production of statues and figurines depicting gods - or perhaps even worshiped as gods.  It was the ensi's role to protect these treasures and to be the gods' representatives on Earth, and they also may have had some authority over agricultural workers' wages, paid in grain (our "daily bread").

But perhaps somewhere around 3000 BCE - that is, not long after the development of tin-bronze - the ensi's military servants and enforcers, known as lugal, began to rise up and take over the city-states for themselves, and set up dynasties of kingship for themselves.  Now the ensi, the temple priests, became the lugal's servants.  For some time, the various city-states competed against each other - now one city-state would establish a hegemony and become dominant over the others, now another.  Most often the dominant city was either Ur and Uruk, the oldest and largest of the city-states, closest to the sea, but eventually other cities, further upriver, got their chance to be hegemon.

Semitic-speaking peoples: 

South Semitic and Central Semitic Language Groups

Also sometime around 3000 BCE, waves of immigrants started arriving in Sumeria - mostly nomadic herdsmen, traveling in small bands, by turns raiders and traders, mainly speakers of languages that were in what modern linguists call the "Semitic" language family.  They quickly spread out into just about every part of what we now call the "Middle East". 

Of the Semitic languages currently spoken, obviously the most common is Arabic, with well over 400 million native speakers worldwide.  Historically, some of the cultures in the Middle East that eventually came to speak Arabic were, earlier, speakers of other branches of the Semitic language family, such as Aramaic, or even more ancient languages.  

One obvious question to ask is: where did they come from?  This can be something of a confusing, even misleading question, though, since different people can speak the same language, or related languages, without being ethnically related, and having quite different histories.  Still, linguistic evidence can point us tentatively in a research direction, in the absence of other information.  But it should be emphasized that this is tentative, and there is no scholarly consensus on the origin of Semitic languages or peoples.  The Semitic languages are a branch of the larger Afroasiatic family of languages (the ancient Egyptian language(s) constitute other branch(es) of this larger family).  The highest concentration of different Afroasiatic languages is around the Horn of Africa, so if we assume that linguistic differentiation takes a certain amount of time, then the most straightforward conclusion would be that these languages originated somewhere in Eastern Africa and spread through the southern end of the Arabian peninsula and from there up through the rest of the Middle East, including what is now Iraq, where we have the oldest physical textual evidence.  If you believe in the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, as I do, then all humans ultimately come from Africa, and it may be that the spread of Semitic languages is the result of one of many waves of migration out of Africa.  This seems fairly plausible.  On the other hand, some experts reverse this, and see Semitic languages as originating in the southern end of the Arabian peninsula and spreading into Eastern Africa.  Then there's also a somewhat fringy belief that Afroasiatic languages originated in Asia, as professed for instance by the linguist Alexander Militarev and popularized by the somewhat eccentric writer, Jared Diamond. I find this argument unconvincing, but who knows?  The reality is that we just don't know for sure.

If Semitic languages by and large spread up from the southern end of the Arabian peninsula to the rest of the Middle East, it's interesting to note in passing that this is a region with volcanic activity.  In what is now Yemen, in particular, there are many active volcanoes.  It's possible that as people passed through this region, they may have either developed their own, or absorbed local traditions about a volcano god.  This is purely speculative though, and not essential to the broader themes in this essay.

Semitic-speaking peoples: 

Eastern Semitic: Eblaites and Akkadians (also: Guti and Neo-Sumeria)

One group of Semitic-speaking peoples settled in a city-state known as Ebla, in what is now Syria.  Another became the Akkadians, centered in a city-state known as Akkad, which archaeologists have yet to locate, but which most scholars believe was somewhere in what is now central Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates bend in towards each other, perhaps southwest of what is now Baghdad.  Some time after 2350 BCE, Sargon of Akkad conquered the entire region and established what is often referred to as "the first Empire" in world history - which may not be strictly true, depending of course on how we define "empire" and distinguish it from a mere kingdom.  For one thing, he conquered what might be considered an earlier "empire," that of Lugal-Zagezi of Umma, who had in turn conquered an even earlier and more extensive "empire," that of Lagash - and Sargon himself is said to have started his career as the "cup-bearer" to King Ur-Zababa of Kish.  In any case, Sargon established a huge, mighty, and stable empire, not only unifying Mesopotamia, and defeating the Sumerians' old enemy, Elam, but extending his empire well to the west, at least into what is now Syria, and probably considerably further.  And under his dominion, there was a kind of pax Akkadia, in which the simmering conflicts between the various Sumerian city-states were subdued, and in the resulting peace, trade, learning, and in general the Sumerian civilization thrived.  

The Akkadians arrived as conquering barbarians, but they soon assimilated to the Sumerian civilization they had invaded.  Neither the settled Sumerians nor the nomadic Semitic societies would ever be the same - so much so, that it's difficult to understand either culture prior to contact - we are always looking back through the filter of subsequent history.  In fact, "Sumer" may have been an exonym: it was simply the term that Akkadians used to refer generally to all the various peoples of southern Iraq.  So what did they call themselves?  We don't know - and it's possible that they never saw themselves as a cohesive culture until responding to pressure from the outside.  From their own perspective, they had been many different and unrelated city-states who were often as not bitter enemies, before the Akkadians forcibly united them.

Most likely, there had already been extensive cultural contact between the Sumerians and Akkadians even before the Akkadians conquered them, so assimilation went fairly smoothly.  The result was a blend of Sumerian and Akkadian culture, with the Akkadians broadly adopting Sumerian religious traditions, consolidating them into a single official version, rather than several competing ideologies of the various city-states.  It may very well be that some of the myths that we now know of various gods interacting with each other originally reflected the political rivalries and alliances between their respective tutelary city-states, but in the Akkadian era they were abstracted away from immediate political representations into more general archetypal stories.  

Although the Akkadians translated religion into their own religion, the old Sumerian names of the gods continued to be used.  Many gods therefore have two names: a Sumerian name and an Akkadian name (and some have many names, titles, or epithets).  Enki, the god of the Abzu, or springs and fountains of fresh water - the "living water" as it were - became known as Ea, and attained a new significance in the pantheon.  The triumph of "sweet" water over salt water became a profound theme for Akkadian religion, probably reflecting the up-river people conquering the down-river people.  To an even greater extent, Enlil, whom the Akkadians called Ellil, increased in stature, until he became regarded as the chief of all the gods.  He was said to have built his own temple at Nippur, which was called the "mooring-rope" connecting heaven and earth.  Meanwhile, the Akkadians called Inanna Ishtar and Nanna, the moon goddess, became known as Sin.  An, god of the heavens, became known as Anu, and Ki, the earth goddess, became known as Anku.  Collectively, the gods were known as the Anunnaki, which, strangely enough, most linguists believe is etymologically unrelated to either Anu or Ki.  Confused yet?

Sargon appointed his own daughter, Enheduanna, high priestess of Nanna in Ur, and she wrote what has sometimes been called "the first book"- again, a dubious honorific - or at least she is sometimes considered the first author whose name we know.  Her writings consist of a series of hymns to her Goddess, Nanna, and these poems or songs are interesting because they are songs of total devotion.  Some of the rhetoric in these poems is remarkably single-minded and lofty in its hyperbole, for instance asserting that Nanna is the chief of all the gods, superior to all other beings.  Perhaps at this time every temple asserted that its god was the greatest god, and denounced others as worthless or inferior.

Eventually, Akkadian rule declined and eventually collapsed.  Then the region was briefly invaded and conquered by another group, known as the Guti.  This is generally regarded as a "dark ages" of Mesopotamian civilization.  

But eventually, at the beginning of the 21st century BCE, Ur-Nammu successfully liberated Sumeria from Guti control and established his own dynasty, the Third Dynasty of Ur (or "Ur III"), establishing what historians sometimes call the "Neo-Sumerian Empire" which is widely seen as a renaissance of Sumerian culture, which was responsible for a number of advances, including, at times, some kind of conciliar government, perhaps something like a proto-democracy.  Perhaps reflecting this, the Neo-Sumerians came to believe that the universe was presided over by a "Divine Council" of the most powerful Gods - usually numbering 7.  The number 7 became regarded as a holy number.  

Most of the surviving written records regarding the Sumerian gods are from this period, not the earlier Sumerian period.  No wonder, therefore, that it can be difficult to distinguish between Sumerian and Akkadian traditions.  (We do, however, have statues and other images of Sumerian gods from the earlier period, but deducing mythology from these images is a matter of interpretation.)  For instance, it was during this period that we have the earliest texts regarding Gilgamesh (more about that below).

Semitic-speaking peoples: 

Amorites (including Babylonians and Canaanites) 

Other speakers of the Semitic language family, the Sumerians called "Martu" and the Akkadians called "Amurru" - or, as they were later known, the Amorites.  The Amorites were not a single cohesive culture, but a loose group of probably vaguely related nomadic peoples, spread out over a very wide terrain.  The Sumerians and Akkadians had a god called Amurru that seems to be a kind of stereotypical representation of the Amorites.

Some of them became Babylonians, settling in Babylon, on the banks of the Euphrates, probably not far from Akkad.  Little is known about the early kings of Babylon, but starting in 1894 BCE, they began to expand their territory, and Hammurabi, who came to power in 1792 BCE, again established a mighty empire and united Mesopotamia, including the former Akkadian Empire.  Under his rule, where he established his famous law code, carved in stone and set throughout his territory, the region again thrived, becoming not only a massive center of commerce and metalworking but also the world center of progress in science, the likes of which the world had never known.  This, the "Old Babylonian Empire" lasted until about 1595 BCE. 

The Babylonian religion seems to have been quite similar to the Sumerian and Akkadian religions, with some important changes.  The patron God of Babylon, Marduk, who had previously been worshiped in their Esagila temple for centuries as a minor God, now became the chief God, replacing Enlil, with the rest of the pantheon relegated to a Divine Council that advised him.  Enlil was still regarded as the creator and perhaps in some sense the highest god, but seems to have taken on a more distant Deus Absconditus role, rather than an object of everyday religious temple worship.  The Babylonians wrote the Enuma Elish, which tells the story of the creation of the universe, the generations of the Gods, a battle between them, and ultimately Marduk's triumph and ascendancy to chiefdom.

The Babylonians virtually created the disciplines of geometry and mathematics as we know them today.  In addition, they massively contributed to humanity's knowledge of astronomy and astrology, which in those days were one and the same.  They tracked the planets' paths through the heavens and learned to predict their movements.  They identified each of the planets with one of their Gods.  Sin was already the moon God, and Shamash, aka Utu, was the sun God.  The planet Mercury was identified with Nabu, Venus with Ishtar, Mars with Nergal, Marduk with Jupiter, and Ninurta with Saturn.  The number 7, already regarded as holy, acquired new and more detailed meaning.

Other Semitic-speaking Amoritic peoples went west and wound up in the Jordan river valley, and from there expanded to the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea - the region that is today known as the "Levant".  Eventually, part of this region came to be known as Canaan. 

This was not the first time that humans had settled here.  Indeed, this region is home to some of the oldest continuous settlement in the world, outside of Africa - perhaps not surprising, since it contains a waterway not far from where Africa connects to the Eurasian landmass.  In 2022, a child's lumbar vertebra was discovered in the Jordan valley that was dated to be nearly 1.5 million years old.  It appears to be anatomically fully modern human, though it may have been from some other closely-related hominin.  Extensive excavations have revealed the Natufian civilization (13,000 - 9,500 BCE), the Ghassulian civilization (4400-3500 BCE) and others beyond the scope of the present essay.  Of particular interest is, of course, Jericho - one of the most ancient cities in the world, a mighty center of commerce and military power in its heyday.  Forming the southwest corner of the fertile crescent, it may have been founded as early as 11,000 BCE and was occupied by many different waves of peoples, continuing to be an important center as late as 1500 BCE.  But by the time the Semitic-speaking Amorite groups were settling in there, Jericho had long since declined, people had moved away, and the walls had crumbled simply from natural decay and erosion, probably centuries earlier, and the city was already essentially nothing but ruins.  Perhaps someone else had moved in there; maybe even rival Semitic-Amorite groups fought over these ruins, though there's no archaeological record of such a battle.  

In any case, geographically speaking, Canaan was a crucial strategic location.  It marked the west side of both the fertile crescent and the aforementioned Eurasian trade routes such as the silk road and the spice road - at the point where they reached the Mediterranean, literally the "central sea" which became maritime trade hub of its own.  In addition, this region was an important source of lumber - the famed "cedars of Lebanon" - and it was also a region with some tin deposits, ripe for the mining, which was crucial for the production of bronze.  It was also home to several species of murex snails, from which people were able to harvest a rare kind of purple dye.  Indeed, one etymology for "Cana'an" is "land of purple."  The later term, "Phoenicia," which we will see in a moment, likely meant "land of purple" as well.  Finally, it was simply geographically located right in between several powerful empires - and for this reason, it would become a continually contested battleground, as we shall see.

Hittites and the Bronze Age Mediterranean

By the time that Semitic-speaking people had settled in Canaan, another wave of migrations were making the scene.  These newcomers had their own family of languages, which linguists nowadays call "Indo-European."  Some people think that these people may have originated somewhere around the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, perhaps in what is now Ukraine or Romania, may have been related to or identical with the Yamnaya culture, and might have been the first people to domesticate the horse.  One (or several) branch(es) seem to have migrated to India, eventually helping to develop the Vedic literature.  Other waves seem to have settled in the high plains to the east of the Kurgan mountain range, in what is now Iran, and spread from there into other regions.  These included the Cimmerians, the Saka, or Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Dahae, the Sargatians, the Bactrians, the Medes, and of course the Persians - about whom, much more, later.  But another branch went much further west and became the Hittites (and still others would go even further west, and would become the Greeks, the Romans, etc., etc.).

The Hittites, in particular, moved into the region that we would now call Turkey, or to use some more old fashioned terms, Asia Minor or Anatolia, and out of the tapestry of ethic groups already living there (the Hurrians, the Hatti, etc.) formed an absolutely massive empire, which existed from about 1700 until 1178 BCE.  Moreover, the Hittites formed many alliances for trade and military purposes as well as cultural exchange, including several groups of Canaanites up and down the eastern Mediterranean coast, which functioned essentially as their client-states.

Ugarit, the Egyptian New Kingdom, and the Bronze Age Collapse 

One of the Semitic Canaanite client states of the Hittites was Ugarit, which was in what today is coastal Syria, near modern day Latakia.  There is archaeological evidence of settlement here going back perhaps as far as somewhere around 8000 BCE (meaning that it coexisted with Jericho), but for our purposes here we're interested in the people who were living here in the 2nd millenium BCE.  By that time, the people who lived here spoke a Semitic language, Ugaritic.

It's probably no coincidence that just off the coast from Ugarit is the island of Cyprus.  Cyprus was a, if not the, major economic hub of the Mediterranean world in the Bronze Age, being the largest source of copper in the area as well as a producer of ships.  An even more ancient and influential Bronze Age civilization was the Minoans, from the island of Crete.  Together, these island communities kept up a vast and intricate maritime trade between the Hittite Empire and the rest of the Mediterranean world, spreading not only metal ore, finished products, grain, and spices, but also language and ideas (until one of the communities that they traded with, the Mycenaean Greeks, grew to become a maritime giant in its own right).  Which brings us to Egypt. 

The "Middle Kingdom" of Egypt had collapsed in 1650 BCE, after more than a century of slow decline, initiating what is known as the "Second Intermediate Period".  During this time period, northern Egypt (known as Lower Egypt) was conquered by people called the Hyksos, who seem to have spoken a Semitic language as well.  (There was an old 19th century theory that the Hyksos were the Hebrews but this idea has been pretty well dismissed.)

But some time after 1570 BCE, Pharoah Ahmos I managed to expel the Hyksos and begin the 18th Dynasty, initiating the "New Kingdom" which is widely regarded as a golden age of Egyptian history.  He and his successors, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, and Amenhotep III, managed to build up Egypt into the largest empire it had ever had.  For one thing, within a few decades, they had conquered a considerable portion of Canaan.  It's during this period that we find the first historical records of the Phoenicians.  Accordng to Egyptian records, the Egyptians sought to defeat those they called the Fenekhu ("carpenters") and for this purpose, Thutmose III, who reigned from 1479-1425 BCE, sought the strategically important cities of Byblos, Arwad, and Ullasa.

My guess is that in aid of attaining this strategic goal, the Egyptians, playing the old imperialistic game of divide and conquer, established an alliance with a number of Semitic tribes in Canaan, hiring them to fight against other Canaanites that were allied with the Hittites.  What number, exactly?  Was it 12?  13?  14?  I don't know.  These people spoke an ancient form of Hebrew, a language that is very closely related to Ugaritic - as is Phoenician, the language of their neighbors.

1185 BCE 

Bronze Age Collapse 1177

This was followed by a brief "dark age" that lasted a couple centuries until new kingdoms began to emerge. 

The Iron Age: 

The Rise of Phoenicia, the Philistines, and the Hebrews

But the port cities of the Phoenicians either never totally collapsed or were able to revive quicker than most of the other Mediterranean civilization.  Like the mythical creature, the "phoenix," Phoenician civilization rose from the ashes of the Bronze Age collapse, and in the power vacuum left by the total devastation of the Hittite Empire, rose to massive prominence.  ("Phoenicia" and "phoenix" are exactly the same word in Greek.  Some claim this is purely a coincidence, but I find that a little difficult to believe.)  Phoenician (or as they were much later known, "Punic") people became rich maritime traders sailing around the Mediterranean and establishing colonies in the port cities around there.  Some of these, like Carthage, would eventually become so prosperous that (much later) they too would establish their own empires.  

Phoenicia itself was never really a contiguous empire, but a collection of more or less politically independent, yet commercially interdependent, city-states, dotting the entire Levantine coast.  The most prominent of these were Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon, not to mention Beirut, which is of course a huge Lebanese city to this day, but there were many more - hundreds, if you count the colonies around the Mediterranean, as far away as what is now Spain and beyond.  (Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, began as a Phoenician colony.)  These included several in what is now Palestine, such as Jaffa and Acre, as well as many cities along the coast of Asia Minor, as well as Cyprus (in some ways, this maritime trade network can be seen simply as the continuation and expansion of the Cyprian network that had been established in the Bronze Age).  They also had an enormous cultural influence on the Greeks, which will be discussed below.

Also in the southern Levant, were several new fairly new settlements of Philistines - most likely some of the "sea peoples," probably related to the Mycenaean Greeks.  These included Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, together known as the Pentapolis: literally, the "five cities".

When it comes to religion, both the people of the Phoenician city-states and colonies, and the Philistines seem to have engaged in Ba'al worship.  Ba'al should not be thought of as a single god, necessarily - it was more like a title, which meant something like "Lord," in the sense of a local nobleman or magistrate, like the lord of the manor.  There were many different Ba'als, worshiped by many people.  It would seem that perhaps every city had its own Ba'al, and some of them had multiple Ba'als.  Some of these were deities imported from earlier civilizations, such as the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, such as Ba'al Hadad, who seems to have been an adaptation of the Sumerian/Akkadian god Adad, worshipped by the Eblaites as Hadda, and then identified with the Greek God Zeus, the Roman God Jupiter, and the Egyptian God Set.

Child sacrifice seems to have been an important part of Ba'al worship, at least in some of the Mediterranean communities. 

Jebusites

Midianites and Kenites

Edomites 

under the influence of the Egyptians, began to see themselves as separate and apart from the other Canaanites - the "chosen" people, chosen by the Egyptians.  They saw themselves as more civilized than the other Canaanite herdsmen, and began adopting Egyptian customs and manners, at least superficially.  They still believed in the Canaanite pantheon of gods, which was more or less derived from the Mesopotamian gods of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon, but they worshiped them n  

The Kingdoms Period and the Assyrian Invasion

Fairly early in the Iron Age, between and around these powerful Phoenician and Philistine city-states were three kingdoms: Israel, Judah, and Edom, consisting of the former client-states of the Egyptians who had assisted the Egyptians in their wars against the Hittites and the Hittite's allies, and then to the east of these, three more kingdoms: Moab, Ammon, and, later, Aram-Damascus.  Exactly when and how these kingdoms began is difficult to say, but it was probably some time in the 10th century.  Some scholars say that the kingdom of Israel began in 930 BCE, and that seems to me as good a guess as any.

According to legend, the original capital of Israel was Shechem, but the capital had to be moved to Tirzah, probably because this was seen as a more defensible location.  Somewhere in the 800s BCE, a person by the name of Omri laid seige to Tirzah, eventually conquered it and effectively destroyed it, establishing himself as King of Israel, and then he went on to build a new capital that he named Shomron, or as it later, under Greek influence, came to be known, Samaria.  Omri expanded the Kingdom of Israel massively, and also brought peace to the region, working out treaties with the other local kingdoms and the Phoenician city-states, especially Sidon, which became an important trading partner and cultural influence.  Some people in Israel may have worshiped the Ba'al of Sidon.  Along the way to making Israel a large, prosperous, peaceful country, Omri left a decent archaeological footprint, giving historians confidence that he was a verifiable historical figure and not merely a legend. 

Judah and Edom were much smaller and less powerful by comparison with Israel.  The Judahites had apparently defeated, incorporated, or somehow displaced the Jebusites, the original inhabitants of Jerusalem, including the temple there, which was a temple of Yahweh, and defended the territory immediately surrounding it, achieving a kind of sovereignty, though undoubtedly through alliance with other local powers, perhaps including the Egyptians and likely also the Phoenician city-state of Tyre.  There they maintained an uneasy rivalry with Israel which occasionally flared up into violent conflict.

But then Hazael, King of Aram-Damascus (842-796) threatened to invade the region and Israel and Judah, which shared many linguistic and cultural similarities, put aside their previous differences and teamed up to repel his army.  This was the beginning of a peaceful partnership between the two kingdoms, to the extent that their earlier enmity was largely forgotten.

But then a new threat arose: the Assyrian Empire.  Assyrians began to invade and exile Israelis in 740-732 BCE.  Samaria was completely defeated in 722.  In 701, the Assyrians laid siege to Jerusalem.  But eventually, after many difficult losses, Judah was able to rally and defeat the Assyrians, expelling them and regaining their sovereignty.

The result was a massive humanitarian disaster.  The Kingdom of Israel had been permanently defeated, and now huge numbers of refugees fled south to the kingdom of their fairly recent ally, Judah.  

To some extent, Judah welcomed these prosperous strangers, but tensions soon arose.  The population of Judah had suddenly doubled?  Tripled?  Multiplied by ten?  Numbers are difficult to estimate, but the demographics had certainly massively changed.  Poor, native Judahites doubtless resented some of these pushy, rich immigrant Israelites.  

And, as usual, the social and economic contradictions expressed themselves through religion.  Judahites saw their way of life being threatened - especially their relationship to their beloved Temple, the Temple of Yahweh, which they guarded jealously.  They didn't want any foreigners taking their place in the management and maintenance of the Temple - not unless such people demonstrated their true, authentic devotion to Yahweh.  And the Israelite northerners were regarded as having all kinds of allegiances to all kinds of Gods, including the Gods of the Phoenicians and Philistines.  In truth, so did many Judahites.  But such a truth did not deter them in their seething emotional bitterness.

Perhaps these widespread sentiments were behind the rise of a new king in Judah, named Yoshiyahu, or Josiah, who seems to have instituted some kinds of reforms, including religious reforms, during his reign which was around 640-609 BCE.  

But everything changed after 606 BCE, during the battle of Charchamesh, when the Egyptians and the Assyrians were defeated by a new regional power, the Babylonians, who would go on to conquer Judah as well. 

The Babylonian Period 

Neo-Babylonians "Chaldeans" exile 598-538 BCE  

Destruction of Jerusalem 587 BCE 

Persians Achaemenids 539 BCE

The Babylonian exile had only lasted about 60 years.  There were probably people old enough to remember the beginning of this period by the time it was over.  And yet it was to have an utterly transformative effect on the Hebrew people and their religion.  

Persians, Macedonia, and the Hellenistic World

From the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE, a group from what is now Iran known as the Medes, under the domination of the Assyrians, gradually grew in power.  In the late 7th century, they made an alliance with the Babylonians and together they defeated the Neo-Assyrian Empire, splitting the territory between the two victors in 609 BCE.

Now we finally come to what is really the point of this entire essay: the Achaemenid Empire, or as it is often simply known, the Persian Empire.  Supposedly founded by a legendary figure named Achaemenes, this dynasty ruled in a small region near the Zagros mountains called Parsa (or Persis in Greek) which was probably a vassal state of the Median Empire.  There they established a city, which in Greek is known as Persepolis.  Achaemenes's descendants, Cyrus I and Cambyses I, apparently managed to strengthen the position of Parsa until it was a serious rival with the Medes, and then Cambyses's son, Cyrus II, rebelled against the Medes in 553, eventually conquering them and establishing his own empire which stretched all the way to Asia Minor, where Croesus, king of Lydia, tried to use the period of instability to enlarge his own kingdom, conquering Phrygia and setting off a massive war in the 540s.  To everyone's surprise, Cyrus II defeated the Lydians as well, making the Persian Empire extremely wealthy and bringing them into contact with the Greeks.  As already mentioned, this was followed by the Persians conquering the Babylonians in 539, meaning that they took control of the southern Levant (including the former Israel and Judah) as well.  Cyrus died in 530, but his successor, Cambyses II, expanded the empire even further, conquering Phoenicia and Cyprus and finally, in the 520s, conquering Egypt itself.  In 522, after some conflict over control of the empire, Darius I, aka Darius the Great, usurped the throne and became an even more expansionist conqueror, defeating the Macedonians, the Bactrians, the Scythians, and the Thracians as well as the kingdom of Meroe in Africa.  Persia was now the largest empire the world had ever known, encompassing the entire Middle East and much of the Eastern Mediterranean, including much of the Balkans, and at the same time had expanded substantially to east, to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of Ukraine and Russia and beyond, almost extending into what is now India.

It's hard to exaggerate the transformative influence of the Persian Empire on the Middle East, and indeed on world history.  I regard it as the most consequential empire in human history, at least at a social and cultural level - more so, for instance, than Greece and Rome, which it directly influenced.

Now Persian controlled the entire Silk Road, from the Greece and Egypt in the west, to India and China in the east.  They also adopted the system of coinage which Lydia had invented, and spread it throughout the empire.  The result was a commercial empire the likes of which the world had never seen.

 Jews under Persian and Macedonian Rule

Yehud was an autonomous province of the Persian Empire, which included what had been the former Kingdom of Judea, plus a few areas that had previously been part of the Kingdom of Israel, the rest of which became a separate autonomous province, that of Samaria.

Elephantine 525 BCE, Temple of Yahweh burned down 410 BCE

Alexander the Great of Macedon conquered Persia, 334-330 BCE.  Then he suddenly died, and his generals battled over his empire.  One of these was Seleucus, who established the Seleucid Empire, which lasted from 312 to 64 BCE, and which included much of the Middle East, including what had been Israel.  Another of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy, established a dynasty in Egypt.

The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls 

The Septuagint has generally been regarded as the first translation, or perhaps even the first collection, of Hebrew scriptures.  An ancient tradition has it that this translation was ordered by the Pharoah of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus - that is, not the Ptolemy who founded the dynasty, but his son (almost all of the Pharoahs in this dynasty were named Ptolemy) - who reigned from 285 to 247 BCE.  According to this tradition, he hired the six greatest scholars from each of the 12 tribes of Israel to translate these scriptures into Greek, for a total of 72 scholars ("Septuagint" means "The Seventy-Two").  Thus the Septuagint is usually dated to around 250 BCE, although the oldest manuscript of the Septuagint is the Codex Vaticanus, which was copied down probably in the early 4th century AD.  And this is, of course, in Greek.  For a long time, the oldest Hebrew scriptures available to modern scholars was the Masoretic text, the oldest complete manuscript of which, the Leningrad Codex, is dated to 1008 AD.  Earlier manuscripts only existed in fragments.

But that all changed in 1946, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls inside caves at Qumran.  These, too, are somewhat fragmentary, but they are by far the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures, the oldest of which are also dated to somewhere around 250 BCE - right around the same time that, according to legend, the Septuagint was being written.  And although there are some interesting differences, it must be said that the degree of agreement between the Codex Vaticanus, the Leningrad Codex, and the Dead Sea Scrolls is remarkable.  At this point, I think we can say with great confidence that most of what we now know as the Tanakh, or the "Old Testament" as Christians call it, had reached an impressively stable form by about 250 BCE. 

But of course nearly everyone thinks that at least some of the Hebrew scriptures must be at least somewhat older than 250 BCE.  Very well, but the burden of evidence is on those who wish to establish an earlier date.  All too often, people, and even some scholars, tend to pick a date somewhere about halfway between the earliest possible date and the latest possible date as a kind of average.  But to assume that if a particular text is older than 250 BCE, then it's probably significantly older is a version of the conjunctive fallacy.  Without any evidence to establish an earlier date, the probability that it existed must be diminishing fairly steeply for each and every single year: 258 must be less likely than 257, which must be less likely than 256, and so on.

That having been said, let's try to guess when and how some of these texts arose. 

Songs 

The oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible are undoubtedly poems, and typically a poem in the ancient world would be recited out loud, and usually sung.   

Some of these songs may have originated, in some form, some early version, in what I have called the kingdoms period.  It's likely that there were ancient songs from back then, most of which were lost and forgotten forever, others of which were dimly remembered and changed, just as folk songs and pop songs are reworked and remixed even to this day.  Of the many songs that were sung in ancient times, certain songs were remembered and given a certain new meaning and urgency in the period of the Babylonian exile, and then were written down either then or in the Persian period.

Like worldwide folk songs of many cultures, performed by polytheistic bards, many of the ancient folk songs were probably originally mythic tales of derring-do, bragging about the exploits of powerful knights, warriors, heroes, and gods, going on adventures and bravely defeating their enemies.  Many of these heroes are human.  Take, for instance, the Song of Deborah, which some scholars, examining the grammar and vocabulary, consider to be the oldest text in the Bible.  

It's important to point out that in ancient heroic legends, the heroes are not necessarily always what we in the modern world would call "good guys".  

But also, the Lord, Yahweh, appears in these songs something like another hero - just as Zeus was portrayed as the hero who defeated the Titans and the Hecatoncheires.  If there is an overarching theme to these early songs, it is the anger of Yahweh.  In this, the Hebrew literature is not entirely unique.  The Iliad famously begins with the word "rage," and the rage of Achilles is presented as the general topic of the entire epic poem: "μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος": "Of the rage, sing to me, Goddess, of Achilles, son of Peleus."  (The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk)  The rage of God, or of a mighty hero, is a common theme in ancient poetry, and it is often presented with similar imagery: thunder, lightning, storm, etc..

Psalm 29 is interesting.  Some scholars speculate that it may have originally been a hymn to Ba'al, which was later adapted into a psalm of Yahweh.

But in the Babylonian period, the rage of God took on a new meaning, and the poetry in these songs had taken on new meaning and a new form.  During the kingdoms period, the Hebrews had pictured the mythic heroic rage of God directed at their enemies.  But as they dealt with the devastation of their defeat and exile, a certain militant Yahwist faction thought of the wrath of God as being directed at the Hebrew people themselves - and felt that they deserved it.

Amos

I strongly suspect that what we know call the Book of Amos was the first entire book of the Bible to be completed in more or less something like the form we read it today.  Of course, there are older texts in the Bible - and we've already discussed some of them - mostly songs.  But this was the first entire book.  Some people think Hosea is even older.  Maybe, but I doubt it.  Imagine: as far as we know, before Amos, there was nothing else like it - and afterwards, there were many texts like it.  That makes Amos a profound turning point in history.  (Of course, there could have been other books that were even older, but which didn't make it into the Bible.  In fact, I think that's probably true.)  In any case, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that the rest of the Bible, as we know it today, eventually gradually grew up around Amos.  I see Amos very much as the central text.  

And Amos is an astonishing text.  (from Judah, went to Israel)

On my radio show, I called Amos "Maoist."  Obviously, that's a profound anachronism.  But I stand by the comparison.  What I meant by it is that the "Amosists," if you'll allow me to coin a term, like the Maoists, constituted a kind of class-conscious, anti-imperialist populist nationalism that demanded fierce loyalty and measured one's commitment to the cause in terms of violence.  Again, I understand that most academics would say that it is anachronistic to speak of "nationalism" in the context of Iron Age history - the nation-state, as we know it today, would not exist for thousands of years.  And yet it's difficult for me to reduce the intense and complex ethnocentrism (or... reverse-ethnocentrism?) in Amos to mere "tribalism."  It's hard for me not to see, in Amos, something like a national consciousness... and even an international consciousness.  Here, too, the book of Amos is "Maoist," in the sense that the Amosists were developing a a sense of geopolitical strategy.

To stretch the analogy almost to the breaking point, if Amos is "Maoist", then Hosea and some of the other early prophetic texts are "Dengist".  That is, the people who were maintaining these texts wanted to present themselves as the legitimate successors of the Amosist movement, but rather than telling their followers that they have a "right to rebel," they emphasized cultural cohesion, stability, and strength.  Above all, rather than focusing on material, political and economic injustice, as Amos had, they focused on obedience to God - namely, Yahweh.  Thus Amos's revolutionary movement stabilized into the movement known as Yahwism.

Hosea is, I think, the earliest of these more stabilizing, cohesive successors to Amos, and it is still, in several passages, quite similar to Amos in tone.  Sometimes the rhetoric is even more violent than Amos.  But the goal of the violence is not so much social justice as adherence to the divine authority of Yahweh and his representatives on Earth.