A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine by Hjelm Ingrid;Taha Hamdan;Pappe Ilan;Thompson Thomas L.;

Author:Hjelm, Ingrid;Taha, Hamdan;Pappe, Ilan;Thompson, Thomas L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The historical chronology of Palestine

The early historical chronology of Palestine stretches from the Lower Palaeolithic, around 1.4 million years ago, to the beginning of the Bronze Age at around 3500 BCE (Ahlstrom 1993: 53–54; Rollefson 1993: 72–111). During the Bronze Age (3500–1200 BCE), the ancient empires of Egypt and Asia (Hittite and Aramean) exercised their power upon neighbouring regions, including Palestine due to its strategical location as a main corridor between Egypt and the rest of the Near East. Independent Canaanite city-states were established in what is known today as Palestine/Israel and were influenced by neighbouring civilisations (Drews 1998; Golden 2009).

During the Iron Age, previously known as the “Biblical period” (1200–586 BCE), the kingdom of Judea (Finkelstein 2003), the Philistines (Assaf 2010) and Israel (Barstad 2008), among many others, played major roles in the history of Palestine. Many small kingdoms were attached to each other from the Mediterranean in the west to the desert of Arabia in the east. These diverse ethnic groups lived side by side for many centuries until the invasions of the Assyrians from the mid-ninth century to the end of the seventh century, and thereafter by the Babylonians, who destroyed Jerusalem in 597/587 BCE and deported many of the ancient Jews to Babylon (Thelle 2014). The latter were allowed to return to Palestine when the Persians ruled the region between 539 and 332 BCE (Taagepera 1979). However, this biblical story is somewhat questionable and other scholars such as Thompson (2013) have questioned the entire exodus story (see the following).

During the Hellenistic period (333–63 BCE), Alexander the Great invaded Palestine as a part of his invasion through the entire East (Berlin 1997). After his death, the successors could not maintain the unity of the Hellenistic Empire and thus the Ptolemies took control over Egypt and ruled Palestine in the third century, whereas the Seleucids took control over Babylonia and thereafter managed to attack and rule Palestine during the second century BCE. When the Jews revolted against the Seleucid Empire and establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom in the second–first century BCE, the entire regions conquered by the Hasmoneans came under Jerusalem’s jurisdiction, and their populations were forced to become Jews (Cohen 2006; Thompson and Wajdenbaum 2014).

The rule of the Romans in Palestine (63 BCE–324 CE) is more complex, and scholars have different interpretations of this issue. Biblical archaeologists claim that the majority of ancient Jews were forced to scatter all over the Roman Empire and were subsequently not permitted to live within Palestine after their revolt against the Romans in 135 CE (e.g. Jagersma 1986). Other scholars such as Sand (2009) and Thompson (2013) did not find historical evidence of Jewish deportation. They found much evidence supporting the idea that the Jewish population remained in Palestine with maybe some of the elite being deported (Ra’ad 2010 115). Sand also argued that the definition of Jews as a race was a legend devoid of historical foundation (Sand 2010: 30). Subsequently, Thompson debated that neither were Jews deported from Palestine, nor was there a mass exodus (Thompson 2013: 77, 95).

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