Priests of War: Lions of Judea Historical Novels Prequel by Arad Amit

Author:Arad, Amit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Historical background

In the late second millennium BCE, the Children of Israel were divided into tribes, each tribe residing primarily on part of the Land of Canaan. The Tribes lived under the pressure of common external enemies such as the Sea Peoples, the Philistines, the Midianites, other nations and tribes (Amon, Moab, Edom, Aram) on the outskirts of Canaan, and the Egyptians to the South. To face these threats some of the tribes would occasionally join forces under the authority of a single leader, whose influence would sometimes include more than one tribe. Gradually, throughout this period, a belief in one supreme God grew, alongside belief and worship in other gods. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is a belief in the creation of a supreme god heading the divine hierarchy but ruling over many servitor and subject gods.

At some point, in the face of the growing power of the Philistine kingdoms and their cooperation in the struggle against the Tribes of Israel, voices within the Tribes supporting unity under a single king grew. Saul of the Tribe of Benjamin was anointed to be the first king of the Tribes of Israel. He was followed by King David, of the Tribe of Judah, the largest and apparently strongest of the Tribes of Israel. King David solidified his rule over all the Tribes of Israel and extended his writ throughout the entire Land of Israel—and beyond. As part of the process of the unification of the Tribes into a single kingdom, Jerusalem was established as the Capital. King Solomon, David’s heir, established the Temple in Jerusalem, which was declared to be the sole center of worship in the kingdom, with other centers of worship being forbidden. The High Priesthood was awarded to the priest Zadok, a longstanding loyalist of both David and Solomon.

The United Kingdom of Israel lasted no more than seventy years. Immediately following the death of King Solomon in the ninth century BCE, the kingdom split into the Kingdom of Judah under the rule of the house of David (who, aside from the Tribe of Judah, only ruled over the Tribe of Binyamin), and the Kingdom of Israel, which incorporated all the rest of the tribes under the rule of kings from a variety of dynasties.

The Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 BCE by the then-dominant regional superpower, the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A significant portion of its population was exiled to the Assyrian heartland in northern Iraq and vanished from known history. Some of those who remained in the land were assimilated by the tribe of Judah; others apparently merged into the populations settled in the former Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians and formed the basis for the formation of the Samaritan People, whose faith is similar to that of Judaism.

The Kingdom of Judah was led by two dynasties throughout its existence: the House of David and the House of Zadok. The House of David was the royal dynasty which formally managed the kingdom. Under its purview were foreign policy, the military, tax collection, and so forth.

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