Ancient Israel

The other parent

If Greece gave Christianity its intellectual tools, Israel gave it its heart. The God of the Christians is the God of Israel. Their first Bible, which they came to call the "Old Testament," is the Hebrew Bible. Jesus was a Jew, his first followers were Jews, and the very word "Christ" is the Greek translation of a Hebrew idea: Messiah, "anointed one." Diarmaid MacCulloch spends the first part of his history on Israel for this reason. Without it, the story of Jesus would make no sense.

A word of caution first. Historians and archaeologists debate how much of the Bible's account of Israel's early history can be confirmed. The stories of the patriarchs and of Moses come to us through texts that were written down and edited over many centuries. What matters most for the history of Christianity is that the early Christians read these stories as their own story. They saw Jesus as their fulfillment.

Covenant: the central idea

The Bible tells how God called Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and promised to make his descendants a great nation, through whom "all the families of the earth" would be blessed. This promise is a Covenant, a solemn, binding agreement between God and people.

The central event of Israel's memory is the Exodus. God, led by Moses, rescues the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. At Mount Sinai he gives them his law, the Torah, including the Ten Commandments. Israel is to be God's own people, holy and set apart. They will worship him alone and live by his commands. In return he will be their God and protect them.

Several features of this faith were unusual in the ancient world:

• One God: Over time Israel came to insist that its God was not just the best god but the only God, creator of everything. Historians call this Monotheism. It developed gradually, and early texts still assume other gods exist.
• A God who acts in history: Israel's God was not mainly a force of nature but a God who rescues, judges and makes promises within real events.
• Ethics at the center: Worship was tied to justice: care for widows, orphans, foreigners and the poor.
• No images: God could not be represented by any statue or picture.

Kings and the Temple

After settling in Canaan, the tribes of Israel were loosely led by "judges." Then, around 1000 BC, they united under a king. The second king, David, captured the hill town of Jerusalem and made it his capital. He was remembered as a warrior, a poet (many Psalms are attributed to him) and a deeply flawed man. God promised that David's family would rule forever. That promise became the root of the later hope for a Messiah, an "anointed" king from David's line who would restore Israel.

David's son Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, a magnificent house for God, where sacrifices were offered. The Temple became the center of Israel's worship and identity. In time it was the only place where sacrifice to God was allowed.

After Solomon the kingdom split in two: Israel in the north and Judah in the south, with Jerusalem as its capital. Both were small states squeezed between great empires. In 722 BC the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom and scattered its people. Judah survived for another 135 years.

Israel's history at a glance

The prophets

During these centuries arose the prophets, men (and occasionally women) who claimed to speak God's word to kings and people. They were not mainly fortune-tellers. They were social and religious critics. Amos thundered against the rich who "trample the heads of the poor." Hosea compared Israel's worship of other gods to adultery. Isaiah warned of judgment but also painted pictures of a coming age of peace, when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation." Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem's coming destruction and promised a "new covenant" written on people's hearts.

Christians later read many of these prophecies as pointing to Jesus. Isaiah's "suffering servant," who is "wounded for our transgressions," is the best-known example. Jewish readers have generally understood these passages differently, often as referring to Israel itself. This difference in reading the same texts became one of the deepest dividing lines between the two faiths.

Exile: the crisis that changed everything

In 587 BC the Babylonian army destroyed Jerusalem and burned Solomon's Temple. The king and much of the leadership were carried off to Babylon. For a people whose faith centered on land, king and Temple, this was a catastrophe. Had God abandoned them? Had Babylon's gods won?

The response to that crisis shaped Judaism, and through it Christianity, forever. Away from the Temple, the exiles focused on what they could carry with them: the Scriptures, the Sabbath, circumcision, and the law. Many scholars think much of the Hebrew Bible was collected and edited in this period. The exile was reinterpreted as God's just punishment for unfaithfulness. That kept faith in God alive rather than destroying it. And the prophets of the exile spoke more boldly than ever about one God who rules all nations, even Babylon.

In 539 BC the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to go home. (The book of Isaiah even calls this foreign king God's "anointed.") Some returned, rebuilt a modest Second Temple (finished 515 BC), and under leaders like Ezra recommitted themselves to the Torah. Many others stayed in Babylon or settled elsewhere. This was the start of the Diaspora, the scattering of Jews across the world. Those diaspora communities would later be the first stops for Christian missionaries.

Waiting for God to act

For the next four centuries the Jews lived mostly under foreign rule: Persian, then Greek, then (after a brief period of independence) Roman. The glorious promises of the prophets seemed unfulfilled. Out of this frustration grew a powerful hope that God would soon intervene dramatically in history. He would defeat Israel's enemies, judge the wicked, raise the dead and establish his kingdom. That is the world into which Jesus was born, and the next chapter, Judaism in the Time of Jesus, explores it.

Wisdom, worship and the Psalms

Israel's Scriptures are not only law and history. They also include poetry and "wisdom" writing that Christians would treasure. The Psalms, 150 songs of praise, lament, anger, trust and thanksgiving, became the prayer book of both synagogue and church. Monks later chanted all 150 every week. Their honesty is striking. They complain to God, ask "How long?", and even curse enemies, alongside joyful praise.

Wisdom books like Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes wrestle with practical living and hard questions. Why do the innocent suffer? Is life meaningless? Job's story of a good man who loses everything, argues with God, and is finally met by God in a whirlwind has spoken to sufferers for millennia. These books show that Israel's faith had room for doubt, argument and searching, a feature Christianity inherited.

Finally, the Hebrew Bible ends with hope deferred. The Temple was rebuilt, but it was smaller than Solomon's. No king of David's line sat on the throne. The last prophets looked forward to a "day of the Lord" still to come. Christians later arranged their Old Testament to end with the prophet Malachi's promise of Elijah's return, a deliberate bridge to the Gospels, where John the Baptist appears as the new Elijah.