In the ancient world, most people worshiped many gods. The Hebrews did not. They were monotheistic, which means they believed in one God. They were the ancestors of the present-day Jewish people.
A Written Tradition
The Hebrews have a written tradition called scriptures that refers to events from more than 4,000 years ago. According to the Hebrew scriptures, God told Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and travel with his family to a land on the Mediterranean Sea. God granted the land to Abraham and his family, so it became known as the Promised Land. The Hebrews believed they had a special relationship with their God and were God’s chosen people.
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The Hebrews traveled to Egypt to escape a famine. A famine is a period of great hunger. For hundreds of years, the Egyptians treated the Hebrews well, but as the descendants of Abraham began to outnumber the Egyptians, the pharaoh, or king of Egypt, enslaved and mistreated the Hebrews.
Moses and the Exodus
Moses became a leader of the Hebrews. According to Hebrew scripture, God told Moses to lead the Hebrews back to the Promised Land. God sent ten deadly plagues to Egypt when the Egyptians would not release the Hebrews from slavery. When the Hebrews did escape, scripture states that Moses parted the Red Sea for just enough time to allow the Hebrews to pass.
The Hebrews wandered through the desert for forty years before returning to their home. The passage from slavery in Egypt back to their home in the Promised Land is remembered by the Hebrews every year in a celebration called Passover.
The Ten Commandments
While on their journey back to the Promised Land, the Hebrews stopped at Mount Sinai. There, scripture states that God revealed to Moses a set of laws called the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments became the model for both Jewish and Christian moral thought.
Solomon
After returning to their homeland, the Hebrews established a nation called Israel. One of Israel’s greatest leaders was Solomon. He married the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh and formed a peaceful relationship with Egypt. During this time, Solomon used his wealth to build a temple in Jerusalem, the religious center of Israel.
Solomon’s taxes were high, and he required his people to work on large building projects. After his death, many of the northern Israelites grew unhappy with these burdens. They broke away, leaving the southern kingdom of Judah, named for one of the tribes of Israel. It is from Judah that we get the name Jews.
The Fall of Israel
The northern kingdom, still called Israel, was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. The Assyrians took many Israelites from their homes and resettled them in other parts of their empire. Over time, these Israelites largely disappear from the historical record. They are often called the Ten Lost Tribes.
Exile in Babylon
In 586 BCE, the Babylonians of Mesopotamia destroyed Solomon’s temple. Jews were exiled, or forced from their homes, and made to move to Babylon. Despite living in a foreign land, many continued to practice their faith by praying and reading holy texts. The holiest book of Judaism, the Torah, became part of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.
Return and Roman Rule
About fifty years after the Jews were exiled to Babylon, a Persian leader named Cyrus allowed them to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple. Over the next several centuries, the land came under the control of different empires. Eventually, the Romans took control. The Jews revolted against Rome in 66 CE, and the Romans destroyed their temple and forced many Jews to leave their homeland and live in exile again.
The Jewish Diaspora
For the next 1,800 years, most Jews lived as minorities in other lands. The Jews remained connected despite often severe mistreatment. European Jews were ordered to leave Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.
The Jews also faced organized massacres called pogroms in many nations, particularly in Eastern Europe. In the last century, as many as six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, where Germany under the Nazi Party attempted genocide, or the planned killing of a whole group of people because of their religion or nationality.
Modern Israel
In 1948, the United Nations supported the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people on the land the Hebrews once occupied. This became the modern nation of Israel. Many Arab people in the region did not believe the United Nations had the right to support a Jewish state on land they considered Arab. Several wars and much violence followed, but Israel remains a Jewish homeland, coexisting in an often uneasy relationship with many of its neighbors.,
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Mr. Donn has an excellent website that includes a section on
Mesopotamia.