Mesopotamia During The Days Of Jesus

Past, Present and Future of Cradle of Civilizations (4)

We are still in Station Twelve when After Moses’ death, Joshua invaded Canaan and destroyed Jericho and from there he was able to lead the Israelite to several victories, securing much of the Land of Canaan.

The Israelite settled there till the time when King David came and the Kingdom of Israel was established

Jews consider David as the King of Israel and the Jewish people, and he is also a prominent figure to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic culture.

The Kingdom of Israel was always mentioned in history as the Northern Kingdom which is different than the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

It was a union of all the twelve Israelite tribes living in the area that presently approximates today the land of occupied Palestine by Israel, including the free Palestinian Territories of West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with the “Philistines” whom they were trying to drive them out of their lands.

Israel continued to exist within its reduced territory as an independent kingdom until around 720 BCE, when it was again invaded by Assyria and the rest of the population deported.

The two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, co-existed uneasily after the split, until the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians in 722/721 BC that left Judah as the sole remaining kingdom.

At its height Assyria conquered Egypt (and expelled its Nubian dynasty), Babylonia, Chaldea, Elam, Media, Persia, Urartu, Phoenicia, Aramea/Syria, the Neo-Hittites, Hurrians, northern Arabia, Gutium, Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom, Corduene, Mannea and parts of Ancient Greece, and defeated and exacted tribute from Scythia, Cimmeria, Lydia, Nubia, Ethiopia and others.

Shechem was the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel. Afterwards it was Tirzah, which is now a little town near Nablus called Tal Al Farah.

King Solomon was the third king of the United Monarchy and the final king before two kingdoms split.

On the succession of Solomon's son, Rehoboam, in 930 BCE the country split into two kingdoms: Israel (including the cities of Shechem and Samaria) in the north and Judah (containing Jerusalem) in the south. Most of the non-Israelite provinces fell away.

The Bible accredits Solomon for building the First Temple in Jerusalem, which according to the Jews is the repository of the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant is a biblical vessel, described as solely containing the Tablets of Stone on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.

According to Hebrews, the Ark also contained Aaron's rod, which The Bible tells how, along with Moses' rod, it was endowed with miraculous power during the Plagues of Egypt which preceded the Exodus, and also a jar of manna, which was the heavenly food God provided for the Israelite during their travels in the desert.

When the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, Jerusalem was strengthened by a great influx of refugees from the northern kingdom.

The First Temple period ended around 586 BCE, as the Babylonians conquered Judah and Jerusalem, and destroyed the Temple.

In 538 BCE, after 50 years of Babylonian captivity, Persian King Cyrus the Great invited the Jews to return to Judah to rebuild the Temple.

Construction of the Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE, during the reign of Darius the Great, 70 years after the destruction of the First Temple. 

In about 445 BCE, King Artaxerxes I of Persia issued a decree allowing the city and the walls to be rebuilt.

Jerusalem resumed its role as capital of Judah and center of Jewish worship.

When Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, Jerusalem and Judea came under Macedonian control, eventually falling to the Ptolemaic dynasty under Ptolemy I. In 198 BCE, Ptolemy V lost Jerusalem and Judea to the Seleucids under Antiochus III.

In 63 BCE, Pompey the Great of Rome captured Jerusalem, incorporating Judea into the Roman Republic.

As Rome became stronger it installed Herod as a Jewish client king.

In 4 BC Herod's son, Herod Archelaus was allotted by Caesar Augustus the greater part of the kingdom (Samaria, Judea, and Idumea) with the title of Ethnarch (Ruler) until 6 AD when Judaea province was brought under direct Roman rule at the time of the Census of Quirinius, which was the time when the Roman provinces of Syria and Lydia were enrolled by the Roman Empire for tax purposes. 

Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was appointed governor of Syria, after the banishment of Herod Archelaus and the imposition of direct Roman rule on what became Iudaea Province (the conglomeration of Samaria, Judea proper, and Idumea).

In Christianity, the Gospel of Luke connects the birth of Jesus to a worldwide census in which individuals had to return to their ancestral cities.

Jesus' mother Mary and step father Joseph, travelled from their home in Nazareth, Galilee, to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.

This census explains how Jesus, a Galilean, could have been born in Bethlehem, the city of King David.

Station Thirteen

When Romans conquered Levant shortly before the time of Jesus, they took the name, 'Philistia' and applied it to the entire region that is south of Canaan Lands, including the land occupied by the Jews and their neighbors. It is from this word, 'Philistia,' that we get our modern English name 'Palestine.'

Palestine at time of Jesus was part of the Roman Empire, which controlled its various territories in a number of ways. 

In the East (eastern Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt), territories were governed either by kings who were “friends and allies” of Rome (often called “client” kings or, more disparagingly, “puppet” kings) or by governors supported by a Roman army.

Antioch on the Orontes, (now called Antakya, also Great Antioch or Syrian Antioch) was an ancient city on the eastern side of the Orontes River (Al Asi River along Lebanon, Syria and Turkey), now modern city of Antakya, Turkey.

The city was founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals. Antioch eventually rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the Near East and was the cradle of Gentile Christianity.

Indeed, just as old Babylon was left desolate when the Babylonians flocked to Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, there were likewise swarms of people from Mesopotamia moving to Antioch when it became the real capital of the kingdom.

Jews were not the only ones to move west into this new area of influence. Native Mesopotamian(s) also migrated on a large scale. In fact, the region of western Syria had become so racially "Babylonian" by the end of the Seleucid rule, that Strabo the geographer of the 1st century B.C.E. said the peoples of Mesopotamia and those of Syria were then a homogeneous group.

What is interesting, even when the capital of the empire moved to Antioch, the Seleucid kings called themselves not only the kings of Antioch or Syria but they retained the prestige title: kings of Babylon

The western part of the Roman Empire came to be settled by various types of Semitic peoples and that at one time a particular type would dominate and at another time others would take over.

In the time of Severide (who ruled from C.E. 193 to 235), emperors there were strong ties through marriage with these Punic peoples (from North Africa) and those of Syria. The ancestors of the Severide emperors were really from Tyre and the early histories reveal that many if not most of the Tyrians that became Phoenicians were actually of Edomite, they were kin to the Jews through the twin brother of Jacob; Esau.

Other Roman emperors and rulers in later times were from different branches of these various Semitic peoples who had moved into the western parts of the Empire.

Mesopotamia by the 1st century B.C.E., the Arabs had replaced the earlier people in the south and made up a third of the country (Strabo).

Christians refer to Palestine as the Holy Land because it was the scene of Jesus' life. It is also holy to Hebrews, and Muslims.

Ancient Palestine lay in both the geographic and cultural center of the known world, surrounded by such great ancient civilizations as the Hittite, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and the Mediterranean civilizations to the west.

At the time when Jesus was born, the Jews understood the world to be divided into two types of people: Jewish and Gentile (non-Jew). The Jews worked hard to disassociate themselves from the Gentiles.

Probably this was one of the reasons why Jesus was strongly rejected by the people of his hometown Nazareth, when he first claimed that he is the fulfillment of a prophecy.

In John Gospel 7:1-9, Jesus moves around in Galilee but avoids Judea, because the Jews/Judeans were looking for a chance to kill him.

Influential Judeans formed a unity against Jesus and conspired to find a way to get rid of him and his teachings.

Probably they feared that the Messiah or the King of Jews had come to put their power to an end.

Early Christians were persecuted for their faith, at the hands of both Jews from whose religion Christianity was an offshoot, and the Roman Empire which controlled much of the land early Christianity was distributed across. This continued from the 1st century until the early 4th, when the religion was legalized by Constantine I.

In 41 AD, when Agrippa I, who already possessed the territory of Antipas and Phillip, obtained the power of procurator in Judea, hence re-forming the Kingdom of Herod, he was reportedly eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the lesser lost his life, Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight.

Christianity began spreading initially from Jerusalem, and then throughout the Near East, Armenia, Ethiopia, Georgia and then the Roman Empire.

Becoming common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages, Christianity expanded throughout the world during the Age of Exploration.

Christianity grew in the Iranian region by different names; Assyrian church, Persian Church, East Syrian Church.

Before the end of the first century the Christian faith broke out across the borders of Rome into ‘Asian’ Asia. Its roots may have been as far away as India or as near as Edessa in the tiny semi-independent principality of Osrhoene just across the Euphrates.
From Edessa, according to tradition, the faith spread to another small kingdom three hundred miles further East across the Tigris River, the Kingdom of Adiabene, with its capital at Arbela, near ancient Nineveh.
By the end of the second century, missionary expansion had carried the church as Far East as Bactria, what is now northern Afghanistan and mass conversions of Huns and Turks in Central Asia were reported from the fifth century onward. By the end of the seventh century, Persian missionaries had reached the ‘end of the world’, the capital of T’ang dynasty in China. (Moffett op cit., pp xiv-xv.).

To be continued

www.samicherkaouiarabicblog.blogspot.com