deserts, tribes and empires 19
Hebrew inscriptions, the earliest agreed examples dated to the eighth
century bce, confirm the existence in Israel at this date of people using
this distinctive branch of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages, but
much of the extensive archaeological data from the land of Israel in the
tenth to seventh centuries bce could have been produced by ethnic
groups other than Jews, and a direct link between particular archaeo-
logical sites and specific biblical stories is rarely possible. On the other
hand, such links are not totally absent. Every reference from the first
half of the first millennium bce in extant non- biblical sources –
Aramaic, Moabite, Assyrian and Babylonian – to a king of Israel (the
northern kingdom, ruled originally from Shechem and eventually from
Samaria) or to a king of Judah (the name adopted by the southern king-
dom, with its capital in Jerusalem) has the same name as the biblical
narrative at approximately the same date as would be expected from
the Bible. The account of the reign in Jerusalem at the end of the eighth
century bce of Hezekiah, which Josephus derived from the biblical
books of Kings and Chronicles, and which included attacks on Heze-
kiah’s territory by Assyrian armies, is confirmed in very general terms
by reference to victorious campaigns in Judah, including a siege of Jeru-
salem, in the reliefs, now in the British Museum, of the Assyrian king
Sennacherib. The versions of these campaigns of 701 bce in the Assyr-
ian records do not exactly agree with those in the Jewish sources, but it
is clear that they are referring to the same events.^27
There can be no doubt that the historical traditions of the kingdoms
of Israel and Judah and exile to Assyria and Babylon have been manipu-
lated by later generations to teach moral lessons to their contemporaries,
but they are highly unlikely to have been invented from scratch. By the
fifth century bce, and the return of some Jews from Babylonian exile to
Jerusalem, coins bearing the word ‘Yehud’ show that the name of the
Jews was in use for a political entity under Persian rule. The rest of the
biblical narrative about the Temple state of Jerusalem in the Persian
period is difficult to illuminate through archaeology, but an archive of
documents from the Egyptian Jewish community which manned a gar-
rison in Elephantine on the first cataract of the Nile from the late sixth
to the early fourth century bce reveals these diaspora Jews writing to
the Temple authorities in Jerusalem for advice on how to keep the Jew-
ish festivals in their own local shrine (see Chapter 3).^28
This long history can be understood only in the light of wider political
and cultural conditions in the Middle East. The urbanization of