20 A History of Judaism
Mesopotamia, a process dependent on both the region’s fertility and
development of irrigation systems, long predated the birth of Abraham
in Ur, whatever date might be assigned to this event – the internal chron-
ology of the Bible places his birth in the first half of the second
millennium bce, but this chronology is highly unlikely to have been
based on any firm ground. An extensive network of trade routes across
the fertile crescent in the second millennium bce provides the back-
ground to the stories of his migration to Canaan. The stability of the
kingdom of Egypt through the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, in
the second half of the same millennium, with foreign policy dedicated to
expansion to the north, explains the centrality of Egypt in the narratives
of Israelite patriarchs and the exodus. The imperial ambitions of the
kings of Assyria from the mid- ninth century bce, which extended their
influence to the southern Levant, and the need to placate those ambi-
tions as well as those of Egypt to the south, explains much of the foreign
policy of the kings of Israel and Judah up to the end of the seventh cen-
tury bce. The similar ambitions of the Babylonian kings who conquered
the Assyrian empire in 612 bce led to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 bce.
The return of Jews from exile in Babylon was the direct result of the
capture of Babylon by Cyrus, king of Persia, in 539 bce, and the begin-
ning of Greek rule over Jerusalem in 332 bce was the product of the
rapid conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander the Great. In the
tradition of Macedonian kingship inherited by Alexander, the legiti-
macy of a ruler was proved by foreign conquest, and these values were
preserved by the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties in their numerous
wars in the third century bce to control Judaea, less for its own sake
than as a prize of empire.^29
The location of Judaea at a strategic crossroad between the empire of
Syria and Egypt explains much of the frequency of external interven-
tions in a region with few natural resources to make it important in its
own right. The fertile plain which runs from north to south along the
Mediterranean provided access to maritime trade only through a small
number of harbours on an inhospitable coast. The hill country which
runs parallel from Galilee to the Negev desert produced only the basic
products of Mediterranean agriculture (grain, wine and oil) in the val-
leys and on terraced hillsides. Further east, the rift valley of the Jordan,
which sinks far below sea level on its way to the Dead Sea, is exception-
ally fertile around the Sea of Galilee, and the oasis of Ein Gedi by the
Dead Sea was famous for its balsam groves. Further east still, the graz-
ing lands of the Transjordan steppe merge gradually into the desert