Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [16]
Located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the world of the Bible is a tiny area—but it was a natural bridge between three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as a natural beachhead for seafaring traders from the Mediterranean. And it was this geography that made the area such a collecting point for so many different groups who have had so much impact on history.
Though small in area, this land the Bible called Canaan features an extraordinary diversity of climate and features. A gentle coastline slopes up to mountains and the vast deserts beyond. The Jordan River flows from the steep, snow-topped mountains of Jordan, into a beautiful freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee or Lake Tiberias, before plunging down to the lowest point on the surface of the earth, the Dead (or Salt) Sea. A lake thick with mineral salts, the Dead Sea is surrounded by an extremely hot, rocky wilderness. Into this land of such striking contrasts came waves of people, some as wanderers, some as traders, but many as invaders and conquerors. This was a blood-soaked piece of real estate, just as it continues to be today.
But long, long before the peoples of the Bible, long before the civilizations of Egypt or Mesopotamia, there were people here. They included some of the earliest known human settlers, a Stone Age people called Natufian. They were named for the Wadi en-Natuf, in the Judean hills, where a cave was discovered with evidence of some of the earliest known human settlements. The Natufians, dating to around 10,000 to 8000 BCE, were among the first people to live in permanent villages. Primarily hunter-gatherers, they also left evidence of grinding flour, and digs near the Sea of Galilee have yielded bone fishhooks and harpoons. These people practiced burial, and studies of their graves show that the dead were buried with jewelry and animals carved from stone and bone, evidence that from a very early time humans were interested, if not obsessed, with the “afterlife.”
Over hundreds of centuries, a wide variety of people eventually settled these lands, evolving from primitive hunter-gatherers to nomadic herders, then settled farmers and finally city dwellers. One of the oldest of human settlements is Jericho, famed in the Bible as the city destroyed by trumpets. First excavated in the 1950s by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, Jericho is nearly ten thousand years old, and has been almost continuously inhabited. By about 3000 BCE, about the time the first pyramid was built, Jericho had a strong defensive system, evidence of a high degree of social organization.
The names of the various groups who settled this land include the Canaanites, Edomites, Moabites, Amorites, Jebusites, and Hittites—all now lost tribes. Later arrivals included the Philistines, who apparently migrated from the Mediterranean islands of Crete or Cyprus and settled on the coastline sometime after 1200 BCE. To the north on the Mediterranean coast, in what is modern Lebanon, were the Phoenicians, the extraordinary sailors and dyers of cloth who also get credit for devising an alphabet that influenced our own.
Bracketing the land of Canaan were the two great superpowers of the ancient world. To the north and east was the land of Mesopotamia (from Greek for “between two rivers”), the “Cradle of Civilization” that sprang up in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and produced the Akkadians, Sumerians, Assyrians, and other “Babylonians.” At the extreme other end of the land was Egypt, home of a civilization that lasted for thousands of years. Wedged into a tiny strip of land between sea and desert, Canaan served as bridge, buffer, and battleground between these two great ancient lands whose emperors vied for control of the area for centuries.
The land called Canaan in the Bible gradually grew to include both rural and urban people. A true melting pot, it was a land of herders, farmers, and traders. It was also a land of many gods and religions, although one