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By Root 1291 0

group of Canaanite gods was most widely worshiped. The supreme god, the creator, was called El, a word that figures prominently in Genesis, as evidenced in such names as Israel and Bethel. El’s son was the storm god Baal, another name that appears prominently throughout ancient Israel’s violent history. And among Baal’s consorts were Astarte and Asherah, mythical female goddesses who must have been very alluring to the Children of Israel. The followers of Moses and their descendants kept getting into trouble with their Yahweh God because they continued to worship these fertility goddesses instead of Yahweh. Since worshiping Baal and his goddesses probably meant having sex, or watching priests have sex, it was presumably more appealing to the masses than a religion that involved killing small animals and didn’t allow women in the temple.

This “oversexed” Canaan was the little piece of land that the Israelites said they had been promised by their God. There is little historical or archaeological evidence to tell much about the people who came to be called “Hebrews”—a word possibly derived from an Egyptian word, habiru, a derogatory term for “outsiders”—or “Jews,” derived from the later Roman name for the country, Judea. No one really knows when the “Children of Israel” arrived in Canaan. No one really knows precisely where they came from, although the evidence points to beginnings in the Tigris-Euphrates area. At some point, they moved into Canaan, and sometime after 2000 BCE some of them crossed into Egypt and remained there in the Nile Delta for a few hundred years. This group left Egypt, where they said they had been enslaved by an unnamed Pharaoh, and moved into the wastelands of either the Sinai or Arabian desert for forty years under the direction of a charismatic leader named Moses who said he spoke to God. Through Moses, the ancient promises that these people would one day possess Canaan were reconfirmed.

By around 1200 BCE, through conquest or gradual migration—the Bible has it both ways—they eventually took control of the land from the Canaanites, whose religious and sexual practices were so abhorrent to them. It’s difficult to say precisely what these Canaanites did that was so abominable, but it can be assumed they had sex in their temples, and possibly didn’t flinch at homosexuality, incest, bestiality, or human sacrifice.

The first piece of historical evidence of the existence of the Children of Israel is a stone plaque, or stela, from Egypt dated c. 1235 BCE. This stela from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah mentions the complete destruction of the people of Israel. Merneptah’s claim of a lopsided military victory, obviously inflated, is the first recorded reference to the people of Israel outside the Bible. Once the Israelites got their toehold in the interior hill country, they came to blows with another powerful group of recent arrivals, the Philistines, who had come from the Mediterranean and settled in cities along the coastline around 1200 BCE.

By around 1000 BCE, under the leadership of a dashing soldier-poet named David, who finally did in the Philistines, and his brilliant son Solomon, the Israelites finally controlled the land that they had been promised. But their empire was short-lived. After Solomon’s death in 922 BCE, the kingdom was split in two in a civil war that left both halves of the divided nation vulnerable. The northern part was called Israel and the southern part Judah. The two nations vied for control over the land as well as authority in religious matters, each professing to be the true heirs of Abraham, Moses, and the promises from God.

The good times didn’t last long. In 722 BCE, the Assyrians under Sargon II conquered Israel—the northern kingdom—and deported thirty thousand upper-class Israelites to the Euphrates River area in one of history’s first recorded episodes of “ethnic cleansing.” These ten northern tribes were dispersed throughout modern-day Iraq and Syria and became the so-called “Lost Tribes” of Israel. About one hundred years later, the southern kingdom, Judah, was