Upon the death of King Solomon, the ten northern tribes refused to accept his son Rehoboam as king. They separated from the southern tribes to form the Kingdom of Israel and elected Jeroboam as their king. The two southern tribes formed the Kingdom of Judah.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel, exiled its inhabitants, scattered them to other parts of their empire, and forced them to assimilate with the local population, while bringing in Assyrians to colonize their new territory. After a century and a half, all that remained of them was the legend of “the 10 lost tribes of Israel.” On the other hand, the kingdom of Judah managed to escape the Assyrian threat, but was successively conquered by the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and finally by the Babylonians, who took Jerusalem in 588, destroyed the Temple, and took the elite to Babylon.

Fortunately, the Babylonian exile didn’t last long, because in 539 BCE, Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to the land of Israel. Between 520 and 515 BCE, the second Temple in Jerusalem was built, and by 450 CE, the canonization of the Torah and half the books of the Bible began, which make up what Yoram Hazony calls the «History of Israel,» from Genesis to the Book of Kings.

Hazony explains: the «History of Israel,» the first half of the Bible, was conceived to stem the hemorrhage of the exiled communities and build a nation amidst exile. They feared that if they did nothing, they might suffer the same fate as their northern brethren. The text would serve as a repository for memory, a reminder of what had been and what had been lost. By reading it, the Jews would have a source of national pride. It would also be a record of returns from other exiles and a preparation for one day finally returning to their homeland. The Exodus from Egypt is the best example of a narrative of a successful return, and from this stems its constant presence in the Bible.

But the central point that the «History of Israel» teaches us, says Hazony, was that the God of Israel was not only the benefactor of that people, but was the Creator of all humanity, and therefore cared for all of His creation. The Hebrew Bible questioned the nature of the moral and political order of all humanity, not just the Jewish people. The Greeks called this questioning «philosophy,» and the Jews called the Torah the philosophy of Judaism.

Hazony asks: Why did the Jewish people, whom Moses called the least of the peoples, refuse to disappear among the peoples where they lived and always seek to restore themselves as a nation? The answer is a bit daring but simple: The Jewish cause is worthwhile, because it is ultimately the cause of all humanity.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Yoram Hazony “The Philosophy of the Hebrew Bible” and other sources.