The story of the Ancient Israelites in Egypt is one of the most famous stories in the world, and one of the most contentious from a historical standpoint. Today, most people know about the relationship between the ancient Israelites and the Egyptians from the Old Testament book of Exodus, and the numerous feature films that often depict the dealings between the two peoples in contentious ways. The deadly plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, the arduous 40 years the Israelites spent in the desert, and the Ten Commandments all make the Exodus unforgettable, but they’ve also left generations of scholars wondering just how accurate the Scripture is.
The return of the Israelites to Israel is, of course, inextricably linked to the history of the Jewish people, their dispersal throughout the Mediterranean world, and their reestablishment of the modern state of Israel in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust. The small area around Jerusalem was originally known to the ancient Greeks as Ioudaioi, hence the name Judea. An Iron Age kingdom is said, in the Bible, to have existed as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, which, it is claimed, existed from approximately 1010-930 BCE. The split in the kingdom, according to the Bible, was the result of the refusal of the northern tribes to accept the son of Solomon, Rehoboam, as their king. The Bible claims that, initially, only the tribe of Judah remained loyal to the House of David, but Benjamin also joined with the loyalists after a few years. Two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, co-existed uneasily, with frequent outbreaks of war between them in the following years. Judah was invaded by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Shishak, in the 5th year of Rehoboam’s reign, and Jerusalem was sacked. Rehoboam gave the Egyptians all of the nation’s treasure and became an Egyptian vassal.
