Judahites

Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones did not assume personal resurrection, a belief that entered Judaism in a later period. In its original context, the imagery of bones rearticulating and coming back to life draws upon the ancient burial practices of Judahite family tombs, offering a message of hope to the exiles in Babylon that YHWH will return them to their land.

Situated in a land bridge between the Babylonians and Egyptians, the two great powers of the day, Kings Jehoiakim and Zedekiah of Judah kept switching allegiance depending on which seemed the more powerful. Judah first favored Egypt, then Babylon, and then returned to Egypt. The Bible and the Babylonian Chronicles help us reconstruct the events that led to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.

Although Judea is one of the provinces of the multicultural empire of Persia, the book of Esther never mentions it. Rather, it grapples with the precarious position of Jews scattered throughout Persia, outside their ancestral homeland, and who stand out among the non-Jews in their insistence on keeping to their cultural rules and norms.

Jerusalem in the 14th century B.C.E. was a Canaanite city; by the 10th/9th century B.C.E. it was Israelite. The Bible records several different accounts of how it was conquered. What are we to make of these different traditions?