Kingdoms of the Levant - Israelites (Canaan)

In the mid-third millennium BC, city states began to appear in Syria as people benefited from interaction with Sumer and from improvements in irrigation. Within five hundred years, around 2000 BC, the same process was happening farther south and west, in the Levant, along the Mediterranean coast. Semitic-speaking Canaanite tribes occupied much of the area, creating a patchwork of city states of their own. The Phoenicians (more Canaanites) also occupied parts of this region, eventually founding their own mighty seaborne trading empire.

According to tradition, the Israelites were Semitic émigrés from southern Mesopotamia who left the city of Ur during the reign of Hammurabi of Babylonia, when his post-Sumerian empire was at its height. Forming a small confederation of tribes, they initially settled on the coast of the Dead Sea, before being forced to emigrated to Egypt. A dramatic return centuries later was recorded only in the Old Testament, during which they forged or took over several small kingdoms in Canaan during the period of deep social unrest in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.

Oral history almost always has a core truth at its heart (something which can sometimes be forgotten by scholars who wander off at tangents with imaginative theories about tribal origins). The assertion that the Israelites came from Mesopotamia has to be taken at face value. However, it doesn't necessarily have to refer to a wave of thirteen tribes and several hundred or more tribespeople wandering into Canaan in the eighteenth century BC. Archaeology alone has disproved such an event.

Instead, as with tribal associations everywhere in history, the arrivals probably formed a small but powerful - and possibly more technologically advanced - group which quickly became important in regional events. As with other such cases, such as various tribes of the Celts and Germanics, or the Mitanni when they arrived to dominate the Hurrians, the new arrivals were in command, but their own customs were quickly replaced by those of their majority subjects (if they differed at all), making them also look Canaanite in origin. Given that they were most likely Semitic-speakers anyway, the transition would not have been a great one.

In at least part of their existence in Canaan the Israelites may have been part of the habiru phenomenon (which may or may not be a source for the name 'Hebrew'), possibly when they migrated into Canaan from Mesopotamia, but even more likely in the twelfth century BC. This was when they supposedly invaded Canaan through Edom and Moab, penetrating as far north as Amurru in Syria. This term seems first to have been used for a range of outsiders, from unemployed farm labourers and vagrants to mounted mercenary archers. The context differed depending upon where the references were found. Although it may originally have referred to just about any marginal people who lived outside state controls, there is nothing to preclude one such group becoming the later Hebrews.

While the Bible's Old Testament is the primary source for much of the information on the second and first millennium BC Israelites, the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, also provides a highly interesting interpretation in Greek for his predominantly Roman audience in his massive work, Jewish Antiquities. The early parts of this list are largely made up of a combination of incidents from both sources.

The dating here agrees with sources such as Oxford, but others date Abraham to about 2000 BC, Joseph at about 1800 BC, Moses at about 1400 BC, and David and Solomon at 1000/900 BC, a timeline stretched to about two centuries longer than Oxford's. There are various other chronologies which differ to some degree (including the orthodox dating, or Thiele, Usher, or Rohl (an exceptionally unorthodox dating which has been greeted with near-universal disdain), or Velikovsky, or even Courville).

The book of Genesis provides Terah's ancestry back to Noah, but many of these names are fanciful attempts to link to ancient kingdoms and states. Additionally, the ages of the earliest figures mentioned here must be taken with a pinch of salt. The names of direct descendants, though, may well be correct, part of an oral tradition which, in any culture, has always placed a strong emphasis on ensuring an unbroken list of ancestors. The first set of names are shown below with a lilac background to highlight their near-mythical status. Spellings vary, taken from Hebrew and Greek sources mainly.

Near East Kingdoms

Ancient Levantine States

Images and text copyright © all contributors mentioned on this page. An original king list page for the History Files.