The wars of ancient Israel: from the settlement of Canaan to the divided kingdoms

The wars of ancient Israel are known from three very different kinds of evidence, and the story changes depending on which one you hold. The Hebrew Bible tells a continuous narrative: a conquest of Canaan under Joshua, generations of local wars under the judges, the rise of a kingdom under Saul and David, and then two rival kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, until Assyria destroyed the first in about 720 BCE and Babylon the second in 586 BCE. Later Jewish tradition added layers of meaning, dates and heroes. Archaeology and the inscriptions of Egypt, Assyria, Aram and Moab supply a third voice, which confirms some episodes with striking precision, complicates others and contradicts a few. This article follows the wars in order and keeps the three voices apart.

The conquest of Canaan in the Bible and in the ground

According to the Book of Joshua, the Israelites crossed the Jordan, brought down the walls of Jericho, took Ai by an ambush, defeated a coalition of southern kings at Gibeon and Beth Horon, and then broke a northern coalition led by Jabin, king of Hazor, at the waters of Merom. The book presents a swift and nearly total campaign. The Book of Judges, read straight after it, paints a different picture: Canaanite cities that were not taken, tribes fighting alone, and a long, uneven process.

Archaeology has made that tension sharper. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Jericho in the 1950s found no walled city to destroy in the late 13th century BCE, the period when most scholars who accept a historical exodus would place the event. At et-Tell, the site usually identified as Ai, Joseph Callaway's excavations found no settlement at all in the Late Bronze Age. Hazor tells another story: its great Canaanite city was destroyed by fire in the 13th century BCE. Yigael Yadin, and later Amnon Ben-Tor, attributed that destruction to the Israelites; other scholars point to rival Canaanite cities, the Egyptians or internal revolt.

The first mention of Israel outside the Bible comes from Egypt. A victory stele of Pharaoh Merneptah, dated to about 1208 BCE and found by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896, lists "Israel" among the peoples defeated in Canaan, marked with the hieroglyphic sign for a people rather than a city. Israel, in other words, existed as a group in the land by the end of the 13th century BCE.

How it got there is debated. Scholars have proposed four main models: - a military conquest broadly as in Joshua, a view associated with William F. Albright; - a gradual, mostly peaceful settlement of pastoral groups, proposed by Albrecht Alt; - a revolt of Canaanite peasants against the city-states, argued by George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald; - an emergence of Israel from within the local population of the central hill country, supported by the surveys of hundreds of small Iron Age I villages published by Israel Finkelstein in 1988.

Most archaeologists today lean toward versions of the last two, while acknowledging that violent episodes, such as the destruction of Hazor, were part of the period.

The judges, the Philistines and Saul

The Book of Judges describes wars fought by individual tribes or small coalitions against neighbors and invaders. Deborah and Barak defeat the Canaanite general Sisera at the Kishon stream; Gideon drives off the camel-riding Midianites; Jephthah fights the Ammonites east of the Jordan. The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 is regarded by many scholars as one of the oldest passages in the Hebrew Bible, and it names which tribes came to fight and which stayed home, an unusually candid detail for a victory poem.

The decisive enemy of the period was the Philistines, one of the Sea Peoples who settled on the southern coast in the 12th century BCE. Their cities, among them Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron and Gath, have been excavated extensively, and their distinctive pottery, diet and architecture leave no doubt that a new population arrived. According to the First Book of Samuel, the Philistines defeated Israel at Ebenezer near Aphek and captured the Ark of the Covenant, then pressed into the hill country. The need to face them is the Bible's own explanation for the demand for a king.

Saul, the first king in the biblical account, relieves the besieged town of Jabesh-gilead, and his son Jonathan opens a successful campaign against a Philistine garrison at Michmash. The story ends in disaster on Mount Gilboa, where Saul and three of his sons fall in battle and the Philistines display their bodies on the walls of Beth Shean. No inscription mentions Saul, and his kingdom, if it is historical, was probably a modest chiefdom in the hill country of Benjamin and Ephraim.

David and Solomon: a kingdom at war

The biblical account credits David with turning a hill-country militia into a regional power. He takes Jerusalem from the Jebusites, breaks the Philistines in the valley of Rephaim, and fights wars against Moab, Edom, Ammon and the Aramean kingdom of Zobah. His son Solomon is remembered as a king of peace and building rather than of conquest. Both reigns are treated in detail in separate articles, the wars of King David and King Solomon and his kingdom.

Two points belong here. First, the scale of the united kingdom is one of the most contested questions in biblical archaeology: some scholars see a real state centered on Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, others a small polity whose glory was enlarged by later writers. Second, the 9th century BCE Tel Dan inscription, discussed below, refers to a "house of David," which most scholars read as proof that a dynasty of that name ruled Judah.

The divided kingdoms and their enemies

After Solomon's death the Bible records a split: Jeroboam ruled the northern kingdom of Israel, Rehoboam the southern kingdom of Judah. Here, for the first time, the biblical account and outside records meet regularly.

In the fifth year of Rehoboam, according to the First Book of Kings, the Egyptian king Shishak came up against Jerusalem and carried off the treasures of the Temple. Egyptian sources record a campaign into Canaan by Pharaoh Sheshonq I, usually dated to about 925 BCE, and a list of place names on the Bubastite Portal at Karnak includes many towns in the north and the Negev. Notably, Jerusalem is not legible on the surviving list, one of several details scholars still argue over.

In the 9th century BCE the northern kingdom under the Omride dynasty became a military power. The Kurkh Monolith of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, now in the British Museum, describes the battle of Qarqar in Syria in 853 BCE and lists "Ahab the Israelite" among the members of a coalition, credited by the Assyrian scribes with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 foot soldiers. The Bible never mentions Qarqar. The Mesha Stele, found at Dhiban in Jordan in 1868 and now in the Louvre, records the Moabite king's account of how "Omri" had oppressed Moab and how Mesha later threw off Israelite rule; the Second Book of Kings tells the same war from Israel's side.

The long wars with Aram-Damascus, recounted in the Books of Kings, also have an Aramean witness. The Tel Dan inscription, whose fragments were found in 1993 and 1994, is usually attributed to Hazael of Damascus and claims the killing of a king of Israel and a king of the "house of David." The violent change of dynasty in Israel that followed, and the famous Assyrian image of the new king's tribute, are the subject of the article on Jehu and the Black Obelisk.

Assyria, Babylon and the end of the kingdoms

The decisive wars of the age were fought against empires. The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III annexed much of the northern kingdom in the campaigns of 734 to 732 BCE. Samaria fell after a siege in about 722 BCE; Shalmaneser V began it and Sargon II claimed the conquest and the deportation of the population, a claim that matches the biblical account of the exile of the northern tribes.

Judah survived for more than a century longer. In 701 BCE Sennacherib invaded and besieged Lachish, the kingdom's second city. Its fall is told in three ways at once: in the Second Book of Kings, in Sennacherib's annals, which boast of shutting up Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," and in the stone reliefs from his palace at Nineveh, now in the British Museum, which show the assault ramp, the battering rams and the deportation of the townspeople. The excavations at Lachish uncovered the Assyrian siege ramp itself, the only one of its kind known from the period. In Jerusalem, the water tunnel and the Siloam inscription are widely linked to Hezekiah's preparations for this war.

Play video: The Lachish Reliefs

Babylon completed what Assyria began. Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem in 597 BCE and, after a second revolt, destroyed the city and the First Temple in 586 BCE, the date most commonly used, with 587 BCE preferred by some scholars. Ostraca found at Lachish, letters written by a Judahite officer in the last days before the fall, include one in which the writer says he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish, because Azekah can no longer be seen. Destruction layers at Lachish, Arad and the City of David bear out the scale of the Babylonian campaign.

Remembering the ancient wars

For later generations these wars became more than history. Rabbinic tradition fixed the destruction of the First Temple on the Ninth of Av, a fast day that also came to mark later disasters such as the fall of the Second Temple and of Betar. Medieval and modern readers turned Joshua, Gideon and David into models of courage and faith, while others read the same books as theology rather than chronicle.

In the State of Israel the ancient battlefields took on another life. Yigael Yadin, the second chief of staff of the IDF, became the country's best-known archaeologist and excavated Hazor and Megiddo, and the study of biblical warfare entered military education. The later Jewish wars against empires are told in the articles on the Maccabean revolt and the Great Revolt and Masada. How the periods of the modern history connect to this deep background is the subject of the guide to the periods of Israel's military history.

The safest summary is that the later the period, the more firmly the biblical wars stand on outside evidence. The conquest of Canaan remains largely a matter of literary tradition and debate; the wars of the Omrides, of Jehu, of Hezekiah and of the last kings of Judah are anchored in inscriptions and destruction layers that can be dated and seen.