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I struggle to think of anyone whose culture has had more of an impact on world history than the Jewish people. The reasons why are obvious, but in some ways it's also kind of surprising in hindsight. For the majority of their history, the Jews have been a minor group of tribal nomads in the middle-of-nowhere desert, perpetually situated in between much bigger empires with much more popular gods. Even their true origins are pretty mysterious. Their most famous work of literature, the Hebrew Bible, has no shortage of mythological origin stories, be it Adam and Eve, Noah's table of nations, or the Exodus, but these don't really help us much. Archaeologically, the Israelites were indistinguishable from other Canaanite cultures in the region, so what we can glean from that is also limited. The oldest reference to "Israel", the Biblical promised land situated in what we now call the Levant, is found in Egyptian records. Specifically, we first find this word among the list of conquered peoples in the Merneptah Stele. Interestingly, this 13th century BCE document denotes "Israel" as an ethnic group rather than a place, probably alluding to their nomadic nature. It's unclear what relation, if any, these earliest historical Israelites have to the "Shasu of Yhw", a tribe of Semitic-speaking raiders documented during the reign of Amenhotep III whose "Yhw" is probably identical to the Hebrew god, Yahweh. The god of the Israelites is an entirely different topic, though. I dive more into that on my blurb for Yahweh, for reference.

In terms of Biblical chronology, the blurred line between history and mythology usually starts to clear up around the reign of the legendary King Solomon and his kin during the 10th century BCE. In the Bible, this time is remembered as a golden age, when the land was united under one king until ten of the twelve tribes of Israel rebelled against Solomon's son in 930 BCE and founded the Kingdom of Judah under Jeroboam. This is likely a narrative spun by later Judean authors seeking to reintegrate refugees after Israel was completely destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. Archaeology doesn't support a united kingdom during the time of Solomon, or at least not one even close to the prosperous nation of gold described in the Bible. The earliest Biblical king whose existence can be confirmed by archaeological evidence is Ahab, who reigned in the 9th century BCE. Assyrian documents also confirm that he was the son of Omri, and interestingly also assigns him to the "House of David", obviously alluding to the Biblical hero of Goliath-slaying fame. David is his whole can of worms, though, and since he would've lived two centuries before these stelae were inscribed, we can't conclusively call this evidence of his existence beyond being a legendary ancestor.

So where then does the Bible itself arrive on the scene? I think a lot of us who grew up in the West's less-than-stellar educational system have this impression that there's some original book gathering dust in a monastery somewhere that all modern Bibles just copy from, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Tanakh is currently the Codex Leningradensis, which was made in 1008 CE. The Bible is really a compilation of many different works written over the course of some six hundred years or so. Traditionally, four authors have been given credit for different parts of the original five books of the Tanakh (together referred to as the Torah), based on literary analysis: the Elohist, the Yahwist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly Source. The Elohist is probably one of the oldest authors, as they prefer the words "El" and "Elohim" over "Yahweh" to refer to their chief deity. While in modern Hebrew, the word "el" is just the word that means lowercase g "god", it was originally the name of a completely separate god who was head of the Canaanite pantheon. "Elohim" is the plural form of this word, indicative of the polytheistic views that the earliest Israelites originally held. The Yahwist, meanwhile, prefers to use the four-letter name of the Jewish god (YHWH) which most modern Jews do not pronounce out loud. I'd say check out my blurb on Yahweh for more on that paper trail. The Deuteronomist… well… wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. Internally, it is said that Deuteronomy was revealed to the priest Hilkiah in 622 BCE, to be presented to the reigning king of Judah, Josiah, so it's likely that the historical Hilkiah is the author of this book. Deuteronomy is primarily a law code for the Jewish people, born out of a period of civil strife and looming invasions, and is one of the most important books in the modern faith, as interpreting those laws define the culture more than the stories themselves. Indeed, most modern Jews are quite agnostic about all the mythological bits of scripture, seeing them more as theological set pieces than records of actual history. Turns out it's more important to know how to live as a good person within your community than it is to insist that some old guy thousands of years ago put a bunch of animals on a boat for forty days.

Lastly, the Priestly Source is the main compiler of all the previous sources. The priesthood of ancient Jerusalem is an entire diatribe in itself, but they were responsible for organizing the Bible in a form we may recognize today. The need to unify these disparate texts emerged from one of the greatest tragedies in Biblical history: the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. This was a real event we can confirm through archaeology, and it was an existential nightmare for the Jewish people. Their god had seemingly abandoned them, yet still refused to exterminate them completely like their pact claimed would happen. The Jewish people became scattered until the priests were finally allowed to return to Jerusalem when the Iranian conqueror Cyrus the Great destroyed the Babylonians in 539 BCE. The Jews were allowed to rebuild the Temple which had been destroyed in the invasion, and they were free to worship as they pleased. It is during this Persian Period, and the Greek and Roman periods that followed, that many books of the Bible were authored and compiled, necessary in order to bring their dispersed people back into harmony. They had to come up with a reason why things were consistently so bad despite their god telling them that He would deliver His believers to a promised land and destroy all the enemies who beset them on all sides. They had to recontextualize their place in a world where good things happen to bad people and those bad people tend to use their good things to bully the Jews. The solution was a theology that likely emerged from their newfound connections with Iran's Zoroastrian clergy: apocalypticism.

Apocalypticism assured its believers that God was still with them, it's all just part of a 4D chess game with an evil opposite which will be vanquished at the end of time, and it's only then that God will make everything okay. This is how we end up with the trippy visuals of the Book of Daniel, and perhaps the most famous work of the apocalyptic genre: the New Testament. Jesus of Nazareth was very much a Jewish apocalyptic preacher, with direct parallels often being ripped straight from the Book of Daniel. In many ways, he was the penultimate culmination of this genre, and if he hadn't become the Messiah for a whole different religion, he probably would've been remembered as one of many such preachers from this period of Jewish history. It is interesting to note that Judaism as a whole seemed to split off into two major branches that survive today: Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call Rabbinic Judaism a direct response to Christianity, but the two have often passive aggressively butt heads over the course of history. Well… okay, more passive aggressive on the part of the Jews and more just plain aggressive on the part of the Christians, let's be honest. Rabbinic Judaism is really its own thing that came to be after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, as since there was no longer a Temple, the scripture itself became the Temple. This is why rabbis are still poring over each individual word and letter in the Tanakh to this day. Judaism is extremely focused on textual analysis and scholarly disagreement, which is something I personally find very alluring. Their god may not be for me, but I have an intense respect for that method and the theories of divinity it produced. For now though, that is where I will leave this story off. Most people could argue that "ancient Israel" really stops at 70 CE, so everything else is beyond the scope of this blurb.

Design notes, so obviously there's an absolute shitload of Biblical art out there. Unfortunately, most of it seems to fall into two categories: medieval and Renaissance depictions which don't even bother to make things appear accurate since the average artisan rarely traveled outside their own hamlet, or weird modern art which has this sort of… idk how to describe it other than "churchy" vibe. Like, accuracy is not the priority so much as drawing a bunch of peasants in potato sacks kneeling before this wispy divine presence. I've found it's the works of the late 19th, early 20th centuries that really gets a hard-on for exploring clothing which would've been accurate for the time period, and they do it without taking away the grandeur which I think most artists are actually going for. Makes sense, this was afterall the dawn of archaeology and Biblical scholarship. People just had more resources to go off of. For me, my favorite artist I've found in this regard is James Tissot. I don't know what it is, but something about his designs for Biblical characters feels extremely grounded. The clothing layers and hairstyles look real, and he explores a diverse array of textiles and how they can be arranged, so no two characters actually look the same. Whenever I design Biblical characters, James Tissot is now my go-to for reference. On this piece specifically, I think I added too many stripes to the elite's sash, that's like the one thing that's really bugging me. Sometimes I wish I could get a hang of digital art just so I wouldn't have to deal with stupid nitpicks like this-

Description
I struggle to think of anyone whose culture has had more of an impact on world history than the Jewish people. The reasons why are obvious, but in some ways it's also kind of surprising in hindsight. For the majority of their history, the Jews have been a minor group of tribal nomads in the middle-of-nowhere desert, perpetually situated in between much bigger empires with much more popular gods. Even their true origins are pretty mysterious. Their most famous work of literature, the Hebrew Bible, has no shortage of mythological origin stories, be it Adam and Eve, Noah's table of nations, or the Exodus, but these don't really help us much. Archaeologically, the Israelites were indistinguishable from other Canaanite cultures in the region, so what we can glean from that is also limited. The oldest reference to "Israel", the Biblical promised land situated in what we now call the Levant, is found in Egyptian records. Specifically, we first find this word among the list of conquered peoples in the Merneptah Stele. Interestingly, this 13th century BCE document denotes "Israel" as an ethnic group rather than a place, probably alluding to their nomadic nature. It's unclear what relation, if any, these earliest historical Israelites have to the "Shasu of Yhw", a tribe of Semitic-speaking raiders documented during the reign of Amenhotep III whose "Yhw" is probably identical to the Hebrew god, Yahweh. The god of the Israelites is an entirely different topic, though. I dive more into that on my blurb for Yahweh, for reference.

In terms of Biblical chronology, the blurred line between history and mythology usually starts to clear up around the reign of the legendary King Solomon and his kin during the 10th century BCE. In the Bible, this time is remembered as a golden age, when the land was united under one king until ten of the twelve tribes of Israel rebelled against Solomon's son in 930 BCE and founded the Kingdom of Judah under Jeroboam. This is likely a narrative spun by later Judean authors seeking to reintegrate refugees after Israel was completely destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. Archaeology doesn't support a united kingdom during the time of Solomon, or at least not one even close to the prosperous nation of gold described in the Bible. The earliest Biblical king whose existence can be confirmed by archaeological evidence is Ahab, who reigned in the 9th century BCE. Assyrian documents also confirm that he was the son of Omri, and interestingly also assigns him to the "House of David", obviously alluding to the Biblical hero of Goliath-slaying fame. David is his whole can of worms, though, and since he would've lived two centuries before these stelae were inscribed, we can't conclusively call this evidence of his existence beyond being a legendary ancestor.

So where then does the Bible itself arrive on the scene? I think a lot of us who grew up in the West's less-than-stellar educational system have this impression that there's some original book gathering dust in a monastery somewhere that all modern Bibles just copy from, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Tanakh is currently the Codex Leningradensis, which was made in 1008 CE. The Bible is really a compilation of many different works written over the course of some six hundred years or so. Traditionally, four authors have been given credit for different parts of the original five books of the Tanakh (together referred to as the Torah), based on literary analysis: the Elohist, the Yahwist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly Source. The Elohist is probably one of the oldest authors, as they prefer the words "El" and "Elohim" over "Yahweh" to refer to their chief deity. While in modern Hebrew, the word "el" is just the word that means lowercase g "god", it was originally the name of a completely separate god who was head of the Canaanite pantheon. "Elohim" is the plural form of this word, indicative of the polytheistic views that the earliest Israelites originally held. The Yahwist, meanwhile, prefers to use the four-letter name of the Jewish god (YHWH) which most modern Jews do not pronounce out loud. I'd say check out my blurb on Yahweh for more on that paper trail. The Deuteronomist… well… wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. Internally, it is said that Deuteronomy was revealed to the priest Hilkiah in 622 BCE, to be presented to the reigning king of Judah, Josiah, so it's likely that the historical Hilkiah is the author of this book. Deuteronomy is primarily a law code for the Jewish people, born out of a period of civil strife and looming invasions, and is one of the most important books in the modern faith, as interpreting those laws define the culture more than the stories themselves. Indeed, most modern Jews are quite agnostic about all the mythological bits of scripture, seeing them more as theological set pieces than records of actual history. Turns out it's more important to know how to live as a good person within your community than it is to insist that some old guy thousands of years ago put a bunch of animals on a boat for forty days.

Lastly, the Priestly Source is the main compiler of all the previous sources. The priesthood of ancient Jerusalem is an entire diatribe in itself, but they were responsible for organizing the Bible in a form we may recognize today. The need to unify these disparate texts emerged from one of the greatest tragedies in Biblical history: the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. This was a real event we can confirm through archaeology, and it was an existential nightmare for the Jewish people. Their god had seemingly abandoned them, yet still refused to exterminate them completely like their pact claimed would happen. The Jewish people became scattered until the priests were finally allowed to return to Jerusalem when the Iranian conqueror Cyrus the Great destroyed the Babylonians in 539 BCE. The Jews were allowed to rebuild the Temple which had been destroyed in the invasion, and they were free to worship as they pleased. It is during this Persian Period, and the Greek and Roman periods that followed, that many books of the Bible were authored and compiled, necessary in order to bring their dispersed people back into harmony. They had to come up with a reason why things were consistently so bad despite their god telling them that He would deliver His believers to a promised land and destroy all the enemies who beset them on all sides. They had to recontextualize their place in a world where good things happen to bad people and those bad people tend to use their good things to bully the Jews. The solution was a theology that likely emerged from their newfound connections with Iran's Zoroastrian clergy: apocalypticism.

Apocalypticism assured its believers that God was still with them, it's all just part of a 4D chess game with an evil opposite which will be vanquished at the end of time, and it's only then that God will make everything okay. This is how we end up with the trippy visuals of the Book of Daniel, and perhaps the most famous work of the apocalyptic genre: the New Testament. Jesus of Nazareth was very much a Jewish apocalyptic preacher, with direct parallels often being ripped straight from the Book of Daniel. In many ways, he was the penultimate culmination of this genre, and if he hadn't become the Messiah for a whole different religion, he probably would've been remembered as one of many such preachers from this period of Jewish history. It is interesting to note that Judaism as a whole seemed to split off into two major branches that survive today: Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call Rabbinic Judaism a direct response to Christianity, but the two have often passive aggressively butt heads over the course of history. Well… okay, more passive aggressive on the part of the Jews and more just plain aggressive on the part of the Christians, let's be honest. Rabbinic Judaism is really its own thing that came to be after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, as since there was no longer a Temple, the scripture itself became the Temple. This is why rabbis are still poring over each individual word and letter in the Tanakh to this day. Judaism is extremely focused on textual analysis and scholarly disagreement, which is something I personally find very alluring. Their god may not be for me, but I have an intense respect for that method and the theories of divinity it produced. For now though, that is where I will leave this story off. Most people could argue that "ancient Israel" really stops at 70 CE, so everything else is beyond the scope of this blurb.

Design notes, so obviously there's an absolute shitload of Biblical art out there. Unfortunately, most of it seems to fall into two categories: medieval and Renaissance depictions which don't even bother to make things appear accurate since the average artisan rarely traveled outside their own hamlet, or weird modern art which has this sort of… idk how to describe it other than "churchy" vibe. Like, accuracy is not the priority so much as drawing a bunch of peasants in potato sacks kneeling before this wispy divine presence. I've found it's the works of the late 19th, early 20th centuries that really gets a hard-on for exploring clothing which would've been accurate for the time period, and they do it without taking away the grandeur which I think most artists are actually going for. Makes sense, this was afterall the dawn of archaeology and Biblical scholarship. People just had more resources to go off of. For me, my favorite artist I've found in this regard is James Tissot. I don't know what it is, but something about his designs for Biblical characters feels extremely grounded. The clothing layers and hairstyles look real, and he explores a diverse array of textiles and how they can be arranged, so no two characters actually look the same. Whenever I design Biblical characters, James Tissot is now my go-to for reference. On this piece specifically, I think I added too many stripes to the elite's sash, that's like the one thing that's really bugging me. Sometimes I wish I could get a hang of digital art just so I wouldn't have to deal with stupid nitpicks like this-