Back in Episode 5, I mentioned that Israel had an outsized influence on the history of the Western world, considering its size and significance in Ancient history. If you were able to go back in time to the ancient world, and gone to visit someone in some other part of the Mediterranean, like Greece, and asked them about Israel, they would have said, ‘Who?’
Israel was really pretty insignificant in the ancient world, to be honest. It only really matters to the affairs of the great nations because it’s occasionally in the way, kind of like my small dog Chipper is often in the way when I’m trying to go to the kitchen. Assyria wants to attack Egypt, and on their way to the kitchen, I mean to Egypt, they have to go through Israel.
Later Babylon comes, and again, on their way to Egypt, and Israel is in the way.
Despite being tiny, and weak, and strategically not that important, and not having a lot of resources or people, Israel manages to survive, when a lot of the other nations around them do not. Moab? Gone. Edom? Gone. Philistine? Gone. But Israel manages to stay around, and is still alive and kicking when it’s conquered by Rome in 63 BC. We will come back to that conquering in a bit, but for now, let’s take a look at what might have been the Golden Age of Israel: the Kingdom of David and Solomon.
Map of the Kingdom of Israel, under David and Solomon. The map shows how Israel was pretty much the direct path from Egypt to Assyria, so as those two superpowers fought each other, they tended to crash through Israel on the way.