Part 2: CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW
I find I learn things best if I know about what I’m learning before I start. So I’m going to tell you a story, with no evidence or attempt at elaboration, sketching in the broadest way possible the history of the world.
Starting now, we will not be using the BC format dates, since all of these dates are in the BC range; for simplicity we will simply refer to BC dates with a –, thus, –3971 was when God created Adam and Eve.
They had sons and daughters, who multiplied and filled the Earth. They lived very long lives, but never more than 1,000 years long, God having set that as hard limit to our lifespans for “A thousand years is with God as one day” (2 Peter 3:8), and God had warned Adam “in the day you eat the fruit, you shall die” (Genesis 2:17).
Humans did a lot more bad than good, until God became fed up and decided to start over, and arrange humanity’s government differently after the flood, starting from one “breeding pair” of humans and their three sons and their wives.
This was in the year –2434, 120 years before the flood, when God started grooming Noah to build the ark (Genesis 6:3). He built it, collected two of every animal, but seven clean (eating) animals (Genesis 7:1-3); the flood came in –2314 and then the ark settled on Ararat in eastern Turkey in –2313.
Noah’s children grew, multiplied, and eventually migrated down to the valley of Sumer, where they built cities, chose a king, Nimrod rebelled against God, God confused the languages, and people finally began to leave Sumer and settle around the world.
In most of the world, we have little if any history of this period so we have to rely on the Bible and Sumer (and later, a little bit, Egypt). No one else left records to speak of. Those settlers who remained in Sumer, in the south of Mesopotamia, warred more or less constantly with each other.
The key players in this part of the story are the cities of Kish, where the first city was built; then Uruk, Nimrod’s first successful city (they stopped building Babel mid-way); then Ur, Lagash, Umma, Adab, and others.
Eventually some of these cities came out on top and established a semblance of an empire, reaching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea; this is now about –2000. It’s at this stage that Chedor-Laomer of Genesis 14 invaded Canaan in –1937 to re-establish control only to be killed by Abraham after kidnapping Lot, which plunged his empire into chaos.
He was not the first, nor the last emperor in this chain – the names are not important for now – but the empire rolled over from one conqueror to the next until Sargon of Akkad took over in –1896.
During his long reign (56 years) he managed to consolidate the empire and leave a stable throne to his sons. They unfortunately faced constant rebellions and invasions by barbarians from the east called the Gutians, and gradually lost power over about a century – we’re around –1750 now – until finally succumbing to a one-time vassal of theirs who had been governor of Elam to the east, Puzur-Inshushinak.
His success was short lived, and he – and the other barbarians – were overcome by Utu-Hegal of Uruk and his (probably) brother Ur-Nammu of what’s called the Ur III empire. His reign and that of his successors was a golden age in Sumer, and lasted about a century.
Meanwhile, Abraham was in Canaan, his descendants Isaac and Jacob and Joseph were having various adventures I’m sure you already know about (but will hear about later anyway), and the family of Jacob wound up migrating to Egypt around the time of Ur III, in –1733, where they would stay until Moses led them out of Egypt in –1507.
Early in that period, Joseph became the vizier of Sesostris I of the 12th dynasty, saved Egypt and earned the gratitude of the Egyptians. He died around the time the 12th dynasty was ending and Amenemhet IV began to persecute the Egyptians in –1596.
His wife Sobekneferu, without an heir, found Moses while she was praying to the river god for a son; raised him in secret until her father and/or husband died and she ruled in her own right. Not long after, her own dynasty was absorbed by the 13th dynasty, probably by more or less coerced marriage, but she retained power enough to protect and educate Moses.
Decades later, when she died, Moses no longer had a protector – and his status as non-Egyptian heir was deeply offensive to the Egyptians – and so he fled for his life to Arabia for 40 years before returning in –1508, setting the stage for the exodus of the Hebrews in –1507.
BACK IN SUMER
Back in Sumer, all good things must end, and Ur III faded under its final king, Ibbi-sin, who was beset by rebellions and invasions by new barbarians – the Amorites this time – and who gradually lost power until his city of Ur was overcome by Elamites and burnt, and then occupied by the Elamites for a handful of years starting in –1603.
One of Ibbi-sin’s generals, Eshbi-erra, had basically extorted his own independence early on in Ibbi-sin’s reign to become king of Isin. Ibbi-sin had also appointed Naplanum, a wealthy merchant, to be governor of Larsa. When Ibbi-sin died, Naplanum became king if he hadn’t been before.
It was Eshbi-erra who chased out the Elamites and recovered and rebuilt the city of Ur, which would stay under his dynasty’s control for about a century until Gungunum, king of Larsa, took it from him.
The cities of Isin and Larsa competed for control for above two centuries, and this is known as the Isin-Larsa period. In the end, the king of Larsa, Rim-sin, killed the king of Isin ending his dynasty.
Then just 30 years later, Rim-sin was killed himself by the young Amorite king Hammurabi in his quest to dominate Sumer, in –1356. As a quick side note, Hammurabi is famous for his law code, which skeptics say predated and therefore inspired Moses’ law.
By removing the Kassites, we have incidentally moved Hammurabi to a place about a century after Joshua invaded the promised land (-1467) where there were many Amorites. Some of these Amorites, being faced with imminent invasion and an apparently unstoppable enemy in Israel, fled east where they formed part of the emerging Amorite dynasty.
Having had contact with Israel, they certainly could have had contact with their laws; which certainly could have inspired Hammurabi; thus proving the maxim that “the law shall go forth from Jerusalem” (Micah 4:2).
One thing is certain; if this timeline is correct, Moses’ law was not inspired by Hammurabi – Hammurabi wasn’t even born when Moses died. Regardless, as so often happens after a great king creates an empire, Hammurabi’s descendants were unable to hold on to it.
So it was with Hammurabi whose son Samsu-iluna gradually lost the territory his father had gained, and over the course of the next century declined to the point that, in –1189 the Hittites sacked and destroyed Babylon, ending his dynasty.
Meanwhile, the second dynasty of Babylon, called “the first Sealand dynasty,” since it ruled over the coastal southern regions of Sumer, has two clear interactions with the Amorite dynasty; first, when Samsi-iluna wanted to kill Ilum-ma-il, its first king; and last, when Gulkishar of Sealand wrote a nasty letter to Samsi-ditana, the last king of the Amorite dynasty.
These dynasties were, therefore, contemporary over the period of these kings. And historians are correct in believing that the Kassites prospered from the weakness of the Amorites, establishing themselves at some point in this period as overlords of both the Sealand and Amorite dynasties.
They would continue in this role, after the fall of Babylon, as sovereigns over dynasties 4-9, ruling hand-in-glove over them from their capital of Dur-Kurigalzu, while the Babylonian puppet kings ran the day to day things and pretended to be important.
Meanwhile, far to the north, the Assyrians grew in power starting in around –1550, and later competed with Kassites for control over land, going back and forth; sometimes being stronger, sometimes weaker.
Also meanwhile, to the northwest, the kingdom of Mari which had been a significant player in the
–1900 Sargonic era had been replaced with the Mitanni, who gradually grew to become a greater player; meanwhile, even farther west, the Hittites controlled eastern Turkey and northern Syria, even after the conquest of Joshua.
The scope and power of these empires waxed and waned, but for now it’s enough to mention that they existed. And meanwhile Israel was going through the Judges period for about 350 years, which ended when Saul was crowned king in –1111.
Meanwhile in Sumer there was always drama but nothing worth noting until after the turn of the millennium. But to get to that, we have to make a brief detour to Egypt.
BACK IN EGYPT
If you know anything about history, you’ll notice that the following events are dated about five centuries later than traditional history places them; this is to be expected, based on what I told you about Egyptian history. For now bear with me, and we’ll prove these dates much later.
After the Exodus, Egypt was in tatters for some time – funny how 10 plagues of literally Biblical proportions can wreck a country – and as the Israelites fled east to Arabia, they met the Amalekites and defeated them.
The Amalekites, no doubt learning about the events in Egypt, saw a ripe fruit for the picking and circled around and invaded the greatly weakened land, conquering it without firing a shot, so to speak.
These Amalekites – known to history as the Hyksos – took the opportunity to invade and rule for some four centuries, finally being chased out by the 18th dynasty where they pushed towards southern Judea around the time of Saul, who faced the Amalekite refugees fleeing Egypt and conquered them once and for all.
The last Hyksos king, Apophis in the Greek or Apepi in Egyptian, was almost certainly the same as the last Amalekite king Agag; Egypt has no “g,” so Agag in Egyptian could not have been written with a G; a plausible alternative is Apepi. And we do know for a fact that Apepi was Canaanite.
After his death, the New Kingdom of Egypt began, with Ahmose and then a series of Thutmoses and Amenhoteps. Still reeling from its four century captivity and recovering from foreign rule, it needed allies to the north – the emergent state of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel entered a golden era under David and Solomon, who pushed back their Hittite, Mitanni, Canaanite, and Syrian neighbors and took tribute from most of them, making them immensely wealthy. Solomon in particular was insanely rich.
2 Chronicles 1:15 The king made silver and gold to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the lowland, for abundance.
The Bible also tells us that the queen of Sheba came to visit him and was awed. Now Jesus called her “the queen of the South,” which basically has to be Egypt. There were very few women who ever ruled Egypt as a proper queen, and not a mere regent… and there was only one of them who also ruled over Sheba (a land to the south of Egypt).
This means, regardless of Egyptian chronological problems, that the queen of Sheba can only be the 18th dynasty queen Hatshepsut who was therefore contemporary with Solomon –1028-1006. And don’t worry, we have many reasons to believe that the chronology requires her to be contemporary with Solomon, not just circumstantial evidence.
Anyway, after Solomon died, Israel split into two countries, the northern ten tribes in Samaria, and the southern three based in Jerusalem. The northern tribes were ruled over by Jeroboam, who had fled to Egypt under Solomon and came back after his death and was anointed by God to be king.
The southern three tribes were ruled by Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, and was thenceforth called the kingdom of Judah. About 5 years after the split, “Shishak” king of Egypt invaded and plundered Judah and both Rehoboam and Jeroboam became his vassals.
Scholars think they know who this is, but as we’ll discuss later, they are wrong. It was actually Amenhotep II; now interestingly, his grandson Amenhotep III is known as being the richest pharaoh in the history of Egypt. But how? Did they suddenly discover more gold mines? No, his ancestors stole it from the piles of gold Solomon had heaped up “as stones.”
But this leads us to another fascinating story; his son was Akhenaten, the heretic monotheist. He instituted religious reforms that were deeply unpopular, for no apparent reason. He worshiped one god, the sun-disc, and penned a hymn that is eerily similar to Psalms 104 but directed at the worship of the sun god.
Now this, of course, leads historians to say “Look!” the 14th century Pharaoh Akhenaten wrote a hymn to his pagan god Aten, and David shamelessly stole it and addressed it to his God Yahweh!
But the 10th century Pharaoh Akhenaten was the great-grandson of the man who sacked the city of Jerusalem, pilfering it of everything of value! It’s not hard to believe that a copy of David’s psalms was among those things.
Indeed, historians are at an utter loss to explain how and why Akhenaten enacted such radical changes, unprecedented in Egyptian history. But his grandfather had stolen tons of things from Jerusalem; what if he really did have a come-to-Jesus moment because of something he read in the copies of the books of Moses and David that Shishak probably stole?
Meanwhile, in the –900-800s Assyria was growing stronger and reaching west, controlling more and more territory, pushing back and forth over the land of Canaan against the Egyptians and Hittites until the Bur-sagale catastrophe changed everything.
THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE
Historians have long noted that the Hittite Empire disappeared around –1200; simultaneously the Mycenean Greek culture ended, the 19th dynasty of Egypt fell to the mysterious “Sea peoples,” Troy fell, and many other cultures went into a period of darkness from which no history emerges until around –800.
However, this period of darkness did not exist; historians created it by pushing Egyptian history 400 years too far into the past; for when Egypt moves, so moves the history of every nation in the Middle East.
This void in history was created to make the rest of the cultures match the artificially inflated ages of the Egyptian 18th and 19th dynasties, which historians place in the 15th-14th centuries and we place in the 10th-9th.
When we lower the history of Egypt from the 1200’s to the 800’s, we simultaneously erase the dark ages of the bronze age collapse. Nor do we do this only for Egypt’s sake; removing the Kassites also happened to cut 400 years or so off the timeline, removing any need for a 400 year period of barbarism.
But the collapse itself was real; it was caused by the Bur-sagale event, the Biblical Ra’ash, which was almost certainly the explosion of Thera, the island now known as Santorini, with a force of ten times that of Krakatoa.
This would have caused massive tsunamis, earthquakes, molten ash falling from the skies burning cities, nuclear winter with globally lower temperatures for years, acid rain killing crops, with the nearer civilizations being more heavily affected.
This led to a period of mass migration of refugees, hunger, famine, a veritable post-apocalyptic zombie apocalypse movie. These were the sea peoples who invaded Egypt, the peoples who invaded Israel as prophesied by Amos; they are the reason Assyria and Babylon “entered into a period of decline” for no apparent reason after the “eclipse,” and so on.
Incidentally, this was also the cause of the destruction of the 9th century Greek civilization which later led to legends about Atlantis.
All in all, it was a time of chaos; so it’s not surprising that most of the ancient dating epochs – “year zero” in their calendars – date to around this time. The first Olympiad in Greece, the founding of Rome, the Canon of Ptolemy, all began in the early part of the 8th century. The world had ended; it began anew.
THE RISE OF ASSYRIA
The civilizations least affected by these events – though by no means unscathed – were Assyria and Egypt, and they emerged as the dominant players in the next two centuries. Assyria, after about 70 years wound up in the hands of Tiglath-Pileser.
For Christians, a defining event was the fall of Samaria in –721 and the exile of the northern ten tribes. It was standard Assyrian policy to move conquered peoples to new lands, to reduce the risk of rebellions by putting them in strange territory.
So the Israelites were scattered in various cities along the northern edges of their empire, along the Black Sea coast of Turkey, in Armenia and Georgia, and farther east. In their place, the Assyrians imported the newly conquered Elamites, who were settled in Samaria, and became known later as Samaritans.
After some bad luck, they oddly enough adopted the local religion of Yahweh, importing some priests to teach them how to do it, despite having no ethnic relationship to the Israelites or Jews. In the time of Jesus, they were still there, practicing their religion in a temple build to mimic the Jewish temple, which is what the woman alluded to in John 4:20.
Meanwhile in Egypt, the recovery from the catastrophe took a different form; Egypt became fragmented among four main groups, known to history as the 20th, 22nd, 23rd dynasties and the Theban High Priests of Amun (HPAs) of the 21st dynasty (not to be confused with the actual 21st dynasty who ruled from Tanis).
All these dynasties emerged from the ashes of the great catastrophe in the –760s or so. They ruled different parts of Egypt in more-or-less cooperative fashion, much like the city states of Medieval Italy or Germany, until –671 when the Assyrians finally succeeded in conquering Egypt under Esarhaddon and then Assurbanipal.
The Egyptians soon rebelled and were brutally crushed by –664, ending the 20th and 23rd dynasties at approximately the same time; the 22nd continued longer, but in a weakened state as vassals first of the Assyrians and later of the newly powerful HPAs of Thebes.
Eventually Assyrian power faded in the 630’s and 620’s as their neighbors – and vassals – to the east, the Medes, Persians, and Babylonians formed an alliance to overthrow them which led to the fall of the capital city of Nineveh in –612 – important because the burning of the libraries of Ashurbanipal inadvertently baked all of the clay tablets of his immense library.
This fire hardened the otherwise soft clay tablets, ensuring that they would survive 2500 years until they were dug up by modern historians. Without that fire, our knowledge of ancient history would be much more limited.
Oddly though, the Egyptians are recorded by the Babylonians as coming to the aid of the Assyrians in
–616, and again in –610. The Egyptians also recorded the incident, although not where any Egyptologist would think to look – but we’ll get to that story in time.
So at some point during the previous 50 years, the Egyptians had regained their independence and had become allies of the Assyrians. This was no doubt because the Assyrians focused their attention eastward do deal with the rising Median threat and lost control of the west.
THE RISE OF NECHO
As usually happens, the Assyrians stole everything in Egypt that wasn’t nailed down. This left Egypt not only captive, but also broke. This caused the HPAs of Thebes to consider a novel solution; the robbery of the rich burials of their ancestors from the 18th dynasty.
One such burial, that of minor boy-king Tutankhamun was so fabulously wealthy that his coffin alone had 243 pounds of gold in it. It’s difficult to imagine what the other tombs of kings like Thutmose III, Hatshepsut, or Amenhotep III would have been like. Unfortunately, they had all been looted in antiquity.
But not, as is commonly believed, by common thugs or gangs of tomb robbers. We know this, because of two reasons; first, because the bodies were carefully preserved and moved to a new location, something that would only have been done by a priest. All of the rich gold in the mummies themselves were carefully removed, their valuable coffins missing, replaced with cheap imitations in antiquity.
And second, we have a confession from them; Piankh, HPA during the early Assyrian occupation, issued an order to dig up the graves of one of their rich ancestors, but to leave the seal intact until his arrival; clearly intending to loot its wealth.
These facts – and they will be supported much more in the proper place – convince us that the HPAs of Thebes systematically looted the rich gold tombs of their ancestors in the –660’s-640’s, using the gold extracted from the burial goods to rebuild Egypt after the Assyrians left.
But this had a curious side effect; these were religious men, not thieves; and they could not justify sacrilege without a purpose. So they came up with a clever solution; the gold exhumed from these tombs would be used in the name of the king who posthumously donated it.
So the HPAs themselves adopted the names of the earlier kings of the 18th dynasty, and proceeded to rescue Egypt from the Assyrians and expand its borders in the late 7th century BC. And we are not speculating – we have an actual confession from one of them, in addition to an immense amount of evidence to support it.
We have, among these 18th century mummies, the mummy of Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty. He is identified beyond all doubt. And according to historians, this king ruled for 54 years and conquered most of the Middle East as far as the Euphrates in the 15th century. They call him “the Napoleon of Egypt.”
Here’s the problem, though; his mummy is that of a man who died in his 40’s. Clearly, the history is mismatched. This mummy did not do what this man’s legend says he did. And Egyptologists are well aware of this, and offer no explanation:
The cases of Thutmose III and Ramesses II are particularly revealing. The estimates provided by Wente and Harris for the ages of the unequivocally identified mummies of these kings (40 and 55 years, respectively) are glaringly at odds with the well-documented long reigns of both rulers (53 and 66 years). “Something somewhere is badly wrong,” as Kitchen remarked. (Oxford History of Ancient Egypt)
The solution, now that we know the above facts, is easy; there were two men who carried identical names; the original king who died at 40, and the later HPA who deliberately took on his identity and rebuilt Egypt in the name of the king who donated his burial goods to pay for it.
This resolves an immense amount of conflict in the Thutmose narrative; he has two separate childhood stories, one as a prince under Hatshepsut and one as a priest chosen by the god to be king.
He has two separate reign lengths, 54 years according to monuments but only 13 years according to the historian Manetho, whose reign lengths for the 18th dynasty agree remarkably well with the monumental evidence except in this case.
He, and other kings of the 18th dynasty, have a remarkably schizophrenic history; a king Amenhotep II records his “first victorious campaign” in his third year, then in a separate monument in a different part of Egypt, records his “first victorious campaign” in his 7th year.
There are many other examples of this duality in the 18th dynasty, all simply explained by the fact that there were two sets of kings with identical names; the original 18th dynasty kings, and a group of priests from Thebes who borrowed their gold and identities and rebuild Egypt in honor of their ancestors.
The most successful of these was the priest Menkheperre, who took on the identity of Menkheperre Thutmose III, and who was also know as Piankhi and, in the Bible, as Pharaoh Necho.
This was the pharaoh who killed Josiah and fought the Babylonians at Carchemish, on the Euphrates – an event mentioned only one time, in only one place in all of Egyptian history; by Thutmose III. Historians don’t see it because to them, Thutmose was 900 years dead.
Historians place Thutmose III in the 15th century BC; the real Thutmose III actually lived in the early 10th century BC; but the priest who stole his identity and who performed most of the exploits ascribed to him actually lived in the late 7th century BC.
THE INVASION OF BABYLON
Despite Thutmose/Piankhi/Menkheperre/Necho’s Egyptian armies, in –609 the last surviving Assyrian power was conquered in Haran. The leaders of this revolt were the Babylonians, specifically Nabopolassar, father of the famous Nebuchadnezzar who succeeded him in –605.
Nebuchadnezzar voraciously expanded his power, conquering Jerusalem in –598 and installing a vassal there, who then rebelled in favor of Egypt; whereupon Nebuchadnezzar returned and burned Jerusalem and the temple in –585, carrying away the bulk of the Jewish population to Babylon.
Among these captives were Ezekiel and Daniel. As I’m sure you know, Daniel rose to a position of prominence in Babylon, where he prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar would be insane for 7 years.
Meanwhile back in Judea, the remaining Jews and the daughters of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, fled to Egypt with Rehoboam, where they lived in a city on the northeastern Delta; it was here that Jeremiah prophesied the captivity and destruction of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar.
Simultaneously in Babylon Ezekiel announced the same message, in prophecies dated from –586 to
–582, he promised extensive doom and gloom, the death of a pharaoh, and the captivity of Egypt that would last for 40 years and bring utter desolation on the Egyptians.
The thing is, according to historians, that never happened. They believe that, at most, Nebuchadnezzar reached the border of Egypt and decided this was too hard and went home. But this was the same man who spent 13 years besieging Tyre to capture it – “quitter” was not a name he had been called before.
The Bible, the Roman-era Jewish Josephus, the Babylonian historian Berossus, and even the Babylonian annals themselves support these facts; but historians reject them outright because of their confidence that, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the 26th dynasty of Egypt was thriving and could not have missed mentioning the invasion the Bible describes.
But if they’re wrong about the placement in history of the 26th dynasty… suddenly the ancient sources all agree. Several chapters of the book will be spent proving all of these claims, but for now we are just staking out the overview.
In –585, Shebitku of the 25th Nubian dynasty conquered the last of the native Egyptian pharaohs in the NE Delta, killing Pharaoh Hophra as God foretold. Three years later, according to Josephus, Nebuchadnezzar invaded and killed Shebitku and installed his brother Shabaka on the throne instead.
The later Pharaoh Taharqa was present at this battle, and went about fomenting rebellions in territories as far afield as Spain, according to classical historians, bringing about a massive counterattack against the Babylonians in the –570’s that reached as far as Nineveh.
But they underestimated the Babylonians, who pushed back and by –567 had re-invaded Egypt, killed Shabaka, chased Taharqa out of the county, and conquered the land as far as Nubia; sacking and pillaging everything in their wake.
God’s prophesies were fulfilled, regardless of what historians believe, all classical witnesses tell the same story: Egypt was nearly wiped out, barely a man left alive; not since the plagues of the Exodus had Egypt been in such a state.
Meanwhile the Jews who had been taken captive in Babylon returned in several waves to Jerusalem in
–539, –515, and –457; they built various parts of the temple and city walls of Jerusalem, and had the usual ups and downs along the way.
This last date, –457, is significant because it was the decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the city walls; Daniel’s prophecy in Daniel 9:27, given a century earlier, had foretold the Jews that from this event they could count 69 weeks of years – 483 years – and then the Messiah would come.
That calculation yields a date of 27 AD – the year Jesus began His ministry. That same prophesy also told us that in the midst of the 70th week, the Messiah would be killed – thus, 4 years later in 31 AD.
As it happens, this is exactly 4,000 years from the creation of Adam… to the day.
THE RISE OF PERSIA
Back to the main story, in the –550’s Babylonia was weakening, and the Medes and Persians were strengthening; Cyrus began to conquer, and in the –540’s conquered all the perimeter lands around Babylon to the north and west, as far as what is now Turkey.
Then we are told by Herodotus that he explicitly turned his face south to conquer Egypt; again, historians deny this happened, again because they believe the powerful Saites of the 26th dynasty were ruling there, but again they are wrong.
Precisely 40 years after Nebuchadnezzar’s first invasion in –582, Cyrus the Great entered Egypt, wiped out what Babylonian garrisons were there, and liberated the few Egyptians who had survived and moved on to the east, probably leaving behind a token presence in Egypt.
In –539 he invaded Babylon and conquered in a single night; the Babylonians were celebrating their new year festival, and called for some of the sacred vessels stolen from the Jewish temple; which, understandably angered the Jewish God.
What’s interesting is that this whole event also happened to fall on the Hebrew day of Atonement that year. So Babylon fell, and Cyrus – when he was shown in the old books of the Jews that God had prophesied his rise and his repatriation of the Jews over two centuries earlier – sent many of them home with money and orders to rebuild the temple.
Many people know that; what fewer people know is that Cyrus used the Babylonian wealth he had acquired to rebuild temples and restore stolen idols and temple goods to almost every land; he likewise did so to Egypt.
The Persians were a fair and just people; if you had to be conquered by someone, you would want it to be the Persians, who were religiously tolerant, not unnecessarily brutal like the Assyrians nor in love with money so much as the Romans.
History has painted the entry of Cambyses into Egypt in –525 as a brutal affair, based on a misunderstanding of Herodotus’ account, but it was in fact a mission to establish a stable government in what was still a largely unpopulated country.
Cambyses built temples and established priesthoods in Egypt, and most importantly he installed a set of local governors that ruled Egypt as pharaohs on his behalf.
It is these pharaohs who are called the 26th dynasty, who for the entirety of the dynasty ruled in parallel with the pharaohs of the 27th dynasty, who are simply a list of the kings of Persia, the true kings of the country during the 26th dynasty.
Modern historians place them 121 years too early, which is why they are so certain that the events the Bible mentions are impossible. But it is their own theories that are impossible, not the combined witness of every ancient historian.
The Egyptians rebelled from time to time, sometimes with the help of the Greeks who were at war with the Persians for most of the first half of the 5th century BC. But mostly, the Persians hung on to Egypt.
The war with the Greeks mentioned above is famous for the Athenians, Spartans, the battle of Thermopylae, the battle of Marathon which inspired the Olympic event, and the bridging of the Bosporus by a series of rafts chained together so that the Persians could walk across to invade Greece.
They almost won, but they didn’t, and in the end retreated; thus began a decline in the Persian Empire which, a few centuries later, paved the way for a briefly independent Egypt, and more importantly for Philip of Macedon to unite Greece and then for his young son, Alexander, to invade Persia and ultimately to conquer the entire known world to the east – as far as India.
AFTER ALEXANDER
He died young in –331, whereupon – just as Daniel had foretold – his kingdom was divided to his four generals, one each getting Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the broader Mesopotamian area.
Of these generals, two emerged as the most powerful and eventually absorbed the others; Seleucus, who ruled over Mesopotamia and surroundings; and Ptolemy, who ruled over Egypt; and even though Ptolemy and his descendants were Greek, they adopted the customs and titles and manners of the Egyptians, ruling as pharaohs.
These two generals founded dynasties which lasted for around three centuries, who had a complex diplomatic history, warring and making treaties and intermarrying and warring some more – which led to a massive tug of war over the Judean area lasting centuries.
Daniel 11’s prophecy calls these kings “the king of the north” and “the king of the south” respectively. That prophecy, written in the 500’s BC, foretold in extensive detail those wars, treaties, marriages, and so on culminating in an event in –168 where the descendant of Seleucus, Antiochus Epiphanes, conquered Judea and blasphemed the holy place, entering the temple and sacrificing a pig on the altar.
This enraged the Jews, who under the leadership of Matthias Maccabeus declared independence and fought – and won – against the Seleucids. The Maccabees were high priests of God as well as kings, and held on to power – not without problems, of course – for some decades before eventually succumbing to a newly rising power of whom we have not yet spoken… Rome.
Rome was not very active on the international scene before –200, but their power grew exponentially over the next centuries; they first conquered the Italian peninsula – which before then had been populated by different peoples, such as Samnites, Etruscans, Greeks, and so on.
They then looked farther afield, warring against and finally annexing Carthage, Greece, Pergamon (Turkey), and taking bigger and bigger bites out of the Seleucid Empire which in due time fell to the Parthians from the east in around –100.
Meanwhile, Pompey the Great conquered Judea in –67 and also entered the temple; funny story, up until this time Pompey had been the golden boy of Rome, literally everything he touched prospered. His string of good luck was amazing.
But after entering the temple of Jerusalem where no one but priests could go, from that day forth he had nothing but back luck, eventually being killed by Julius Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar had a fling with Cleopatra – the 9th Egyptian queen to carry that name, by the way – who was descended from Alexander’s general Ptolemy.
Marc Antony also had a fling with Cleopatra, which led to the Roman Civil War. In the end Julius Caesar won and declared himself emperor – replacing what had, until then, been the Roman Republic – and was promptly murdered by his friend Brutus.
Julius’ nephew Octavius managed to spin Caesar as a martyr, and in some masterful strokes of statesmanship managed to get himself proclaimed emperor, whereupon he adopted the name Augustus in –44.
Rome kept expanding, annexing – peacefully or at the point of sword – the entire Mediterranean basin, with Egypt falling in –37. In the end, the Romans declared the entire Mediterranean Sea “a Roman lake.”
A side effect of the Roman conquest was that, by having one empire, there were no more internal wars between say, the Syrians and Egyptians; this created an environment that lasted for roughly two centuries known as pax romana, or “Roman peace.”
Augustus, after a long reign, died having declared “I found Rome a city of bricks, and I left it a city of marble.” His chosen successor Tiberius reigned in his place, and it was into this world that Jesus was born on April 24th, in the year 4 BC.
And the rest is, quite literally, history.
Thanks for reading. If you want to read the rest of the book, visit www.goldenruled.com for updates