Jeremy Rosen
The Kings of the North: The Pagan Warriors of Israel

Jeremy Rosen - The Kings of the North: The Pagan Warriors of Israel

- Good afternoon, everybody. We’re going to talk today about the Northern Kingdom known as Israel. And the truth is that we hear generally very little about the north. Most of the time we hear about David, and Solomon, and the Kingdom of Judea, which in a way makes sense, because the Northern Kingdom is going to be completely destroyed by the Assyrians and their population scattered. Whereas in the case of Judea, which survived for several 100 years longer than the north, they were taken to Babylon, transplanted, and there, because the south was mainly the tribe of Judea, that’s why Judah became the Jews of the Babylonian Empire, which in the end fertilised the whole of the Jewish world. And so in that sense the northern kingdom gets looked over, also because the northern kingdom was a major disaster area dynastically speaking, the southern kingdom of Judea always had with one brief exception a descendant of the family of King David. Whereas in the north it was entirely different. Now, I want to share my screen with you very briefly, just to show the difference in the kings. So, if you look at the first column, you’ll see the Judean kings. We start with just giving a background of Abraham, who roughly would be around 2000. You come down to Moses 1300 before the common era. You have the period of the judges and Samuel and the first King Saul, and then you have David, Solomon, and they run through all descendants of the House of David, all the way down to the period of 586 at the bottom when the Kingdom of Judea, Judah was destroyed. But all one dynasty, in that dynasty, as we are going to discover in due course, there were good kings and bad kings, idolatrous, but by and large they were part of this proud dynastic tradition.

When you look across on the other side and you see you’ve got the kings of Israel, starting with Jeroboam, he, when King Solomon died, took the northern tribes away out of the union of the Jewish people, Israelites, and called his kingdom in the north Israel, as opposed to Judea in the South. And if you look at the column, within that period of time you have king after king, most of them not living that long. So, you have Jeroboam. And he’s followed by his son Nadab, and his son Nadab is killed by a guy called Baasha, and assassinate Baasha, he had a son called Elah, and he was assassinated. He was assassinated by Zimri, who survived seven days, Tibni not much longer. And then Omri, who founded the House of Omri. The House of Omri was the only, if you like, dynasty in the Northern Kingdom of Israel that survived from father to grandson. There was Omri, 12 years he ruled, on the right in the column is how many years they ruled. Then there was Ahaziah, sorry, then there was Ahab. Ahab was 22. He’s the king that everybody talks about in the north, largely because of his wife Jezebel. Then he had a son, Ahaziah, and he was followed by his brother Jehoram, and they were killed by Jehu. And Jehu had a son called Jehoahaz, and Jehoahaz had a son and another son. And then there was another assassination, and another assassination after one year, and another assassination, and another assassination with , one assassination after the other.

So, the Northern Kingdom was a mess. And the truth is that not much is told about the Northern Kingdom to us. Interestingly enough, when the modern State of Israel 1948 was founded, the question was, what name are we going to call it? Theoretically we should have called it Judea, but we didn’t, maybe because in one sense Israel sounded better. But if you think about it, the first kingdom of Israel was a crushing disaster. On the other hand, I have a little pet theory of my own. And the pet theory of my own is precisely because the secular Zionists wanted to establish a Zionist state. And they didn’t want it to be identified too strongly with the religious element, because they saw this, the Zionist movement as replacing the religious tradition. They were rather happy to name it after Israel, which was entirely pagan from beginning to end. And also, because the Northern Kingdom actually, I have to say, was something that most people don’t know, much richer and more powerful than the south. We think of the south as the kingdom of King Solomon that extended from all the way up to Syria. And this was a powerful kingdom that was passed on, but then split. And the split was Jerusalem and the south was Judah and Benjamin, and Jerusalem just above to the north were the so-called 10 Northern tribes who had the general title of Joseph, because the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, were the powerful tribes of the north. So, the north’s alliance was to Joseph, the alliance of the south was to Judah.

And the result of this division was that if you look at it geographically, you go Jerusalem and you go south, you go south to Hevron, and Hevron are already almost on the border of the Negev and the desert down to be Beersheba. But when you go north from Jerusalem, you come to the fertile, dominant, interesting areas of Nablus. They move up to the Valley of Jezreel and up to the Galilee and up to Lebanon. It was in fact much more fertile, much larger, much more powerful. And with this power came two kinds of problems. Problem number one was, the powerful one attracted the attention of the empires around who wanted to have a say in it, but also, because it was stronger, and because it was richer, in fact, it dominated. So, we were brought up, I was brought up to think of the southern kingdom of Judea as being the dominant one and Israel being the weak, nebbishy one, whereas in fact it was Israel that was the really rich, powerful dominant kingdom. And so for this reason I want to look more closely at the character of the Northern Kingdom. ‘Cause as I mentioned in a previous lecture, when the split came after Solomon died, his son Rehoboam was the heir. And the northern tribes came to him and said, “Look, reduce taxation.” And his wise men advised him to reduce the taxation. The young men who are jetsetting around or playing it up in the nightclubs of Jerusalem said, “No, whatever you do, don’t give in.” And the result of this was the Northern Kingdom split off. but then the Northern Kingdom had a problem. The sanctuary that Solomon established was in Jerusalem, and everybody was supposed to go there three times a year.

But you can’t have people in a different country. One in fact, that you’re at war with, going down to the other country, to the enemy, to the temple. And so Jeroboam built two substitute temples, one in Bethel, which was up towards Nablus, and the other one in Dan, which was in the Galilee. And in both of these temples he put golden calves. So, the golden calves were, if you like, the continuity of the rebellion against Moses. When they worship the golden calf, they were a symbol of materialism of gold. Mind you, there was gold in the temple too. And they, if you like, set the tone for this new anti-Judean religion. At the same time, both throughout the north and the south, in addition to the temples, there were what were called Bamoth, high places. And the question of what these high places were is highly controversial. The Bible, the Torah, the earlier part of that seems to say very clearly that you should only sacrifice in the temple. Now, in those days, sacrifices were not just ceremonial events, they were also the way of providing food. They were the opportunity of the rich to distribute to the poor. And most of the sacrifices were shared with everybody. And so killing meat was restricted initially to the temple. But what happened when people started living further and further away from the temple?

Did they have to come to Jerusalem to eat meat? And the idea, one of the theories is that these Bamoth, these so to speak, high places, were simply places where people when they wanted to eat went to share it with God, with the priests, with their friends together, and then take whatever they wanted home. So, the bamah, the high place was a way of enabling everybody to eat meat. But it seems that very soon those bamot came to be seen as challenging the position and authority of the temple. And so bamot came to be associated with paganism. And to reinforce this, the fact is that despite the power or whatever it was of the Torah, the people from the death of Joshua started worshipping other gods. They didn’t necessarily reject the Jewish God, but they wanted to hedge their bets and cover whichever God happened to be powerful at that moment. If the Moabite God was powerful, they’d go there. If the Edomite king was powerful, they’d go there. If the Canaanite king was powerful, they’d have their God, or went even as far as Lebanon, all the way up to Turkey. So, the Bamot therefore were places where they could go to worship. And indeed, King Solomon, when he married these 700 women, because that was how they made political alliances in those days, was happy to build temples for them in Jerusalem and allow them to carry on with whatever religious worship they were doing. So, the term syncretism, basically combining your gods together, was a very common feature. And so in both the south and in the north, it does appear that these bamots were common. Everybody was using them, but maybe in the north they were using them in a different way. The other feature, just to give you a little bit of background as we progress in analysing the structure of the north, is that most of the major prophets that we know of and we’re going to deal with in due course were prophets to the south, to Judea.

But there were two prophets who were the giants of the north, Elijah and Elisha. These two men focused and lived and had to deal with the north. And they are the names we associate with the north, but they didn’t write books of their own, unlike Amos, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and Micah and all the others, they’re only recorded in the Book of Kings. But they were the dominant influence. And they reinforce the idea that in both countries, north and south, although there were kings and priests, the populace by and large preferred the prophets. The prophets really spoke to the masses and attacked the hierarchy, they identified within the people and they were the ones who were responsible for keeping the flame of religion alive when everybody else was going off in a different direction. So, I’m stopping share at the moment, and coming back to my main screen. After the death of Jeroboam, King Jeroboam who started off the northern kingdom, he was followed by his son who maintained his tradition and maintained the tension and the battles with the south. But there was a kind of a standoff until his son Baasha. So, this is the grandson. Baasha was a very, very aggressive man, and he started encroaching, I suppose you could say very similarly to Putin on Ukraine. He started invading and attacking the south, and so much so that the south had to turn in desperation to the kingdom above Baasha, which was Aram Syria.

And the king of Judah at the time, Asa, we will come back to him and due course, actually use the vessels and the golds and the silver in the temple to send up to the north to this Aram Aramean king in order to bribe him. And the Aramean king accepted the bribe, he attacked Baasha. Baasha had to withdraw. And in the end that was the, the battle was over at that moment. But the tension between the two countries continued on an on and off basis. Baasha had a son, and his son, as I mentioned before, was assassinated, assassinated by Zimri. Zimri didn’t last very long, seven days, and he was replaced by Tiffany, who managed to last for about five years, except the other part of the kingdom, so the north itself split into two, supported instead of Tibni they supported Omri. Eventually Omri took control, and so Omri became the king of the north and established the Omride dynasty. The Omride dynasty is known for the fact that he expanded the range of the north, created alliances, did extremely well, did a lot of commerce with the northern Damascus, with the Assyrian Empire, with the Hittite Empire. And his loyalty was entirely to the north. Whereas the south, Jerusalem and Judea tended, because it was closer to be on the side of the Egyptians, which was a tension between the two that’s going to explode all the time. The son of Omri is Ahab, and Ahab is known for marrying Jezebel, who was the daughter of the king of Sidon, who was loyal to the God Baal. And she was a determined, passionate believer in Baal. And she set out to totally control the Northern Kingdom as a Baal kingdom and eradicate any trace of the religion that was a remnant to the development out of Judea. Ahab seems to have been something of a wimp.

She seems very much a Lady Macbeth character who really had him where she wanted him to be. And she set about hounding all the prophets who are loyal to God, to the Yuthe, Vavhe, Yahweh, Elohim God of the Jewish Bible. And awful still in sense loyal to that Bible, even though most people seem to have been pretty lukewarm about it. But Jezebel initiated a massive campaign, not only a massive campaign to conquer the north, but actually she made sure that her daughter, some people say granddaughter, Athaliah married into the Kingdom of the South. So, whereas on the one hand there was tension between the two of them, she was already plotting a takeover of the south through her daughter. Her pursuit of the prophets was something that drove those few that remained into hiding. And amongst them of course was a famous prophet Elijah. And Elijah had to flee from her, hide in caves, hide in the desert. He was supported in one way by, shall we say, the miraculous appearance of trees and fruit and of ravens bringing bread whenever they could find them. And of moving constantly from the north by the river Jordan down to the south, and from the south back up to the north, itinerantly moving, but all the time trying to escape this woman who was determined to get him and destroy him. And he has these visions of God in which God is saying to him, “I know you want to give up and it’s a tough and a terrible and a horrible life, but you’ve got to keep going.” And he spent his time coming out of hiding whenever he could to help the poor.

And so you have all these stories about how Elijah finds a woman who’s on death’s door and she’s only got little bit of oil left. And so he makes sure that that oil lasts, and lasts, and lasts. Or he finds a woman who’s going to look after him and give him somewhere to hide and to sleep when he’s travelling through and she’s barren and he provides her with a son. And then the son appears to die and he brings him back to life with what looks like artificial respiration, breathing on the body and so forth. And then you have all kinds of interactions between Elijah and at the same time some of his faithful friends in Ahab’s household, one of them is a man called Ovadia, Obadiah, Ovadia. And Ovadia himself was responsible for rescuing. He says a 100 prophets, 50 in two caves from Jezebel herself. So, although he was the top advisor of Ahab, he secretly was supporting some of the prophets who were running away from Ahab’s control. And he engineers an encounter with Ahab, 'cause Ahab is supporting Jezebel on this. And Elijah says to him, “Look, you know, sort of, I predict that disaster’s going to come. And it’s going to come for as long as you and this country are worshipping Baal. And the only thing that we can do is to try to see who is right.” And this is where Elijah challenges Ahab’s prophets of Baal to attest on Mount Carmel. We don’t know if it was the actual Mount Carmel near Haifa or there was another place called Carmel, which was more in the Judean Mountains, or sorry, in the Sumerian mountains, because they, several names used.

But nevertheless, there was this famous encounter with the prophets of Baal. In which the idea is that the prophets of Baal are going to set up their sacrifice and they’re going to call on their God Baal to ignite it and set it a fire. And Elijah is going to do the same thing, but he’s going to call on the one God. What happened? You know the story, very, very familiar. The prophets of Baal came and they got their altars and they started and they sacrificed and they cried and they prayed to their God. And when nothing happened, they started lacerating themselves and beating themselves and cutting themselves and trying every way. And nothing happened at all until it came then finally to Elijah’s turn. And he builds an altar of the 12 stones, of the 12 tribes. So, he’s doing this on behalf of everybody in a sense. And then he puts his sacrifice on and then he calls for water and they poured water over it three times. Everybody suggests, maybe seriously, maybe not. Maybe it was paraffin, maybe it was petrol, whatever it was. And he prayed to God and it ignited it and the fire came up and he was the winner. And everybody who was there gathered around, he called upon them and he says, “Now, get rid of the prophets of Baal.” And in a blood thirsty attack on them he massacres the prophets of Baal. Truth of the matter is there’s a nasty side to these prophets or an aggressive side to them as well. But nevertheless, this is what happens. The result of this is not as you would have thought, that Jezebel changed her mind. Jezebel and Ahab continue their persecution, and once again poor old Elijah has to disappear and hide and find refuge.

But I don’t want to concentrate too much on him, because that’s going to come at a later stage. And his prophets, his successor, Elisha, when we talk about the role of the prophets, the only interesting thing about them is that both of them seem to have this rather violent streak as well as the prophetic streak. Both of them seem to be very, very intense and committed, and both of them seem to carry out the same sorts of miracles. But to concentrate back on the king, because I want to reinforce this idea of who the kings were of the north and what their character was. You will have heard of the famous story of Naboth’s Vineyard that Ahab looks out of his palace in Samaria. They’re in Samaria in the north, and he sees this nice vineyard and he inquires about it and discovers it belongs to a man called Naboth, Navot. And he goes to Navot and he says, “You know, I’d rather like to buy your vineyard. It’s rather nice, and it would be a nice adjunct to my palace.” And Naboth replied and said, “Look, I’m sorry King, but this has been in our family for generations. It’s part of our tribal land. Much as I’d like to please you, I’m afraid I can’t.” And Naboth then refuses. Ahab goes home and he sits in his palace depressed. And his wife Jezebel comes up to him and says, “Come on Ahab, what are you being unhappy about? You’re the king. You want it, you get it. Don’t you bother about this, leave this to me.” And so Jezebel goes along and she frames Naboth, and she gets two people to argue and to give evidence that he had blasphemed against the king and against God. And as a result, poor old Naboth is taken out and he’s killed. And Jezreel goes back into Ahab and says, “It’s all yours. You can take it over.” And this idea of just taking over the land of somebody else by murdering was considered perfectly normal by Jezebel.

On the other hand, the reaction of the others in that famous phrase, which is part of the linguistic folklore of Israel, basically “You have killed, you now want to inherit his land as well and benefit from having killed the man,” is the kind of the general moral message of what a corrupt king he was. But on the other hand, he was also a fighting king and he decided to join forces with the king at the time of the south, Jehoshaphat, and go to war in order to protect some of the cities of the north. And he invited Jehoshaphat to go with him into battle. And the both of them, these two kings, decided to speak to their particular prophets to ask them what their advice was. The prophet of the North said, “Oh, most definitely, you should go and fight.” The prophet of the South said, “Hold your horses. It’s not that simple.” The disagreement between them, their prophets, didn’t seem to cause much trouble. But the result was that Ahab said to Jehoshaphat, “Look, we’re going into battle together, but I think that you should disguise as me and I will disguise as you.” And the reason he said that is because he was the main general, he was the power. His army was much bigger than the other army, and he was the threat to the north, to the Syrians. And so they did switch. In the heat of the battle the enemy seeing Jehoshaphat as being the king of the North, as they fought, they gathered around him and they started attacking him. And he called out for help and they realised it wasn’t Ahab, it was the king of the south. And so they turned round and they went going looking for Ahab. Ahab manages somehow rather to survive this particular situation, but in due course he is going to face a much worse end. After Ahab dies, he is succeeded by a man called Ahaziah. And Ahaziah is again a difficult person.

A person who unfortunately falls from his palace window and is injured, but at the same time is running a battle and a campaign against the Moabites. And unfortunately, what happens is his prophets, the false prophets are telling him to keep on fighting, whereas a prophet from the south tells him to stop fighting. And as a result of this, there is utter confusion in the state. He doesn’t last very long, and he then is followed by Jehoram. Once again, Jehoram also comes back to the south to ask for help in his battles in the north. But we are now coming to the end of the dynasty of Omri, of Ahab. And the man who has being delegated to replace him is a man called Jehu. And Jehu, Jehu is told already, while the descendants of Ahab are still alive, he is being told by the prophet, by the prophet’s representative that he is going to be king. And he’s the only example of a king of the North who was anointed. So, he was anointed as king with a mission to get rid of Ahab. And this is what he sets out to do. He goes and kills the dynasty, the remnant of the dynasty of Ahab, and he sits up his own new dynasty. I should have mentioned earlier, of course, that in the end the death of Ahab led to, thanks to Jehu, the death of Jezebel too, she was thrown out of the window of the palace, and as predicted the dogs licked her blood. So, she came to a sticky and a nasty end. Jehu is on the other hand somebody who makes an effort to remove the legacy of Jezebel and Ahab. And he removes the prophets of Baal that were there, removes their buildings, their temples, actually turns one of them into a general latrine. And he tries to bring the country more in line to the ideology of the South.

But he doesn’t stop idle worship within the area. He gets rid of the Baal dynasties, but he doesn’t get rid of the other idolatrous worship. He reigns for a long time, 28 years, which is unusual. He dies, he is taken over, his rule taken over by Jehoahaz, Jehoahaz again, 17 years he lives. But unfortunately he now is being attacked again by Hazael of the Arameans. So, this constant battle between the North and the Arameans goes on generation after generation. They are fighting all the time. There’s hardly any moment of peace. And yet at the same time, in general, it is the Kingdom of Israel that is doing better. It has agriculture, it has supplies, it has trade, it has arms, it has men. It’s doing pretty well. There’s a period in which the South is again caught up in a battle with the North. But nevertheless, to cut a long story short, the North manages to hold its own. After Jehoahaz dies, Jerovam, Jeroboam II carries on, he expands the regime, he grows in power, grows in strength. He is the man actually who was around as king when the Prophet Jonah comes with his story about the whale, again to be dealt with when he gets to the prophets. And then he, after quite a long reign, he is followed by Zachariah. Zachariah is a man, not a very nice man. Zachariah is the son of Jeroboam. He’s still his son. But after a reign of six years, he is assassinated by a man called Shallum. The man called Shallum reigns for one year and then he’s assassinated by Menahem. Menahem reigns for a short period, actually 10 years, I’m sorry, he reigned for 10 years. And then he is defeated by Pekahiah, is killed by Pekahiah. And then we are coming to the last gasp of this empire. And the last gasp of this empire starts off in the period of Menahem, Menahem ben Gadi, as he’s called. And you see it on the the the list there, Menahem ben Gadi, who’s killed Shallum ben Jadish.

In his period the emperor of the Assyrians was a man known either as Pul or Tiglath-Pileser. And Tiglath-Pileser wants to conquer the north. After all, it’s rich, it’s doing well, it’s unreliable, it thinks it’s in charge. He comes down, he attacks them, and he subjects them to his rule and his authority. And as a result he begins a slow process, Tiglath-Pileser, of taking cities and populations from cities and removing them from the North so that it’s easier for him to come down and attack. He doesn’t have to fight off cities on the way. And he starts the process of denuding the North, of taking these tribes away and placing them in parts of his empire. But he still leaves other people in charge in order to keep going. So, there is Hoshea, who I mentioned, and during the period of Hoshea he decides that he wants Egyptian support to try to fight off the Assyrian dynasty. And so when he is invaded by Shalmaneser of the North, he calls to the south to Egypt. And Egypt says, “We’re not coming to help you. You’re going to fight Putin all by yourself.” And so as a result it is Shalmaneser who several years after Tiglath-Pileser comes down and totally demolishes the Northern Kingdom. And in 722 he takes the populace of the Northern Kingdom out and spreads them all over the Assyrian Empire, because it was the policy of the Assyrians that when they conquer a territory, they remove the populace. So, they remove their ties and connections to their land and to their God and moves them all over the place, which could have been as far as Persia, maybe even Afghanistan if it comes to that. Because that was all part of the Assyrian Empire at that moment.

So, 722 sees the end of this northern fighting dynasty, the rich, powerful fighting dynasty with corrupt kings, with ambitious kings who assassinated whenever they felt like it. And in a sense, on paper it looks a mess, even though in practise it was more productive, more wealthy, more powerful than the Kingdom of the South. We’ve heard the story of the so-called 10 lost tribes, the 10 tribes of the North known as Joseph. And the fact that they seem to have disappeared and have reappeared apparently everywhere from Britain to America, to South America, to Afghanistan and to China, and Lord knows where else. And according to the Bible, according to our version, what happened was this, they were indeed all taken away. And the policy of the Assyrians was to replace them with people they conquered from other parts of their empire. And the people they conquered from the other parts of the empire were brought down and in to replace them, and stuck there and dumped there. And it seems they were rather unhappy there. There were plagues of wild animals. All kinds of horrible things were happening. And so they appealed to the Assyrian King and they said, “Look, we’re here in this land. We don’t know who the gods of this land are. And if we don’t know who the gods of this land are, who’s going to protect us and look after us when all these horrible things happened? And so please tell us, get somebody to come and teach us what the religion of this land was.” And so they sent down for a priest, one assumes from Judea, to come up and teach them all about the Jewish religion. Those people lived in Samaria, and therefore they came to be known as the Samaritans. And the official position of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, is that they converted to Judaism out of fear. They were called the . They were the converts out of lions, 'cause they were frightened of the lions. And therefore there were some dispute as to whether they were genuine or not. But they certainly thought they were. But they were in the North, not in the South.

They were independent of the South and they ran their own affairs. Now, the Samaritans still exist to this day, small numbers in Nablus, because the Samaritans, they relied on the Torah as Torah was given. And in the Torah, the Torah only mentions two places, the Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal across the River Jordan as holy places. And so they had their temple built there to this, well, it’s being destroyed, but you know, that’s where they always worshipped and still go. Those who live amongst the Palestinian community on the West Bank go there to worship and to sacrifice the Passover sacrifice there every year. They are neither Jew, nor Palestinian. Well, they might Palestinian by nation, if you like, but they suffered from Muslim and Christians who oppressed them as not being who they thought were on their side. And they have a slightly different narrative to the one in the Jewish Bible. Their narrative is this. “We were actually part of the 10 lost tribes. It’s just we never left. We hid in caves when they were attacking. We were still around, we’ve always been here. And we are the true children of Israel who follow the Torah.” The trouble with the rest of them is, when they went to Babylon, they picked up all these crazy other ideas from Babylon and added them onto the Bible and changed the meaning of the Bible. But we are the original ones. And the Samaritans coexisted throughout the return from Babylon throughout the period, the early Christianity. And so you know about the story of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament. And amongst the rabbis there was a mixed feeling. Some of them treated them as Jews, some of them gave them respect without calling them fully Jews and saying, “They kept their laws more strictly than we kept ours.” But it remained a question of ambiguity. And unfortunately, over time the Samaritans broke off completely from the mainstream Judaism. There are still Samaritans, a Samaritan community in Tel Aviv, Samaritan community on the West Coast of America. They’re still there and they have their own traditions. And very often these traditions go back to the Torah, which they take literally.

So, that for example, when the Torah says you shouldn’t burn fire, they literally don’t have any fire at all on Shabbat in their homes. They have been split now between the electric Samaritans, who do take electricity, and the non-electric Samaritans, who don’t. But people who think that claim to be a Samaritan makes life easier for you religiously, in fact, it’s much more difficult, 'cause they still adhere very strictly to the letter of the law in the Bible. Did they disappear, those who moved out? Well, I don’t think so, and I hope to be able to prove that they didn’t next time when we turn in due course, not the next session here, which we’ll deal with Passover, but when we deal with the kings of the South and how they differed from the kings of the North. But I do feel to some extent the kings of the North get a bad rap. They were no worse than a lot of other people. They were pagan. But so most of us have been pagan, and most of us probably still are pagan. And therefore most of us Jews probably have more in common with the kings of the North than we do with the kings of the South. And so on that note, I will open up for discussion.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Marian asked the question, “Before Jeroboam, wasn’t the United Kingdom called Israel?”

A: No, it it wasn’t. They were called the children of Israel. They were called Israel in the sense of Israel being the sons of Jacob. So, when they called it Israel, they really meant the sons of Jacob, and they were known as Judea. And so when you look at the, shall we say, you know I mentioned the battle against Mesha, the king of Moab, but we have the Mesha stone, and in the Mesha stone, the Mesha stone refers to the Kingdom of Israel and mentions the Kingdom of Judea. So, this split already happened then. And so really Israel as the country begins with Jeroboam. So, what happened to Athaliah? Athaliah married into the king of the South. She murdered her own children to grab the throne, which she did for a while. She was the only one who broke with a dynasty of David. And I’m going to refer to her in greater detail when we talk about the Kingdom of the South. Thank you, Stan.

Q: “Are all the Samaritan Jews genetically similar?”

A: Now, I’m not an expert on genetics, but I would hazard a guess they definitely are. But maybe somebody else knows what that situation is.

“I have a copy of the Samaritan Torah, very interesting. Occasionally differences to the Judean Torah.” Yes, it does. In fact, it includes quite interesting commentaries. I’ll give you one example of the difference between the Samaritan Torah and the Judean, and then the Torah we have. In the Torah that we have, the story of Cain and Abel is one in which our text says, “That after God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected Cain’s sacrifice, Cain was really terrible and in a bad mood, God says, "Don’t get depressed, try harder.” And Kain just couldn’t get over it. And it says one day he’s in the field and he speaks to Abel and he kills him. It doesn’t say what he spoke to Abel. On the other hand, if you look at the Karaite, not the Karaite, the Samaritan Bible, the Samaritan Bible says, “When they were in the field, when they were in the field, Cain says to Abel, 'Let you and I rule this world.’ And Abel says, ‘No, I don’t want to.’” And that’s why he killed him. And in fact, that altered other version is actually mentioned in Jewish meteoric texts. So, there are similarities and there are differences. And the Samaritan text is still written in the Canaanite text that was, sorry, the early Hebrew text, which was Proto-Canaanite text, which the Southern Kingdom had until it moved to Babylon. When it moved to Babylon, it changed the script, not the words, but the script, to the script that we have today. And the script that we have today is called the Assyrians, the Ktav Ashuri, the Assyrian script. On the other hand, the Samaritans still have the earlier, earlier Israel Canaanite type of script. So, Samaritans similar to Karaites, they are similar in one sense, in the sense that the Karaites also only accept the written law and not the oral law. However, the Karaites have always seen themselves as Jews. And at one stage in the first millennium in Babylon, they were the dominant Jewish sect of the population there. So, in that sense, you might say, to give an analogy, the difference between the Hasidim and the non-Hasidim, but they always saw themselves as Jews, except they wouldn’t accept a lot of the Talmudic oral law interpretation that they thought was going too far. Thank you,,

Q: Clara, “Please talk about Bnei Menashe?”

A: Bnei Menashe are a group of people who lived in India and were in a sense cut off for a long time from the main Jewish population. There were a lot of other groups in India. There was a group called the Bnei Israel, who also claimed that they were descendants of the 10 lost tribes living in India. And there were a couple of other smaller groups who trace their background to the so-called 10 lost tribes. But they may not be the 10 lost tribes. They’re just as likely to be from Jews from Babylon who traded in India and went to settle in India. Just as Jews moved to Afghanistan and some moved all the way to Kaifeng in China, remember the Assyrian Empire absorbed all these, then it became the Babylonian Empire, then it became the Persian Empire. And the Persian empire did extend into India. And so they could have come from Persian Jews from Judea, but they were, because of political geographical reasons, cut off from the mainstream of the Jewish people for a very long time. But those Jews in India, whether they’re Bnei Israel or whether they’re Bnei Menashe, whoever they are, and will have intermarried sometimes with the local population are, in my opinion, genuinely are the origin, part of the Jewish people. And by and large, are accepted within Israel today. There’s a long story about the Bnei Israel, because when the Bnei Israel came to Israel with the opening of the state, the chief Rabbinate in Israel was from Iraq, and the Iraqi Rabbinate was very strict and they didn’t like the Jews of India. They thought they weren’t religious enough or traditional enough. And so they for a long time refused to accept the Bnei Israel as genuinely Jewish. Since that time, the arrival of the Ethiopian Jews has raised another question. Where did they come from? Did they come originally from Israel and moved down south? Were they converted and who were they converted by? Early Christians, were they converted by Jews? The debate still goes on, but they have become accepted as part of the Jewish people. And if they have, then it seems to me absolutely no reason why the Bnei Menashe and the other Jews of that part of the world should also not be treated. And recently, as you’ve read the news, some of them have come to Israel and been accepted and integrated, and I’m very happy.

Edna says, “After a six day visited the Samaritan, which is a relation of the Torah. There was a version that preceded the authorised version, had a flag of Israel in the school room.”

It’s interesting, I didn’t know they had a flag of Israel in the school room. I know they don’t have it now because of the political situation.

Q: And the question is, “Was their version preceded or not?”

A: And what do you mean by the authorised version? That’s another issue, because you’re quite right. The authorised version of the Torah, that we have today wasn’t finally fixed until the first millennium, the Masoretes. And before that time there were different texts with minor variations, whether they were the Dead Sea scroll texts, whether they was the Septuagint, to which the text was translated into Hebrew. But all of the Jewish texts were very similar. The differences were relatively minute. There were bigger differences with the Samaritan text. But it’s a debatable issue as to which is more authentic, because in fact, the Samaritans claim their text came from Moses and it’s more authentic in the sense that their script came from Moses. Moses certainly didn’t write the square script that we all have today.

Q: “Did some of the 10 lost tribes get found and merged with the tribal counsel of the Babylonian exile and get included in Hamen’s planned foreign genocide?”

A: Yes, Serena, I believe that’s correct. I believe they did. And again, I will talk about that when I talk about what happened to the Judeans and to the Babylonians.

So, thank you very much, and see you next time.