Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 15, Canaan.

This is the first of 10 episodes of this

first of 10 episodes of this podcast that will be devoted to the Tenac or Old Testament and this program will focus on the history of territories within what is today

Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria between about 900 and 500 B.C.

Our goal in this program is to learn the basic geography and ancient near eastern history necessary for understanding

the earlier books of the Old Testament, the books that stretch from Genesis to Kings.

The narrative portions of these earlier books tell two main stories.

The Bible's first five books offer the long narrative of the Patriarch Abraham, his

forebears, and his successors.

And the next ten or so books, depending on which Bible you're holding, tell the story of

two kingdoms once situated in modern day Israel and Palestine, a northern kingdom anchored in Samaria,

today the town of Sebastian in Palestine, and a southern kingdom anchored in Jerusalem. Setting aside the narratives that trace the

descendants of Adam all the way down to Moses, the entire Tanakh is colored by

historical events that happened in these two ancient city states whose capitals were just

35 miles apart as the crow flies.

The tale of these two kingdoms called Israel and Judah in the Bible is an intense dramatic story

as it's recorded in the Old Testament. A northern monarch leads his people into apostasy and the kingdom suffers. A southern monarch is pious and

good and his kingdom is prosperous, but a generation later the southern monarchs successor

leads his people astray and the northern monarch's successor

...