hello and welcome to the second lecture in the jewish history lab series so i'd like to look
very briefly at the earliest populations in the land of israel it's important here that we should
distinguish three different types of let's call them chronological analyses for the time being
there is history which is the area in which i feel most comfortable and then there is
proto-history and pre-history moving backwards in time proto-history is generally understood as the
history when we have the earliest written documents because historians we like to work with
texts we like to work with words and as soon as you begin to get words you know like in cuneiform
or in hieroglyphics and you begin to be able to tease out some of what the earliest generations
are trying to communicate then you have at least the basis of the kind of things that we prefer to
work with on the other hand moving further back in time you have what's often called pre-history
which means what happened even before people were writing things down or we have any written record
of what may have been written down but simply did not survive and when you get into that area while
historians like me start to feel distinctly uncomfortable you got to get into archaeology
you've got to get into geology you've gotten to get into scientific fields to understand
how carbon dating works and things like that those are things that are not really my strongest suit
we will be dealing with much of that especially archaeology in the next couple of videos
but for the time being let's just understand that there is history before that proto history before
that prehistory and let's think about something really basic right now first of all how do we
know that this is the year 5781 that is of course the jewish year that uh was celebrated on rosh
hashanah which occurred in october of 2020. how do we know that this is really the 5781st year
since creation if you look at the book of genesis the first book of the hebrew scriptures
there is an accounting of years but it's not really precise it does not give us a really
clear date for the year one until you get to the second century when an important rabbi rabbi yoshi
ben khalafta that is the second century of the common era meaning about the year 160 or so of the
common era rabbi yosomen khalafta authored a text called sader olam rabbah i should say by the way
it's attributed to rabbi yoshi ben khalafta and what what the author of sader olam rabbah did
is he went back to the text of genesis and pieced together all of the begats
like figuring out how old this person was and how old this person was and added them all up
and there are a couple of areas where it's not entirely clear like when exactly did the flood
happen when exactly did the generation dispersal happen and things like that but that's how we got
to the calculation of the year 5781 now as i'm sure you're aware a lot of scientific evidence
argues with this calculation suggesting that the universe is considerably older so what that means
for our purposes as historians and by the way you know i know people often think i'm a rabbi and i
suppose it's the keeper and the beard that gives it away but i am not a rabbi i am just a regular
guy who happens to work as a historian and so the question is not so much a historical question
here because the scientific evidence is generally what historians work with but it is a theological
question how do we read the seder olam rabbah and how do we read the text of genesis if we're not
going to go into those issues in this lecture if you are curious to see how do we reconcile
cosmology from the perspective of traditional orthodox judaism and how do we reconcile that with
scientific evidence i strongly recommend you have a look at this great book which i actually
read twice because it is so fascinating the challenge of creation by rabbi dr natan slivkin
it is not an uncontroversial work but basically he dips deeply into both science and torah to
uh look at how rabbis in the past have dealt with these challenges and this is nothing new i mean we
jews have been dealing with the age of universe questions really since the 19th century for sure
in a very forthright way but there are even some fascinating earlier opinions as to how to
calculate these dates have a look over there if you want to go further in that direction anyone
who possesses even a cursory familiarity with the first five books of moses and some of the early
prophets like the book of joshua judges samuel and into kings will be aware that of course there
are many peoples who predated the mass arrival of jews in israel the the earliest penetration
of jews into israel of course with the patriarch abraham as described in the book of genesis that's
generally understood to be around the beginning of the second millennium before the common era
that is something like the date 1750 bce uh the later uh exodus and the arrival of jews in israel
which is something again we got to push that off to another lecture because a lot to say about that
that would have been several hundred years after that date but there are lots of people's already
living in israel and in fact the interaction with them is a major theme in uh much of those early
prophetic works some of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the prehistoric
peoples of the land of israel were uncovered by dr dorothy garrett shown here in a 1913 photograph
she was associated with cambridge university and in fact she was the first woman to hold a
chair at that great school unfortunately for her at that point however because she was a woman
she was not allowed to receive a full position on the faculty and although she was allowed to
attend faculty meetings she was not allowed to vote or even to speak if you can believe that uh
she was a pioneering figure not only in the field of archaeology but also in the field of women's
rights in academia in particular and her research led to some phenomenal discoveries such as these
remarkable stone hand axes used by primitive peoples somewhere south of the sea of galilee
which by the way is also the site of some of the earliest beer manufacturing plants in the history
of humanity like so we owe the discovery of beer possibly to the earliest peoples of israel uh
in the khabarian cultures she discovered these remarkable mortal and pestles you can see there's
a little bit of grain on the left and you would like take that pestle and you would grind it up
it's it's actually quite tactile you can actually imagine ancient hands you know actually grinding
grain to flower this remarkable tiny sculpture from maine soccery is also quite fascinating
her discoveries of things like this tiny little bird medallion indicate that the
peoples of ancient israel had a very rich spiritual life looking at grave sites she
was able to discover you know fantastic ritual items that were associated with people such as the
uh the inclusion of many tortoise shells in with this grave which is believed to be of an ancient
shaman of the period but i think one of the most fascinating things that she's associated with
is the discovery of these things called desert kites uh t e lawrence already in the 20th century
was was writing about these and trying to figure out what do they mean um and really the only way
they were finally understood is with a lot of aerial photography and they remind me of the nazca
sand drawings in peru so t.e lawrence writing about this says you know what are these things
you've got these miles and miles of these tiny little piles of stones that seem to be
quite deliberate they run in lines but what are they there for you can see on the right
a a view of what it's like from the ground but when you get up in the air then you begin to see
oh my gosh look at this it's shaped like in some kind of funnel with some kind of container at the
end and in fact uh what uh dorothy garrett opined was that these kites might have been used for um
herding wild deer and uh what would happen is you would you know find a group of wild deer
which of course were roaming israel at the time and the prehistoric peoples would like kind of
chase them into this kite and the deer would like run away from them and then seeing this
small barrier there will be driven further and further into the kite until and here we look at
it from the point of view of a hunter there will be hunters hiding behind this little gathering
at the back which would of course be a killing floor and would provide a lot of protein for the
diet of the hunters involved in this i mean it's just amazing and bizarre kind of things that
were happening in israel but if you think that's bizarre wait till i show you this stuff oh my gosh
some of the most fascinating things are discovered in the region of jericho and the judean hills
in particular uh the discovery of these plastered human skulls which appears that
the ancient peoples of eureko jericho one of the oldest cities in the world
would preserve the skulls presumably of their ancestors and then decorate them and bury them
apparently under the floor of their home so you can see sometimes they had like plaster on
top of them and sometimes they had like specific decorations like the use of these shells for their
eyes and so on and perhaps this was associated with some kind of ancestor worship the people of
ancient jericho were also into trefanation which is our really wild practice that involves the
drilling of holes into the skull a procedure which people tended to survive believe it or
not because the skulls actually show evidence of healing it's uncertain why they were doing this
perhaps to as an early medical procedure perhaps as perhaps as an early psychiatric procedure
maybe it was some kind of cultic practice who knows but it was definitely very bizarre
uh also discovered in the region of jericho were a whole series of fascinating masks which again give
us some inkling of their spiritual life perhaps their entertainment it's hard to tell but you can
see here that the masks clearly had holes drilled at the side so they could be attached to the face
perhaps for some kind of dramatization maybe in connection with ancestor worship
and a lot of these masks display different kinds of emotions and feelings they're actually quite
clever and appealing in many ways there are tens of these masks some of them however do
not have holes and they perhaps might have been uh decorations or they may have been some kind
of cultic objects like this skull mask here okay so that's it for a very superficial look
at some of the prehistoric peoples in the land of israel we're going to continue our story with
the biblical data regarding the arrival in israel of the mesopotamian patriarch abraham
and what that says for the beginnings of jewish history there thank you very much for watching