Episode 149: What is the ancient Near East?

Anyone who knows me knows how much I enjoy studying the history of the ancient Near East because it is also the history around the Bible. But what is it? Where is it? And how is it different from the Greco-Roman Near East of Jesus? And does it make any difference?

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.

Hey there, we’ve talked about the ancient world a lot since we started Genesis, and how differently they lived and thought and believed than we do today. We’ve talked about what life in Babylon was like and about Ziggurats, but now we are going to be going a lot deeper as we continue with the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his twelve sons. When we looked at Genesis 1, we had to talk about ancient Temple texts with their stories of Temples being built in six days and the god of the Temple resting and ruling on the seventh day and how God used that to explain to Moses that the universe is created to be His Temple and He rules over it with humans as His priests and kings. Then, when we learned about the flood, we talked about the Atrahasis Epic and their flood story. And for the Tower of Babel, we studied the ancient Ziggurats which the people believed were stairways to heaven that the gods could use for walking up and down. But starting with chapter 21, we’ll be talking more and more about the law codes of the ancient world that Abraham and Sarah grew up with. Over the last hundred and fifty years, archaeologists have found clay tablets with the laws of ancient Sumeria (Lipit-Ishtar), Babylon (the law of Hammurabi), and the Hittite and Middle Assyrian laws; we will be talking about all of those as we go from Genesis through Deuteronomy.

All these nations with all of these laws—from the Egyptians, Canaanites, Babylonians, and Assyrians, to the Hittites—lived in an area (along with Abraham and his descendants) that we call the ancient Near East. In fact, all of the Hebrew Bible happens in the ancient Near East. Ancient means old, a long time ago and even older than boomers—which I am not. I am Gen X just for your information. The Near East is the part of the world covering everywhere from Turkey and Israel to Egypt in the south, to Iraq and Iran in the east. We call it Near East because that’s the name it was given by people in Europe and America—it was nearer than the Far East where we find countries like China, Japan, and India. All of the countries in the ancient Near East thought the same kinds of things about the world, about science, and about the gods. So, it shouldn’t surprise us that they also had laws that were very much the same, plus some laws that make no sense to us today because we can’t follow those laws while loving our neighbors as ourselves. Also, we don’t have temples and animal sacrifices anymore.

You know, a lot of stuff that happened in the Bible—people just had no clue why they did what they did until they found all these old law codes. Why did Sarah give Hagar to Abraham to have a baby and why on earth would that baby belong to Sarah instead of his mom, Hagar? Why will Sarah think that it’s okay to send Hagar and Ishmael away with nothing? Why did Laban trick Jacob into marrying Leah instead of Rachel? Why did God wait until there was a new Pharaoh before rescuing His people from slavery? Why are some of the laws that God gave to Moses the same as the ones we find in the other nations and why are many of them so different? And what do the differences tell us about how trustworthy and good God is? Now, I have to tell you that when all these laws were originally found, some folks freaked out because so many of the laws were the same and some of those laws came long before God spoke to Moses at Mt Sinai. But, you know, everyone needs rules. And most cultures on earth think that murder is a bad idea, and wife-stealing like in chapter 20, and they needed laws about slavery, war, and being married, and festivals and all that stuff. When Abraham and Sarah were born, it was in Babylon and so those were the laws they were raised with. God never told Abraham a single thing until he was seventy-five years old. God said, “follow me” and later God will say that Abraham was faithful about doing everything God told him to do. We know that Abraham did a lot of stuff wrong but he must have been really good about the changes God made to the way Abraham understood about what was right and wrong. Wouldn’t it have been just awful if God had changed everything right away?? God is always really patient with us and doesn’t change everything right away because we have to get used to living in new ways.

In the commandments that God gave to Moses, we even see God saying that the children of Israel aren’t allowed to do some of the nonsense that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his sons did. We don’t know what’s wrong until people tell us and they didn’t know everything that made God unhappy. I mean, after all, Jesus took God’s commandments and made them way more strict. We can’t do some of the stuff that Moses and the Israelites could get away with because we have the Holy Spirit and so we can grow to be more loving, forgiving, kind, and self-controlled. Without the Spirit, and living in that world, they couldn’t live the way we are called to live by Jesus. So, we see them following a lot of the laws from the nations around them. Some of those laws were good and others were bad. Today, in my own country, some of our laws are good and other laws are really bad.

One of my favorite Bible teachers, John Walton, says that all of these laws and the way they lived and thought and believed was so normal for them all that it was like the water they were all drinking, or swimming in. I want you to imagine your country like a swimming pool or a pond. The pool is full of your shared experiences—how you dress and eat and the music and whether you live in a desert or a forest or a city. Depending on where you live, you might have a car, or take the bus, a subway or the train. And so does everyone else around you. You don’t need car laws if everyone takes the bus and those bus laws will be the same for you and everyone else, no matter what god you worship or what you look like. Or at least they should be the same. You are in the bus with all sorts of people and you are all wearing clothes, because that’s what we do, and drinking coffee or soda, and talking on the phone or playing a game or reading a book or maybe just thinking. Those things are all different, but they are also all normal. I hate coffee but it would be normal for me to see someone else drinking it. The ancient world wasn’t much different in that they had things that everyone was used to—like donkeys and camels and sheep and cows—even in the house. When they ate, it was usually lentils (a kind of bean), and fresh baked bread that was a lot like tortillas which they dipped in oil or vinegar, and they drank water and wine, and sometimes beer if the water wasn’t clean. Every once in a while, they might even get some meat. Men and women both wore long dresses and no underwear. They lived in tents if they had critters and in or around cities if they were craftsmen. So, all these people (just like us) would need to have rules based on their environment. They didn’t need rules about cars and buses—they needed rules about what happens when a guy’s ox or bull killed somebody.

Of course, as we will see, their rules weren’t exactly like God’s in one important way. They had laws that said rich and powerful people and men were more important than poor and vulnerable people and women and children and foreigners. If you accidentally killed a slave, you had to pay the owner but that was it. If you accidentally killed someone rich, you were going to die—if you were lucky. God said that everyone is made in His image and so every single one was precious and worth the same amount. Unfortunately, there are many times after God gave His commandments when the kings and other powerful people would obey the laws of the other nations instead and they would play favorites and that made God very angry. David did a really good job of following God before he became king but the longer he was king, the more he became like the kings of the other nations. And the kings of the other nations could do whatever they wanted because the laws were for the people and not for them. And that’s not good at all. Not good, but it was normal. It was part of the water I was telling you about.

But why did it work like that if these were laws? Well, this is where It gets a bit confusing because the ancient world didn’t exactly have laws the way we do or the way they did in Jesus’s time.  What ancient people had were judges and wisdom. Their judges were chosen from the people because (hopefully) they were smart and honest—at least that’s the kinds of judges that God wanted for his people. I imagine the judges in most communities in the ancient world were more along the lines of being rich and powerful older men. What sort of judge you had was connected to what sort of wisdom was going to be used to decide what was right and wrong and good and bad. God’s laws said that rich and poor, old and young, powerful or weak were to be treated exactly the same by the judges, because they were all made in God’s image. But in the other nations, their gods played favorites and so did they. And their wisdom told them that was right—that rich people were more like the gods than poor people and free people were worth more than slaves. That was wisdom to them because it just made sense. They looked at the world and thought that the world of the gods was the same. But God’s wisdom was different and so were his instructions—which is really a better word than law or commandments because they weren’t laws like we have today.

When a judge has a law that says, “Stealing such and such is wrong and you have to go to jail for a year,” then that’s what they need to do no matter what was stolen. But with wisdom and instructions, judges can make decisions that are better. Stealing is still wrong, but what God told Moses let them make decisions about how they would handle different situations. It gave them a starting point for making decisions. That’s why, all through the Bible, we see people doing things that the Bible says are wrong and some people really get punished and others, not so much. One of the rules given to Moses said that no Moabite could be part of God’s people for up to ten generations—which pretty much meant forever. But God chose the grandson of a Moabite woman, Ruth, to be king. God could overlook his own rules because He saw something in David that He liked. If they had been laws like our laws, then the rest of Israel never would have accepted David as their king and probably would have killed him. That’s the difference between wisdom and laws. Wise judges use God’s instructions to help them decide what is good in a situation. Foolish judges just judge people without thinking about what is right.

Jesus got in trouble for this quite a bit because He would do things on the Sabbath that weren’t evil but weren’t exactly okay if the instructions God gave to Moses weren’t meant to be thought about very carefully. Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, but when the Pharisees got angry about it because they had turned God’s instructions into laws that were very strict and weren’t always very wise or kind, Jesus had to remind them about the reason for the Sabbath—that people could rest and be at peace. If someone needed healing, that means they weren’t really having a restful Sabbath and that wasn’t right. Another time, Jesus and His disciples were picking grain in the fields because they were hungry and again, the Pharisees got angry at them because they were “working.” They had decided that harvesting crops is working, and they were right because that’s really hard work but Jesus and His disciples were just picking a bit of grain because they were hungry. Anyone who is hungry on the Sabbath isn’t really resting! And Jesus told a story about the time that David and the High Priest had broken one of the Temple laws and gave what belonged to God to David and his men to eat. Because God gave Moses His wisdom about what it looked like to be more good than the world around them, it gave them the freedom to make wise decisions and to make exceptions that were going to save lives and make lives better for the glory of God. These people knew that God wanted them to work six days a week, rest on the seventh day, and to have full bellies. Anything they would do to get in the way of that wouldn’t really be obeying God. And like I said before, God’s wisdom is very different from the wisdom of the nations around them that was totally unfair and even cruel to the people who needed the most help.

Another thing about the ancient Near East, everyone believed there were a lot of gods and that every nation had their own gods who were only really powerful in their own nation. There’s a really funny story in the Bible about some folks who attacked the Israelites in the mountains and when they got their butts kicked, they decided that the god of Israel must be powerful in the mountains so they decided to attack them in the valley next time! Well, we know that our God is powerful everywhere so that didn’t really go well for them. But the ancient Israelites, up until after the end of the Old Testament, totally believed that there were a lot of other gods and even worshiped some of them because they believed those gods had power over something they wanted. They did that not because they didn’t believe that the god of Abraham wasn’t the strongest and biggest and best but because they really believed that there were other gods out there with powers—everyone did. It was that water they were all drinking. It seemed silly to them that there could be only one god. I mean, who would take care of the rest of the earth and all the stuff that needed to be done? It wasn’t until much later, a few hundred years before Jesus, that the Jewish people realized that there was only one God. And the rest of the world thought they were weird.

When Jesus came, they were still living in the Near East but it wasn’t ancient anymore. By then, they were living in Greco-Roman times and they didn’t think like ancient Egyptians and Canaanites and Babylonians and Persians anymore, but more like Greeks—who came from the west and had very different values and ideas. They looked at the world very differently than the people in the Old Testament. And they did different things with the Bible in the centuries right before Jesus was born than they ever had before. For one thing, they started writing “what if” stories about the Bible. And they also began to interpret the Bible story using philosophy, which was a way of thinking about how to live the right kind of life.

Just like it had been in ancient times, when the Israelites were forever being tempted to worship other gods and do the wicked things that the Canaanites were doing, there were also challenged during Greco-Roman times. No one was tempted to worship other gods anymore, but instead of one religion, Judaism became many religions as people began to think in different ways and had different feelings about the Greek world around them as well as different ideas about how the commandments should be kept. Some Jews were very religious and some just wanted to be like the Greek pagans, and because of these differences, there were even wars. It was a terrible mess for quite a long time. For the first time, young Jewish boys in the cities were going to Bible school to learn the Torah and the Prophets and the Writings. That’s just a fancy way of saying the Old Testament, which was their whole Bible—and Jesus’s whole Bible too. During Old Testament times in the ancient Near East, they didn’t have the whole Bible because it was still being written! It was being written about them! But by the time of Jesus, it was all done and they had everything that we still have today.

That Bible left them with a lot of questions, and a lot of theories about what was going to happen in the future. Some people thought they saw a resurrection, where all the people who had loved God would come to life again and live with Him forever here on earth. Some people didn’t and so they didn’t believe there was any reason to be good people because they thought they would just die and that was that. Others hated everything Greek so much that they went into the desert and lived by themselves and really had nothing good to say about the Jews living in the cities. And then there were some who believed that God wanted them to be violent and to kick the Romans out of Judah and Galilee, where they were living. Many looked at what the Bible said about all of the promises made to David and believed there would be a Messiah, which means anointed one—someone chosen by God for a special job. But the different groups had different ideas about the Messiah and what he would look like. Some Bible verses made it look like he would be a priest, and others as a warrior doing battle, then some seemed to say that he would be tortured, rejected, and killed. Well, that was sure confusing. How could the Messiah be all of these things at the same time? It seemed impossible. Jews took sides against one another and split into factions—which are groups of people who join together because of something they do or don’t agree with. You know, like political parties where sometimes people don’t want to be friends with people who don’t vote the same way.

This was very different than life was in the ancient Near Eastern world of the Old Testament. People in communities pretty much did what was expected of them and people left the worship of a god to the priests and there was only one way to worship each God. There was only one set of beliefs, and they didn’t mess with that because they were scared of what would happen if they made their gods angry. So, they did everything the same way year after year. They farmed the same way, lived the same way, and worshiped the same way. They told the same stories and sang the same songs and grew the same crops. They knew what had always worked and they figured it always would work. It wasn’t like today when we get new inventions every year and new discoveries and it doesn’t even bother us—I mean, we like it! The people of the Old Testament were just trying to have enough to eat and to try not to get beaten up by foreign armies.

But by the time of Jesus, life had been very different for a very long time. After the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem, they forced everyone to move east to Babylon—like a three month walk—and they had to learn different ways of life. And then the Medes and the Persians sacked Babylon and took over, and they did things differently too. And then, finally, the Greeks came in and took over, but the Greeks changed things more than anyone. The Greeks wanted everyone to be just like them and so wherever they went they built theaters and gymnasiums where dudes played sports naked—which sounds dangerous to me, actually. Pretty soon, everyone was living like Greeks and learning about the Greek ways of doing science. The Greeks wanted to talk about everything and explore everything and to learn new ways of thinking about life and the gods—that was a very new way of living. Many Greek ways of doing things were very useful but others—not so much.

For the first time ever, people were looking to the future more than they were looking back at the past. They wanted to know what was going to happen and they wanted to come up with better ways of doing things and they weren’t as worried about the gods getting angry at them for changing the ways they were doing things. But that only went so far because the faithful Jews were very worried about the Greek ways of doing things and the way they lived. So the Jewish people decided that their Bible was just about the most important thing in the world, along with God and the Temple. They believed it would protect them from becoming too much like the Greeks, and then the Romans who were in control when Jesus was born. You see, when the Greeks were in charge, there was a terrible war that started with some very bad decisions made by some Jews who wanted to ditch their Bible and become totally Greek. That led to a horrible persecution where people were killed for obeying God’s commandments. Of course, that made the Bible even more important to the Jews who loved God. But, after the war, it also led to the instructions of God being made into very strict laws, sometimes, and at other times, they looked for ways to do bad things if the Bible didn’t specifically say it was wrong. So Jesus was born into a very different Greco-Roman world that was much different from the world that Abraham knew which was also very different from David’s world. So we can’t read the stories like they are all the same because they are very different.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you will stick with me as we learn about all the different times in the Bible and how people’s lives could be very different depending on when and where they were born.