Israel and Judah were Iron Age kingdoms of the old Near East. The area of time covered in this page is from the first mention of the name Israel in the archaeological record (1200 BCE) to the end of a independent Judean kingdom near the time of Jesus Christ.
The two kingdoms arose on the most eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the most western part of the Fertile Crescent, between the old empires of Egypt to the south, Assyria, Babylonia, later Persia to the north and east, Greece and later Rome across the sea to the west. The area is small, maybe only 100 miles north to south and 40 or 50 miles east to west.
Israel and Judah were from the Canaanite culture of the late Bronze Age, and were based on villages that formed and grew in the southern Levant highlands (today for the region between the coastal plain and the Jordan Valley) between c. 1200-1000 BCE. Israel became an important local power in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE before falling to the Assyrians. The southern kingdom, Judah, became rich inside the greater empires of the region before a revolt against Babylon led to it being destroyed early in the 6th century.
Judean exiles returned from Babylon early in the following Persian period, starting a Judahite presence in the province of Yehud, as Judah was now called. Yehud was absorbed into the subsequent Greek-ruled kingdoms which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the 2nd century BC, the Jews went up against Greek rule and created the Hasmonean kingdom, which became first a Roman dependency and soon went under the rule of the Roman Empire.
Late Bronze Age background (1550-1200 BCE)
Geography and human settlement
The eastern Mediterranean seaboard - the Levant - goes 400 miles north to south from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai desert, and 70 to 100 miles east to west between the sea and the Arabian desert. The coastal area of the southern Levant, large in the south and becoming short to the north, the southernmost part has a zone of foothills, the Shephalah; like the plain this area narrows as it goes northwards, ending at Mount Carmel. East of the plain and the Shephalah is a mountainous ridge, the "hill country of Judah" in the south, the "hill country of Ephraim" north of that, then Galilee and the Lebanon mountains. To the east again lie the steep-sided valley occupied by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the wadi of the Arabah, which continues down to the eastern arm of the Red Sea. Beyond the plateau is the Syrian Desert, separating the Levant from Mesopotamia. To the southwest is Egypt, to the northeast Mesopotamia. "The Levant thus constitutes a narrow corridor whose geographical setting made it a constant area of contention between more powerful entities".
The central and northern part of the Levantine coast was known in Classical times as Phoenicia; the southernmost portion was known to the Egyptians as Canaan, by which they seem to have meant all their Asian possessions. In the bible Canaan can mean all of the land west of the Jordan river, or, more narrowly, the coastal strip. By Classical times the name Canaan had been dropped in favour of "Philistia", "Land of the Philistines", despite the fact that the Philistines had long since disappeared. The modern name "Palestine" is derived from this. Northeast of Canaan/Palestine was Aram, later called Syria after the Assyrians, who had likewise long since vanished.
Settlement during the Late Bronze Age was concentrated in the coastal plain and along major communication routes, with the central hill-country only sparsely inhabited; each city had its own ruler, constantly at odds with his neighbours and appealing to the Egyptians to adjudicate his differences. One of these Canaanite states was Jerusalem: letters from the Egyptian archives indicate that it followed the usual Late Bronze pattern of a small city with surrounding farmlands and villages; unlike most other Late Bronze city-states, there is no indication that it was destroyed at the end of the period.