Judaism

The ancient Middle Eastern setting

The Bible depicts the family of the Hebrew patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (all early 2nd millennium bce)—as having its chief seat in the northern Mesopotamian town of Harran, which then belonged to the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni. From there Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew people, is said to have migrated to Canaan (comprising roughly the region of modern Israel and Lebanon), which was a vortex of west Asian, Egyptian, and east Mediterranean cultures throughout the biblical period and later ages. From Canaan the Hebrew ancestors of the people of Israel (named after the patriarch Jacob, also called Israel) migrated to Egypt, where they lived in servitude; a few generations later they returned to occupy part of Canaan.

Israelite culture initially resembled that of its surroundings; it was neither wholly original nor wholly primitive. The Hebrews were seminomadic herdsmen and occasionally farmers. Their tribal structure resembled that of the West Semitic steppe dwellers known from the 18th-century-bce tablets excavated at the north-central Mesopotamian city of Mari; their family customs and law have parallels in the Old Babylonian and Hurro-Semite law of the ... (200 of 86,975 words)