The One God of the Hills — Sleep Podcast

There is a ridge of stone in the hills between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, where the light goes amber and the ground is dry and thyme-scented, and the Jordan valley is a long green ribbon far away. On that ridge, in the late afternoon, a small hill-country people made a story that became the foundation of three world faiths. A slow bedtime history of the Hebrews and the Israelites: how a small people’s religion — one god, one name, no image — became the foundation of three world faiths.

One hour and a bit, in the voice of the show. We stand on the plain of the promise; we hear the first name, and the god with a name; we sit with the family at the beginning, and the memory of Egypt; we walk the village in the hills, and the cities that did not fall; we watch the first kingdom rise and divide, and the two kingdoms that followed; we stand in the fire and the exile; and we come, at the end, to the return and the scroll, and the one god of three faiths.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About eighty minutes. The archaeology of this period is genuinely contested; where the sources disagree, the disagreement is preserved in the text.

Sources (a selection): Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (1988); Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (2001) and David and Solomon (2001); the Deuteronomistic History (1–2 Kings, Joshua); the Merneptah stele (c. 1208 BC, Egyptian Museum, Cairo); the Siloam inscription (British Museum); the Tel Dan inscription (Israel Museum); the Lachish letters (T. 1); the Assyrian annals of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon (the fall of Samaria, 722 BC); the Babylonian chronicles (the exile); World History Encyclopedia and Wikipedia entries consulted for dates and place names.