The Jews Were The Original Inhabitants Of Palestine? - That's A Myth

Quite often we come across articles in the media or the net which seem to take it for granted that the Jews were the original inhabitants of the area that we now know as Palestine and Israel. This bit of misinformation seems to have been widely accepted without much questioning by the general public. Hopefully the following article will put everyone back on the right track.

Those interested in Palestine should study Canaanite history, not Jewish mythology

Canadian Arab News,

May 4, 2006

Our story begins about 5,000 years ago on a hill 55 miles inland from the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. The Jebusites, a tribe of the Canaanites, have chosen it to be the site of new place of worship in honour of Shalem, the Canaanite God of Dusk.

The original name of this place of worship survives because it was inscribed on stone tablets found in Elba, Syria, c. 3000 BCE; on Egyptian statues, c. 2,500 BCE; and on shards of ceramic Egyptian Execration Texts dating to the XII Dynasty, c. 1900 BCE.

It reads: “Urushalem,” a Canaanite word comprising the prefix “Uru” (“founded by”) and “Shalem.”* We know this place today as Jerusalem—“Founded by Shalem,” a Canaanite God.

About 1,200 years later, according to legend, a man named Abraham left the Sumerian city of Ur, in what is now Occupied Iraq, and immigrated to Canaan.

A further 600-odd years later c.1184 BCE, a people called the Hebrews invaded Canaan, which the Greeks called Phoenicia. Even by Biblical accounts, which must be taken with several grains of salt, these Hebrews acted like marauding savages, as in this account of the sack of Jericho:

“They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.… And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.”†

Hebrew domination of Canaan began with the reign of three kings: Saul, r. 1112–1072 BCE; David, r. 1072–1032 BCE; and Solomon, r. 1032–992 BCE. This account is almost certainly folkloric, since the odds of three kings each ruling for exactly 40 years is statistically implausible, and 40 is a recurring apocryphal number.

David is credited with uniting the 12 tribes of Israel and establishing Urushalem as the political and religious capital of a United Israel after he brought the Ark of the Covenant with him from Hebron, David’s capital for seven years.

United Israel deteriorated toward the end of Solomon’s reign, and under his son Rehoboam it split into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea. The Assyrians conquered Israel in 722 BCE, and the Babylonians conquered Judea in 597 BCE. Thus endeth the reign of the Hebrews.

This thumbnail sojourn into ancient history is meant to show three simple truths:

• Jerusalem was founded by Canaanites.

• Jerusalem as the “City of David” lasted all of 73 years, or 1.46 percent of the city’s entire history. If the 5,000 years of Jerusalem’s history were defined as one 24-hour day, the Hebrews would have had it for 21 minutes and 1.44 seconds.

• Even if we include the divided kingdom period, continuous proto-Jewish control over Jerusalem lasted only 516 years, a far cry from the 1,277 years it was under Muslim rule (637–1914 CE).

Sources:

* See, for example, Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) pp. 6-7.

† Joshua 6:21, 24. KJV.