In this book, first published in 1901, Ottley chronicles the development of the Jewish people from the first accounts in Genesis to the reign of King Herod the Great in the late 1st century BCE. Ottley's history includes seven maps of relevant biblical territories as well as chronological tables comparing developments among the Jews with those of contemporaneous ancient civilizations and a list of documentary sources. This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in Jewish history and in the history of the ancient world.

Dieser erste Teilband des dritten und letzten Bandes des HBOT-Projekts setzt die kritische Darstellung der ganzen Rezeptions-, Auslegungs- und Forschungsgeschichte der Hebräischen Bibel / des Alten Testaments fort und berücksichtigt die neuen Aspekte dieser Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, und zwar auf jüdischer wie auf christlicher Seite, unter katholischen wie unter protestantischen Theologen und Forschern. Dabei macht sich vor allem eine neue Faszination des Phänomens einer vielfältigen und bunten Geschichte bemerkbar; die »Geschichte« rückt in den Brennpunkt, und mit dem immer breiter ausgreifenden und vielfältigen historischen Kontext tritt ein entschieden stärkeres Interesse an historischen Fragestellungen bei der Auslegung und Erforschung der Bibel in den Vordergrund. Diese Kursänderung kommt namentlich an den Tag, wenn das Alte Testament in seinen vorderorientalischen Kontext näher eingeordnet wird, während die Bezüge zur Kirche und Synagoge mehr oder weniger geschwächt werden. Sobald eine historisch-kritische Annäherungsweise und Methode in der Bibelforschung allmählich an Dominanz gewinnt, gerät das Verhältnis zwischen der neuen wissenschaftlichen Exegese und der herkömmlichen kirchlichen Auslegung des Alten Testaments mehrfach in eine Krise, und zudem werden Streitigkeiten zwischen Fronten hervorgerufen; doch enthält diese weithin krisenhafte Lage noch Möglichkeiten fruchtbarer Neuorientierungen – in der Bibelwissenschaft wie in Leben und Lehre der Kirchen. Dabei greift das auslaufende 19. Jahrhundert auf das 20. Jahrhundert aus.

Many a nation has walked God’s earth, has long enjoyed its good things, has come into being and passed away, without our knowing anything of its history, or even whether it had a history at all. For no nation has a history except one that makes history, that is to say, that influences the course of human development. It is with races as with individuals; none is kept in mind by posterity save those who have distinguished themselves by ideas that have modified the life of mankind, or (which comes to the same thing) have been pioneers in fresh fields of action. The greater the spiritual gain a nation has brought to the rest of the world, the longer and more steadily its life has flowed in the channels it was the first to make, the longer is its history told among them. The nations of history are those which have put forward, in one fashion or another, their claim to the dominion of the world. Thus we may fitly ask what claim it is that is made upon our interest by the history of the Jewish nation. And the answer will be, that nothing which excites our attention, or stirs us to admiration or imitation in the history of other nations, is here present in any large measure. Israel was always a small, nay, a petty nation, settled in a narrow space, never of any considerable importance in the political history of the East; it never brought forth a Ramses II, a Sargon, an Esarhaddon, an Asshurbanapal, a Nebuchadrezzar, or a Cyrus to bear its banner into distant lands. Yet, for all this, the history of Israel has, for us, an interest quite different from that of those other nations of antiquity. And if, as we see, Israel is far surpassed in martial glory by the peoples of the great empires, and by the Romans in their influence on the development of law, there are yet other points in which it must yield unquestioned precedence to other nations of antiquity. We do not find in Israel the same feeling for beauty as among the Greeks, who, like no nation before them or after, showed forth the laws of beauty in every sphere of intellectual life, and to this day, in such matters, stand forth in a perfection which has never again been attained, far less excelled. Among the Hebrews there is nothing analogous, nothing comparable to what we admire in the Hellenic people. It has no epic, nothing that can be compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, against which the Germans set the Nibelungen Lied, and the Finns the Kalewala; it has not the slightest rudiments of a drama—the Song of Songs and Job are not dramas. There is a school of lyrical poetry unsurpassed for all time, and the music that corresponds to it. But the bent towards science, which actuates the Greeks, is wholly lacking—wholly lacking the bent towards[2] philosophy. Nor was it ever eminent in ancient days, in the walks of commerce, enterprise and invention, by which, also, a nation may conquer the world; its intellectual life is absolutely one-sided, a one-sidedness that produces on us the effect of extreme singularity. But the attraction it has for us does not lie in this singularity. It is due, rather, to the circumstance that this small nation has exerted a far greater influence over the course of the history of the whole human race than the Greeks or Romans, that to us it has become typical in many more respects than they. Our present modes of thought and feeling, our lives and actions, are far more profoundly influenced by the world of thought and feeling which Israel brought to the birth, than by that of Greece or Rome. Our whole civilisation to-day is saturated with tendencies and impulses which have their origin in Israel. To be continue in this ebook...