Introduction to the Biblical Family Tree | Which Characters are Historical?

on this channel I mostly use family tree charts to explore real world history although I do sometimes talk about mythologies and fictional worlds as well over the years I've received numerous requests to cover biblical genealogy but up until today I've pretty much avoided the topic this is because I know that different people approach the subject in different ways and I wanted to avoid any potential misunderstandings for example I know that some people out there believe that the Bible is 100% historical all the way back to Adam and Eve let me say up front that this is not a position that I myself hold like most mainstream historians I view the Bible primarily as a collection of documents written in many different literary genres edited over a long period of time whose main purpose is to make theological points not to record literal history however like most mainstream historians I also do recognize that the bible does sometimes in some places include references to real historical people so the question is at what point in the biblical family tree do the characters go from being primarily mythological or legendary to being primarily historical well that's the question I hope to answer in this video so regardless of where you stand on this particular issue I hope that you will find the information that I'm going to share with you interesting and educational you [Music] [Music] before we begin let me explain three key terms that I will be using in this video history mythology and legend let's start with the word history history is a record of events that happened in real life to real people so for example we know that in the year 49 BC a man named Julius Caesar crossed a river called the Rubicon and then went on to become the dictator of Rome for the next five years before being stabbed to death by a bunch of senators this is not just a story that someone made up its history it really happened mythology on the other hand is just a story a story that someone made up to explain something or to make a point and often it includes supernatural elements so for example the ancient Greeks told a story involving two gods named Zeus and Prometheus in which Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to humans thus allowing human culture to advance now most people today do not think of Zeus and Prometheus as being real nor do they think of this story as being a record of actual events instead they'd agree that it's just a story now as a side note this doesn't mean that mythology is not important in fact we still use mythology today for example in movies and novels because mythology can often communicate valuable ideas in a way that historically based accounts simply cannot finally we have the word legend legend fits somewhere in between mythology and history a good example of a legend would be the story of the Trojan War that story includes a character named Menelaus who was king of Sparta now we know that Sparta was indeed a real historical place we also know the exact dates that some of the later kings of Sparta reigned but does this mean that everything we read about Menelaus and the Trojan War is historical well no there very well may have been a real spartan king named Menelaus and he may even have on to war against a city called Troy but most of the details we read in Homer such as the part about the wooden horse or the part about some guy named Achilles being invincible except for his heel these things were likely all embellishments added much later to make the story sound more exciting kind of like a movie that is based on a true story but takes a lot of liberties in the retelling okay so now that we have some categories to work with let's look at the biblical family tree and see which labels we should apply to which parts so the first book of the Bible is Genesis and it starts out with the creation story in which God directly creates the first two humans named Adam and Eve we then get the flood story which occurs about ten generations later and involves a man named Noah who famously builds a huge boat called an ark so that he and his family can escape a worldwide flood now to me these first two stories are obviously pure mythology to believe otherwise is to disregard everything we know from modern science but keep in mind that viewing these stories as mythology is actually a position that predates the scientific era most Jewish rabbis will explain to you that the creation and flood stories were never meant to be taken literally even the early Christian writer Augustine understood this so I think I'm in pretty good company here when it comes to my choice of label next up about 10 more generations down from Noah are the three patriarchs Abraham Isaac and Jacob here the stories get much more detailed and the setting often involves place names that we know actually existed in the real world but according to most historians were still dealing primarily with mythology at this point you could argue that it is starting to border on legend because of the historical place names but the problem with the place names in Genesis is that they are off by about 1000 years so it's kind of like someone writing a story about the pre-colonial americas but including the cities of New York and Chicago in the setting okay so let's continue nearer to the end of Genesis Jacob gets his name change to Israel and he has a total of 12 sons who for reasons that I won't get into in this video and up living in Egypt there they grow into the Israelite nation which consists of twelve tribes in Egypt the Israelites are eventually forced to become slaves and this is the situation at the beginning of the second book of the Bible called Exodus in Exodus God chooses an Israelite named Moses to lead his people out of Egypt back to the region of Palestine this is where we get the famous parting of the Red Sea story then according to the next four books of the Bible the Israelites wander in the desert for forty years before they finally conquer Palestine under the leadership of a guy named Joshua and then they finally settled down there so what label should we use for this section well according to most historians the best label for the Exodus story would still be mythology you see we're now dealing with events that supposedly occurred around the Year 1450 BC the Egyptians were keeping really good records by this point and the fact is there is no mention of the Israelites ever having lived in Egypt as a nation or having been slaves there or of their mass migration out of the country but it is at this point that we do start to get some glimpses of parallels to real-world history for example we know that around the year 1600 BC a foreign group known as the Hyksos invaded Egypt and ruled there for about 100 years before being forced to flee back to Palestine perhaps the memory of this event formed the basis of the Exodus story but let's continue down the family tree eventually the Israelites now living in Palestine decide that they want a king their first king is a guy named Saul from the tribe of Benjamin but he doesn't work out that well so they end up going with a guy named David from the tribe of juda David's the guy who killed the famous giant named Goliath David then has a son named Solomon who was supposedly super-rich and who builds the original temple in Jerusalem so according to the Bible there was originally a single unified Israelite Kingdom which was centered at Jerusalem and which had three main Kings Saul David and Solomon according to the chronology given in the Bible this unified Kingdom would have existed around the Year 1000 BC now keep that date in mind because we're going to come back to it after the death of Solomon the kingdom gets split in two there's the Kingdom of Israel in the north consisting of ten tribes and there's the kingdom of Judah in the south consisting of just two tribes Judah however keeps the capital city of Jerusalem as well as the Davidic line of Kings this period is known as the divided monarchy and it comes to an end when the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria leaving the southern kingdom all by itself okay so now that we've reached the point in the biblical family tree where an Israelite monarchy begins this is where most historians would stop using the word mythology and switch to the word legend instead but we're not quite to the point of real history yet to explain why let's go back to that important date I mentioned earlier 1000 BC this actually represents a pretty important turning point in all of world history it roughly marks the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age the transition started a few hundred years earlier with an event known as the bronze age collapse in which several major civilizations such as the Mycenaean Greeks and the Egyptians new kingdom suddenly fall apart for reasons that may have involved climate change we then get what's called the Greek Dark Ages for a couple hundred years before we then see the rise of several new Iron Age civilizations like the neo-assyrian z' and the republic of athens so strangely enough the point in which israel was supposedly unified and at its peak of power occurs during this ancient Dark Age so it's kind of like the lights go off for a bit and when they come back on everything is different and we've got to explain what happened in the dark well according to the Bible during the period when the lights were out there was a single United Israelite Kingdom that was huge extremely wealthy and centred on Jerusalem where there was a large population and a major palace and temple but according to the archaeological record when the lights were out Jerusalem was just a small town and there was no major kingdom anywhere in the region we do find a potential reference to the house of David later in the archaeological record but nothing from when David himself supposedly reigned so the most likely explanation is that David and Solomon were in fact local historical rulers who lived around 1000 BC but that the Bible greatly exaggerated s' their wealth and power therefore the best way to describe them would be to use the word legend that puts them in the same category as King Menelaus of Sparta so let me tell you what really happened during this period based on what we know from archaeology the first mention of ancient Israel in the archaeological record is from the Merneptah stele II in Egypt dated to around 1200 BC in it pharaoh Merneptah brags about conquering a bunch of people groups in palestine including one called israel now this makes sense based on the excavations of settlements from around this time it appears that the Israelites were a distinct group of people living mainly in the hill country and that other groups of people were still living in the larger coastal towns but then the Bronze Age collapse occurred which involved a seafaring group known as the see people's destroying most of those coastal areas this left a lot of towns mostly empty and so what happened was that the Israelites slowly took over these areas for themselves so rather than coming from Egypt and conquering the land all at once they were likely just a distinct cultural group that emerged in the hills and then slowly took over the coast due to the bronze age collapse and they're likely never was a single unified Israelite Kingdom in fact what the archaeological record tells us is that the northern kingdom likely evolved first and that it was definitely the larger of the two kingdoms it was centered on the city of Samaria not Jerusalem where the people were consistently polytheistic the smaller southern kingdom of Judah centered on Jerusalem came much later and it was there that the idea of worshiping just one God likely emerged so like I mentioned the more powerful Northern Kingdom of Israel eventually gets defeated by Assyria leaving the southern kingdom of Judah all by itself and it's when Judah was left all by itself that the biblical narrative finally moves into the territory of real world history sure there's still some theological embellishments here and there but for the most part the characters and locations are historically accurate so why is everything up to this point mythology or legend but here things suddenly switch to history well the very obvious answer is that this is the point in which most of the Hebrew Bible was actually written and/or compiled so it makes sense that the writers and editors would be historically accurate when they were talking about the time period in which they themselves were living but more creative and imaginative the farther back in time they went and how do we know that the characters from this section are in fact historical well because many of their names have been found in the archaeological record for example if we take the last ten Kings from the kingdom of Judah six have been confirmed through a Syrian or Babylonian records I hope to do a video on the kings of ancient Israel and Judah later this year and at that point I'll go through some of those sources in more detail but for now I want to answer one more question about this period if the exodus did not really happen and if a unified Israelite Kingdom centered at Jerusalem did not really ever exist then why would the people living in the kingdom of Judah at this point make these stories up were they just bad historians no not at all they were very likely trying to build an argument for a military conquest in their day and age remember the northern kingdom had just been destroyed by Assyria this meant that there was a lot of vulnerable land nearby ripe for the taking what the biblical writers were saying was let's conquer the land now let's build a unified Israelite Kingdom now so the stories of Joshua and of David were actually sort of a blueprint for what they wanted to happen in the near future not a historical record of what had happened in the distant past but unfortunately for them the kingdom of Judah never did achieve its dream of a grand conquest and a unified Kingdom it actually ended up being conquered by the Babylonian Empire just a few generations later but the story doesn't end there eventually the Babylonians were replaced by the Persians and the famous Persian king Cyrus the Great allowed the former residence of Judah now called Jews to return to their homeland now called Judea and rebuild their temple this begins what's called the Second Temple period and this is where the Hebrew Bible ends of course Christians have what's called the New Testament which takes place more than 500 years after the end of the Hebrew Bible which they call the Old Testament by that point the Romans were now in charge of Judea in the New Testament the followers of a man named Jesus claimed that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah central to their claim was that Jesus was a descendant of the house of David so the New Testament starts with some genealogies that attempt to connect Jesus back to King David this is yet another topic that I hope to cover in more detail in a future video but for now let me say this the view of most mainstream historians is that the genealogies given in the New Testament were never meant to be taken literally and are thus best labeled as legend this is because they show clear signs of a poetic structure and includes several important contradictions again I'll delve more into that at a later date so there you have it the genealogical information found in the Bible is neither 100% fact nor is it 100% fiction rather it is a mix of mythology legend and history for those of you who would like a good source for all the details on the archeology and scholarship behind the view that I've just presented in this video I highly recommend a book called the Bible on earth written by one of the top Israeli archaeologists in the world today along with one of his American colleagues I'll leave a link to that in the description thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: UsefulCharts

Views: 521,201

Rating: 4.7252431 out of 5

Keywords: old testament historicity, old testament history, old testament historical, bible historicity, bible historical, bible family tree, biblical family tree, ot historicity, ot historical, ot history, bible genealogy, biblical genealogy, bible history, torah historical

Id: aLtRR9RgFMg

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vaishineph]

I really liked this video up until the 16:00 minute mark where the author speculates that the legendary sections of the HB (including most of the Pentateuch and DH in his opinion) were written to justify a Judean invasion of Samaria. What?