Two ways in.
The forensic opening, or the scene that explains everything about how the whole thing got started. Pick your entry point.
In 1208 BCE, an Egyptian pharaoh named Merneptah had a stele carved to commemorate his military victories. It is a standard piece of ancient imperial self-promotion: the usual catalogue of enemies defeated, cities taken, peoples laid waste. Most of it concerns a Libyan campaign. The final lines deal with a separate operation in Canaan, where some vassals had been restless. The pharaoh's scribes listed the targets in sequence: Ashkelon conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent. Then, in passing, between one boast and the next:
Israel is laid waste; its seed is no more.
It is the earliest known reference to Israel outside the Bible. Carved in granite, filed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and dated with reasonable precision to 1208 BCE. Before there was a temple. Before there was a king. Before there was a Jerusalem worth mentioning in dispatches. Before there was a Torah, a covenant, a chosen people, or a promised land.
Before any of it, there was a people in the hill country of Canaan whom the most powerful empire on earth considered worth noting as a military nuisance, and worth claiming, in the conventional hyperbole of ancient victory inscriptions, to have finished.
They were not finished. But the claim is instructive. Because everything the theology would later construct (the kingdom, the covenant, the divine promise, the land) would be built on top of a people who, at the moment of their first appearance in the historical record, were being described as agricultural peasants in an upland backwater, without a king, without a city, without a temple, and without any apparent mechanism for distinguishing themselves from the other hill-country pastoralists around them.
Except one. But we will come to that.
This is where the book begins: not with the land claim, but with the people the land claim was built on top of. Three thousand years before the ICJ ruling, before the Balfour Declaration, before the first Zionist Congress, there was a pharaoh's scribe noting a minor military operation in the hill country of Canaan. The people he recorded had no theology yet, no covenant, no promised land. They had pig-free middens and a talent for institutional survival. The rest, as they say, is history. This book examines that history.
There is, in the historical record, a small problem with the Cyrus Cylinder as the founding document of the Jewish return to Jerusalem. The problem is that the Jews are not mentioned in it. The Cylinder records Cyrus's general policy of allowing displaced peoples to return to their homelands and restore their temples: a policy applied across the empire, to dozens of peoples, as a matter of administrative convenience rather than theological endorsement. The Jews were not, by the available evidence, on the list at all.
Which raises the question of how, precisely, the arrangement was arrived at. The answer, in all probability, is something like this.
An anteroom in the palace at Babylon. 538 BCE. Cyrus the Great is reviewing dispatches. A delegation of temple functionaries has been waiting since the third hour.
Delegation LeaderMr Cyrus, sir. We represent the temple establishment of Jerusalem, exiled to this city by your predecessor's predecessor, and we wish to...
Cyrus(not looking up) Yes, fine.
Delegation LeaderWe haven't actually... that is, we'd like permission to...
CyrusMm. Granted.
Delegation LeaderWe want to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple and...
Cyrus(signing something) Yes, yes. Take Sheshbazzar. He'll sort out the vessels.
Delegation LeaderThe sacred vessels, yes, we'll need those. And also (and this is the other matter) we wanted to ask about the Cylinder. We're not on it.
CyrusNo.
Delegation LeaderWe were wondering if it might be possible to... that is, we understand it's a significant document and we wouldn't want to trouble you with an amendment, but perhaps a small addition, a codicil of some kind, mentioning that our god Yahweh (he's not quite in Marduk's league obviously, more of a regional arrangement, but very committed, very diligent) visited you in a sacred dream and commanded that you release the Jews, as we are sometimes called, and...
Cyrus(looks up slowly) He commanded me.
Delegation LeaderStrongly urged. In a dream. Which we appreciate is not binding in the technical...
CyrusNo man commands me. No tribal god commands me. I am king of the four quarters of the world. Marduk himself does not command me. He requests. With appropriate ceremony.
Delegation LeaderYes, absolutely, we used the wrong word entirely, what we meant was more of a divine suggestion, a celestial nudge, which you in your wisdom...
CyrusAnd who are the Jews?
Delegation LeaderWe... that is, we are. The Jews. Us. Also known as Judeans. From the southern highland...
CyrusYou're Judeans.
Delegation LeaderSome people say Jews, some people say Judeans, it's more of a...
Cyrus(long pause) Why would I amend the Cylinder?
Delegation LeaderWell. Here is the thing. Jerusalem, as you know, sits on the road to Egypt. Notoriously difficult posting. Lots of moving parts. Competing interests. We have been administering that territory (our ancestors have, well, mine have, not my colleague here, as he's Babylonian, as is the other one, but both are absolutely thrilled with the idea of building a new temple in Jerusalem and lauding it over a few peasants in your name, sir, which we feel demonstrates a very healthy institutional commitment) and we feel we could be very useful to the empire in keeping things orderly. On the Egyptian front. Which everyone agrees is...
Cyrus(looking at the delegation for the first time) How many of you have actually been to Jerusalem?
Delegation Leader(pause) In a... in a spiritual sense, we have all...
CyrusHow many. In the physical sense. Boots on the ground.
Delegation Leader(longer pause) The numbers are somewhat...
CyrusYou're offering to administer a frontier territory none of you have visited, on behalf of a god not mentioned in any imperial document, in exchange for having that god's name added to a proclamation that is already complete, fired, and on display.
Delegation LeaderWhen you put it that way it does sound...
Cyrus(returns to dispatches) I'm not amending the Cylinder.
Delegation LeaderA separate letter, then. Something on official...
CyrusYou have my verbal authorisation. Go back to Jerusalem. Keep the road to Egypt open. We will send the temple vessels with Sheshbazzar.
Delegation LeaderAnd Yahweh (in terms of official recognition)...
CyrusIs not mentioned in the Cylinder.
Delegation LeaderBut if someone were to ask, at a later date, whether your authorisation carried a divine...
Cyrus(long pause) Get out.
They got out. They went to Jerusalem. They built the Temple on the strength of a Persian imperial posting notice, a conversation about frontier administration, and the verbal assent of a man who had already moved on to the next dispatch before they reached the door.
Twenty-five centuries later, the conversation is still being cited as a deed. The posting is still causing trouble.
This scene is reconstructed from the historical record. The Cyrus Cylinder (the actual physical document, now in the British Museum) does not mention the Jews. Not once. Not obliquely. What Cyrus gave them was a verbal authorisation for a frontier posting he found administratively convenient. What they turned it into is the subject of this book.