I.

Introduction

Ancient Palestine, a region of the ancient Near East located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea between Egypt and Syria. It comprised territory that in the 21st century included Israel, the Israeli-occupied West Bank (Samaria and Judea), the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, and northwestern Jordan to the east of the Jordan River. Ancient Palestine was the “Holy Land” of the Bible, the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity.

Ancient Palestine consisted of five geographical divisions. Four ran parallel from north to south. Along the Mediterranean there was a narrow coastal plain. Farther east was hill country—Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. East of that was the valley of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, part of the Great Rift Valley. Still farther east were the Transjordanian highlands. The arid Negev extended southward from the Judean Hills to the Gulf of Aqaba.

The oldest evidence historians possess for the linguistic and ethnic character of the population of Palestine comes from the second millennium bc. Then and later, the country was inhabited by a diversity of ethnic groups, mainly Semitic in language. The invading Israelites knew the area as Canaan and its inhabitants as Canaanites. The Egyptians’ main term for the area was Rezenu (Retenu), and they also referred to it as Pwenet (Punt) and Toneter (God’s Land). In Greek the land was known as coelo (southern) Syria. The modern name Palestine, deriving from the Greek Philistia (the southern Mediterranean coast), was imposed by the Romans after the Bar Kochba revolt (ad 130-134), when they killed or deported most of the formerly predominant Jewish population.