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of the Pentateuch contain very ancient understandings of Israel’s relationship to God, the only true God, the one who created the heavens and the earth. Many ancient Israelites took these traditions to be not only historically accurate but theologically significant. According to these traditions, as eventually found in the Pentateuch, God chose Israel to be his special people—even before they had become a people. After the world was created, destroyed by a flood, and reinhabited (Gen. 1–11), God chose one man, Abraham, to be the father of a great nation that would be uniquely tied to the Lord of all. Abraham’s descendants would be specially favored by God and so were thought to be his people. But two generations after Abraham,his family was forced to enter Egypt to escape famine in the land of Israel. There they multiplied and became a great nation. Out of fear of their size and strength, the Egyptians enslaved the people of Israel, and they suffered miserably as a result.
    But God remembered his promise to Abraham that he would be the father of this people, and he raised up a powerful savior, Moses, to deliver them from the hands of the Egyptians. Moses performed many miracles in Egypt to compel the Egyptian Pharaoh to release the people; eventually he was forced to do so and they escaped into the wilderness. Pharaoh then had second thoughts and pursued the children of Israel, but suffered an irreversible defeat at the hands of God, who destroyed Pharaoh and his armies when the Israelites crossed the “Red Sea” (or the “sea of reeds”). God then led the people of Israel to his sacred mountain, Sinai, where he gave Moses the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Jewish law and established his covenant (or “peace treaty”) with them. They would be his covenant people—meaning that he and they had entered into a kind of political agreement, a peace accord, with each other. They would be his chosen people whom he would protect and defend in perpetuity, just as he had done when they were enslaved in Egypt. In exchange, they were to keep his Law, which dictated how they were to worship him (much of the book of Leviticus spells out the details) and how they were to relate to one another as the people of God.
    After the Pentateuch comes another set of historical books in the Hebrew Bible: Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel, and the books of Kings. These take the story yet further, showing how God gave the promised land over to Israel (there were already people living there, so the Israelites had to destroy them in war, as described in the book of Joshua); how he ruled them through local charismatic leaders (Judges); how the monarchy was eventually formed (1 Samuel), and what happened during the time of the united kingdom, when both north and south were ruled by one king (under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon), and then in the dividedmonarchy, when the kingdom split into two parts, Israel (or Ephraim) in the north and Judah in the south. Among other things, these books detail the disasters that struck the people of Israel over the years, culminating in the destruction of the nation of Israel (the northern kingdom) in 722 BCE at the hands of the Assyrians, Mesopotamia’s first “world empire,” and the destruction of Judah (the southern kingdom) a century and a half later in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, who had overthrown the Assyrians.
    It is not my purpose here to discuss the historical question of whether any of this—especially the accounts of the Pentateuch—actually happened. Some scholars think that the accounts of Genesis through Deuteronomy are essentially historical in their descriptions, others think they are much later fabrications, and probably the majority think there are some historical roots for these traditions, which developed significantly over time as the stories were told and retold in the course of centuries of oral tradition. 13 What is certain is that many ancient Israelites believed