From Megiddo to Megiddo: A Brief History of the southern Levant
Since I was a child , I have been fascinated by the history of the region that is today the country of Israel and the territories of Palestine. It’s a long and complicated history, and in this essay I plan only on scratching the very surface on it. However, since this is a rabbit hole of near-infinite depth, I wanted to write up such a surface-level history, to provide some historical context for the modern conflict.
This essay will provide a whirlwind tour of the history of the Near East, starting with our earliest historical records and ending at World War I, when the political complexity of this region got kicked into overdrive.
Nomenclature
First, to give a sense of just how complicated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, we don’t even have a good value-neutral name for the region. Language here is so closely tied to political positions that names themselves are politically charged.
So let’s start with the “southern Levant,” which isn’t exactly precise, but which is nonetheless a nice neutral(ish) name for the region. “Levant” is a broad term that encompasses the eastern shore of the Mediterranean — modern day Cyprus, western Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. “Levant” comes from Italian merchants, who called the land levante or “rising” — denoting the lands over which the sun rose. (It is actually not etymologically related to “Lebanon,” which arises from the west Semitic† word laban — meaning “white” — referring to the snow-capped peaks of the Lebanon mountain range.)
But there are a lot of names that this region has borne over the years — Canaan, Israel, Judah, Judea, Palestine, and others. Each term is inextricably bound with particular historical events — which I will be going through in more detail below — but here’s a brief primer on some of the names you may (or may not) be familiar with:
- Canaan: Canaan was the biblical name for the southern Levant, a blanket term for the various cities and tribes who were part of a larger Bronze Age and Iron Age cultural/linguistic family that inhabited modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Hebrew is considered by linguists to be a Canaanite language.
- Israel: The modern country of Israel gets its name from the biblical tradition that the last common patriarch of all Jews was the biblical Jacob, who was also called Yisrael (Israel); Jews therefore consider themselves the “Children of Israel.” Historically, however, the story of Jacob is probably a retcon to explain the name of the Kingdom of Israel — a Hebraic Iron Age kingdom that existed from about 930 BC to 722 BC in the northern half of the modern state of Israel. (More on the Kingdom of Israel below.)
- Samaria: The capital of the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel was Shomron — translated by the Greek as “Samaria.” It is often used to refer to the whole of the kingdom, and it is how the northern part of the region was described in the New Testament.
- Judah: Judah (or Yehudah) was — along with Israel — one of the two Hebrew-speaking Iron Age kingdoms. Judah — with so much of its land in the Judaean and Negev deserts — was really a backwater compared to the more fertile and prosperous Israel. However, between the fact that Judah lasted for more than a century after the fall of Israel, and the fact that it was home to the religious center of Jerusalem, Judah ultimately lent its name to the more common historical name for the region — Judea — as well as to the demonym for the people who lived there — Judeans — and ultimately to the words “Judaism” and “Jew.”
- Judea and Samaria: To make life easier, I’d love to refer to the whole region based on the names from antiquity: “Judah and Israel” or “Judea and Samaria.” But unfortunately I can’t. “Israel,” of course, is too ambiguous a term because the boundaries of the modern state of Israel differ from than the ancient Kingdom of Israel. And “Samaria” is bound up with Israeli politics, because right-wing Israelis describe the West Bank region as “Judea and Samaria” — the idea being that the the West Bank is part of Israel and therefore needs a real geographic name.
- Palestine: Palestine originally referred to the lands of the Philistines, a group centered on modern-day Gaza. However, the Greek historian Herotodus used it as referring to the entire Judean region as early as the 5th century BC, and it became a synonym for “Judaea.” When the Romans crushed the last Jewish rebellion in 135 CE, they renamed the province from “Judaea” to “Syria Palaestina.” When the Roman Empire was supplanted by the Muslim Caliphate in the middle ages, the name “Filastin” (a cognate of “Palestine”) was kept as the name of the region.
Given all this complexity, I will continue to refer to the region as the “southern Levant,” and hope that that is a clear enough designation.
Location, Location, Location
The Levant as a whole has had the “fortune” of being the crossroads of three regions that have been centers of political organization since the beginning of recorded history: Egypt to the southwest, Mesopotamia to the east, and Anatolia to the north. It is also a coastal region in a part of the world dominated by maritime trade since (again) the beginning of recorded history.
Thus, it was not uncommon for armies of the great powers in these regions to march through ancient Canaan — whether it was the Egyptians moving north to the lands of the wealthy Phoenician city-states in modern-day Lebanon, or Assyrians moving southwest from Damascus. Many of those armies would use the natural highway of the Jezreel Valley, leading to clashes around the major defensible point in that region — the fortress city of Megiddo. Megiddo saw so much conflict over the years that it lent its name to the prophesied site of “Armageddon.”
The first recorded such battle was in 1457 BC, so let’s use that as our jumping-off point.
The Bronze Age: Egyptian Hegemony (1457–1157 BC)
In the late 16th Century BC, the entities that make up modern-day Egypt underwent a process of political consolidation into what we call today the “New Kingdom.” The New Kingdom expanded rapidly, and in 1457 BC, under Pharaoh Thutmose III, they defeated a confederation of Canaanite tribes at the Battle of Megiddo. For almost 300 years following Megiddo, the peoples of Canaan were vassals of the Pharaohs.
Being a subject of the Pharaoh could be brutal, especially if a Pharaoh was in the mood to assert his authority. Indeed, the first written use of the name “Israel” of which archaeologists are aware comes from Victory Stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, in which the Pharaoh bragged about various rebellions he quashed around 1210 BCE:
The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:
Ashkelon has been overcome;
Gezer has been captured;
Yano’am is made non-existent.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;
But after 1200 BCE, something — nobody is quite sure what — happened in the Near East. Wikipedia has this to say:
Between 1206 and 1150 BC, the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the New Kingdom of Egypt in Syria and Canaan interrupted trade routes and severely reduced literacy…. [Robert] Drews writes, “Within a period of forty to fifty years…almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”
Whether by cause or effect, this collapse coincided with the arrival of the “Sea Peoples,” a number of Mediterranean tribes that invaded and settled in the Near East. The best known of these tribes was the Peleset; in the Hebrew alphabet, this would have been written as PLST, which was likely pronounced “Pilisti”, and ultimately became rendered most familiarly as “Philistines.”
The Iron Age: Israel, Judah, Babylonian Exile, and Persian Restoration (930–332 BC)
In the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse, small polities sprang up in the region known as Canaan. To provide a sense of what this region was like in the Iron Age, I would like to provide a quote from Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization,” which Dan Carlin quoted in his Hardcore History episode “Kings of Kings”:
To a distant and yet discerning eye the Near East…would have seemed like an ocean in which vast swarms of human beings moved about in turmoil, forming and dissolving groups, enslaving and being enslaved, eating and being eaten, killing and getting killed, endlessly. Behind and around the great empires — Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia — flowered this medley of half nomad, half settled tribes: Cimmerians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Bithynians, Ashkanians, Mysians, Mæonians, Carians, Lycians, Pamphylians, Pisidians, Lycaonians, Philistines, Amorites, Canaanites, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites and a hundred other peoples each of which felt itself the center of geography and history, and would have marveled at the ignorant prejudice of an historian who would reduce them to a paragraph.
Of the many peoples, tribes, and kingdoms populating the Iron Age near east, I want to focus on two political entities: the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. These were assemblages of Hebrew-speaking tribes that by the late 9th Century BC had consolidated themselves into kingdoms.
A few notes here about Israel and Judah. First, though the Bible states that Israel and Judah started as a unified kingdom under Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and only split into two kingdoms after the reign of Solomon, there is no archaeological evidence outside the Bible that Israel and Judah were ever a unified monarchy. While there is archaeological evidence of an ancient Judahite king named “David,” there is no evidence that he ruled Israel as well.
Second, historians tend to refer to the religion of these kingdoms as “Yahwism” as opposed to “Judaism,” as the texts, laws, and customs that would make up the later religion of Judaism did not yet exist. While the Hebrews worshipped a sky god named Yahweh, they likely worshipped him at the head of a broader Canaanite pantheon. The Bible describes a number of the kings of Israel and Judah worshipping other Canaanite gods, such as the well-known Canaanite god Ba’al or the earth mother goddess Asherah, and while it casts aspersions on those rulers, this practice of monolatry was clearly commonplace in ancient Israel and Judah.
Further to the east, starting around 900 BC, the Middle East saw the rise of the first regional superpower — the Assyrian empire. Starting from northern Mesopotamia (centered around modern Mosul, Iraq), over about 250 years it spread to encompass southern Mesopotamia down to the Persian Gulf, eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and even Egypt. In 722 BCE, the Assyrian king Sargon II conquered the Kingdom of Israel, deporting its people to Assyria, and reduced Judah to a tribute-paying vassal state. (The Assyrians tried to conquer Judah as well, but their siege of Jerusalem ended when disease decimated the besieging Assyrian army.)
In the late 7th century BC, a series of uprisings by its subject peoples and invasions from outside swiftly diminished Assyria’s strength. From about 615 to 609 BC, all of Assyria’s major cities (including the famous Nineveh, near modern-day Mosul) were sacked, and the Assyrian monarchy was deposed.
Two major powers tried to step into the vacuum left by Assyria’s fall. The biggest beneficiary was Babylon, a city-state in southern Mesopotamia that quickly absorbed much of the former Assyrian territory, becoming what scholars today call the “Neo-Babylonian Empire.” On the other side of the former Assyrian empire, the new 26th Dynasty in Egypt made a play for gobbling up the western half of the former Assyrian territory. Caught in between Egypt and Babylon, however, was poor Judah.
Judah, faced with impossible geopolitical choices, threw in its lot with Egypt. Babylon’s punishment was swift and brutal. In 587 or 586 BCE, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem, sacked the city, razed the Jews’ holy temple to the ground, and deported all the Jews living there to Babylon.
Thus began the Babylonian exile, a formative moment in Jewish tradition. Many biblical writings and prophecies date from this era, and many of those prophecies took on an eschatological tone — about an end of days when a descendant of the royal House of David would once again sit on the thrones of Israel and Judah.
Just a few generations later, however, the wheel of empire turned again. Cyrus the Great — the king of a new Persian empire (or Achaemenid Empire, after its ruling dynasty) — invaded Babylonia from the east in 539 BC and in a matter of months had toppled the Babylonian empire.
As has been wonderfully described in Dan Carlin’s “King of Kings” series and a series of episodes in Patrick Wyman’s “Tides of History,” the Achaemenid Persians ran a kinder, gentler form of empire — relative to the Assyrians or Babylonians at least. As long as a province submitted to the King of Kings, paid its taxes, and sent its soldiers to fight in the empire’s wars, it was generally left to govern its own affairs.
Moreover, the Achaemenid empire was more than just a protection racket. Cyrus made a real effort to encourage submission through the carrot as well as the stick. In 538 BC, he issued a formal edict allowing the Jews to return to Judah (or Yehud Medinata — “Province of Judah”), and even funded the construction of a new high Temple in Jerusalem, to replace the one that Babylonians had destroyed.
The next 200 years were a time of relative peace for the Jews — albeit one marred by the depopulation and destruction wrought by the Babylonian conquest. (The biblical Book of Esther does recount a story wherein Haman, a vizier for the Persian emperor Xerxes, tried to have all of the Jews in Yehud killed, but there is no historicity to this story that scholars are aware of.)
Most importantly, the Persian period was a critical time for the centralization, codification, and centralization of the Jewish religion. The Second Temple was built, and it would stand for six centuries. The governor Nehemiah and the scribe Ezra introduced a new law code to Yehud, which was likely the first version of the modern-day Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Slowly but surely, the Yahwism of the Iron Age began to morph into the Judaism of classical antiquity.
The nonbiblical parts of Jewish religious tradition developed during this period as well. Persia’s dominant religion, Zoroastrianism, focused on a divine struggle between good and evil and taught that one day a savior figure would defeat evil and bring about the renovation of the world. This melded nicely with the apocalyptic prophecies of the Babylonian era and their emphasis on the return of the House of David, and likely became the inspiration for various apocalyptic Jewish sects, such as the Essenes or early Christians.
Jews in Classical Antiquity: The Hellenistic Era (332–63 BC)
As the wheel of empire continued to turn, the next conquest of the region came from the west. Philip II of Macedon — a peripheral kingdom on the Greek mainland — spent the 23 years of his reign reforming the Macedonian army and turning it into the greatest fighting force in the ancient world. Philip died in 336 BCE, leaving the state and the army to his son Alexander III.
Over the next 13 years, Alexander would conquer all of the Persian empire, including the Levant. When Alexander died in 323 BCE at the age of 32, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River and from the Egyptian deserts to the central Asian steppe.
After Alexander died, however, his empire fragmented into local kingdoms, as his generals laid claim to whatever land they could control. The two most powerful successor kingdoms in Asia were the Ptolemaic kingdom (founded by Ptolemy) in Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom (founded by Seleucus) in Persia. Those two powerful kingdoms bordered each other, of course, along the great highway that was the Levant.
The Ptolemaic kingdom initially laid claim to the Levant, but from 274 BCE to 168 BCE, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids fought no fewer than six wars for control of Syria and its surrounding areas. Ultimately, the province of Yehud ended up under the control of the Seleucids.
In 175 BCE, King Antiochus IV ascended to the Seleucid throne. Although the sources we have about this time are not particularly reliable, it appears that Antiochus engaged in systematic persecutions of the Jews, which in 167 BCE prompted a rebellion against Seleucid authority. After three years of guerrilla warfare, led by a priest named Judah “the Hammer” (Judah Maccabee) and his followers, the Jews succeeded in driving the Seleucid armies out of Jerusalem.
After throwing off the Seleucid yoke, the followers of Judah Maccabee set up the Hasmonean dynasty. This was not an instantaneous or clean break from the past — it took another two decades of conflict to gain full political autonomy from the Seleucids — but it was a critical period for the development of modern Judaism. The Hasmoneans were a theocratic monarchy, and the development of religious rituals was part of a deliberate process of nation-building — the goal being to forge a separate and unique Jewish identity. Recent scholarship suggests that recognizable Jewish ritual practices probably started to be observed during the Hasmonean period. Thus, the late second century and early first century BCE saw the completion of the transformation of Yahwism to Judaism.
Jews Under Roman Rule (63 BC — 638 CE)
And still the wheel of empire kept turning.
In the mid-60s BCE, the Roman general Pompey the Great used the threat of Mediterranean piracy as a pretext for conquering all of Anatolia, Syria, and the Levant, finally wiping the Seleucid kingdom off the map. Meanwhile, in 63 BCE, a dynastic struggle for control of the Judean throne gave Pompey the pretext of capturing Jerusalem and bringing Judea under Roman “protection.”
Judea and the Hasmonean dynasty were preserved as a “client state” of Rome, first under the existing Hasmonean dynasty and then under the Herodian dynasty, before Emperor Augustus brought Judea under direct Roman rule in 6 CE.
The Jews were never particularly happy with Roman rule — particularly not the deification and idolization (literally) of the Roman emperors, which was anathema to the Jews’ religious teachings. Riots and small insurrections were commonplace, and in 66, a full-scale war broke out. Lasting seven years, the Great Jewish Revolt did not go well for the Jews. In 70 CE, Titus Flavius Vespasianus — the son of the Roman emperor of the same name (who ultimately would succeed his father as emperor) — laid siege to Jerusalem and sacked the city in July of 70 CE, razing the Second Temple to the ground.
The Revolt continued for another three years, until it finally came to a bloody end with the fall of the desert fortress Masada in 73 CE.
Another revolt in 115 came to a similar end, and a final revolt under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba in 132 CE was the final straw for the Romans. By 135 CE, when the revolt was finally put down, hundreds of thousands of Jews lay dead, observance of Jewish practices was banned, the remaining Jews were exiled, and the name of the province of Judaea was changed to Syria Palaestina, to expunge any reference to the former inhabitants of the land.
Over the next 500 years, there were periodic attempts to re-establish a Jewish presence in Palestina, all of which came to naught. For half a millennium, Palestina was just another Roman province — albeit one with particular spiritual importance to the empire, which became officially Christian in the 4th Century CE.
Politics in the Eastern Roman Empire (today usually called the “Byzantine Empire”) in late antiquity was dominated by the constant fighting between the Romans and the Persian Sasanian dynasty. The last of these conflicts — the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602–628 — was a drawn-out period of bloody war along the Byzantine-Persian border. Although Persian forces (with the support of exiled Jews) conquered Jerusalem in 613, the Byzantines reconquered it in 617, massacring the Jews who had returned to the city.
The generation-long war ultimately ended in a draw, with the status quo ante bellum being restored by 628. Both empires were left exhausted, depleted of resources and in political chaos.
Just in time for the eruption of the Muslim armies out of Arabia.
Palestine Under the Caliphate (638–1099)
The followers of the Prophet Muhammed started as a religious sect in the Hejaz region of modern-day Saudi Arabia in 622, and within 130 years they controlled the largest empire in history to that point— more than double the size of the Roman Empire at its peak. The Muslim Arab armies captured Jerusalem in 638, incorporating the province of Filastin into their empire.
The Muslim empire (or Caliphate) was ruled by Caliphs — leaders who were considered the successors of Muhammad, as both religious leader and temporal political ruler. The first four Caliphs following Muhammad — the Rashidun or “Rightly Guided” Caliphs — ruled from 632 to 661. They were succeeded by the Umayyad Dynasty from 661 to 750, which was overthrown by the Abbasid dynasty in 750.
Following the Abbasid revolution, the Caliph’s political and spiritual control over the Caliphate slowly started to decline, and the relationship between nominal political rule, de facto political rule, and religious hierarchy became complex, to say the least. Various parts of the Muslim empire gained de facto political independence, while still proclaiming loyalty (and sending tax revenue) to the Caliph in Baghdad.
Specific to the Levant, a violent struggle for control of the Caliphate in the 860s allowed Egypt to break away from the political control of the Caliphate under the Tulunid dynasty; the Tulunids took Filastin with them. The Abbasids reconquered the Levant in 904, but unfortunately a lasting peace was not in the cards.
In 909, followers of Shi’a Islam proclaimed a new caliphate — the Fatimid Caliphate — in Egypt, as a challenge to the Sunni Caliphate in Baghdad; the Levant (as has happened so often in history) became a contested border region. In 935, the military governor of Syria, Muhammad ibn Tughj al-Ikhshid, defeated a Fatimid invasion, and the Caliph subsequently named him and his family the hereditary rulers of the region. The Ikhshidids ruled for another 30 years, until the Fatimids finally conquered the Levant in 969.
Fatimid rule over the Levant was only secure for a century, however. In the mid-11th century, the Seljuks — a Muslim Turkic dynasty from modern-day Turkmenistan — conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria in quick succession. In 1073, the Seljuks took Jerusalem, touching off 25 years of war between the Seljuks and the Fatimids for control of the Holy Land.
It was the Seljuk conquest of Jerusalem that caught the eye and interest of the religious and temporal rulers of Europe, touching off a new era in the history of the Middle East.
Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mamluks (1099–1516 CE)
In 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support from western Christendom in his struggles against the Seljuks. Pope Urban II proclaimed a holy war to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims, and the First Crusade was launched in 1096. Despite numerous debacles at the outset — internal dissention, the decision of the “People’s Crusade” to murder 2,000 German Jews before embarking for the Holy Land, and a near outbreak of war between Catholic crusaders and Orthodox Byzantines, the crusaders ultimately made it to Jerusalem and achieved their goal, conquering Jerusalem in July 1099.
The Mediterranean coast was carved off from the Seljuk empire into a series of Crusader States, the most important of which was the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Per Wikipedia:
At first the kingdom was little more than a loose collection of towns and cities captured during the First Crusade, but at its height in the mid-12th century, the kingdom encompassed roughly the territory of modern-day Israel, Palestine and the southern parts of Lebanon[, and] … into modern Jordan and Syria in the east…. Three other Crusader states founded during and after the First Crusade were located further north: the County of Edessa (1097–1144), the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), and the County of Tripoli (1109–1289). While all three were independent, they were closely tied to Jerusalem.
The Twelfth Century in the Levant was marked by political intrigue and military conflict between the Fatimids in Egypt, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Zengid dynasty in Syria (the Turkish governors under the Seljuks).
Before the century was out, however, all three of these powers would have fallen—and all to the same man.
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known to westerners as Saladin, was a Sunni Kurd from northern Iraq, but through political machinations and military successes, in 1169 became the Fatimid vizier. In 1171, he deposed the last Fatimid Caliph, installing himself as Sultan of Egypt. He then turned back to Syria and conquered the Zengids before turning his sights on the Crusader states. He retook Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187. While the “Kingdom of Jerusalem” technically persisted as a small strip of land centered on the coastal fortress of Acre (in the very north of modern-day Israel) for another century, 1187 marked the effective end of Christian control over the Holy Land.
And still the wheel of empire turned. In the 1240s and 1250s, Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty was faced with a deadly one-two punch. Internal revolt by a military caste known as the Mamluks (who actually had support from European crusaders, as crusades make strange bedfellows) resulted in overthrow the Ayyubid sultan in Egypt. Not long thereafter, the bloody Mongol invasions of the 1250s laid waste to the Ayyubid possessions in modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Israel. The Mongols did not stay long in the Levant however, and the region was incorporated into the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate in 1260.
While the previous four centuries had seen Filastin ruled by Tulunids, Abbasids, Ikhshidids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, the late 13th century began a time of relative political quiet. Mamluk rule only came to an end 250 years later, with the advent of yet another great empire.
Ottoman Rule (1516–1918)
The Ottoman Turks began the 15th century as a minor power in the Balkans. By 1560 it had become the largest empire west of China.
In 1516, Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the Mamluks, bringing the Levant into the possession of the Ottoman Empire. The next four centuries brought renewed peace and prosperity to the region. The Ottomans rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and the walls and gates that outline the Old City of Jerusalem today were those that were built during the reign of Suleiman.
(As an architectural/archaeological aside, look below at a picture of the Kotel — the western wall of the Temple Mount and the holiest site to modern-day Jews. The giant, rectangular stones with the bezel pattern date to King Herod’s renovation of the Temple Mount, c. 10 BCE. The smaller, more square stones in the middle date from the Umayyad period in the eighth century CE, and the smaller stones on top were added under Suleiman in the mid-sixteenth century. This picture alone shows 1600 years of architectural history.)
The next 350 years were some of the most eventful in world history — as the world experienced the myriad changes associated with the beginning of the modern historical era. But in terms of the political history of the southern Levant, it was a period of relative stability.
One important feature of the late Ottoman period was, of course, the growth of Zionism as a movement in Europe, and the beginning of Jewish migration to Palestine. Throughout the Ottoman years, the Jewish population of Palestine probably hovered around 2% of the total population of the region, but that began increasing in the late 19th century, and accelerated in the 20th century. I won’t try to rehash the history of Zionism here, mostly because it is (obviously) complex, but also because it becomes intertwined with modern politics in a way that is beyond the scope of this historical essay.
I’ll leave you with this, to come full circle. The Ottomans allied with the Central Powers in World War I. As had happened so many times in history, a conquering army — this time the British — came out of the Sinai desert, conquering Palestine from the southwest. General Edmund Allenby launched his offensive in October 1917, capturing nearly the entire region by the end of 1917. The final battle of General Allenby’s campaign ended on September 25, 1918, and although the fighting itself was mostly 20 miles away from the ancient fortress, the battle came to earn a name that was both symbolic and poetic, given the previous four millennia of history: the Battle of Megiddo.
† Speaking of “Semitic”, what does that mean? In modern parlance, “Semite” is equivalent with “Jew,” but linguistically speaking, the Semitic languages are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, the dominant language family along the northern coast of Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, and Iraq. The Levant was home to a family of Northwest Semitic languages, including the Aramaic of modern-day Syria, the Phoenician languages of Lebanon, and various Canaanite languages (including Hebrew) in Canaan.
