Judea
Judea or Judaea is a mountainous region of the Levant. Traditionally dominated by the city of Jerusalem, it is now part of Israel and the West Bank. The name's usage is historic, having been used in antiquity and still into the present day; it originates from Yehudah, the Hebrew name of the tribe, called Juda in English. Yehudah was a son of Jacob, later known as 'Israel,' whose sons collectively headed the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Yehudah's progeny among the Israelites formed the Tribe of Judah, with whom the Kingdom of Judah is associated. Related nomenclature continued to be used under the rule of the Babylonians, the Persians, during the Hellenistic period, and under the Romans. Under the Hasmoneans, the Herodians, and the Romans, the term was applied to an area larger than the Judea of earlier periods. In the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina.
The term Judea was used by English speakers for the hilly internal part of Mandatory Palestine. Judea roughly corresponds to the southern part of the West Bank, a territory Israel has occupied since 1967 and administered as the "Judea and Samaria Area". Usage of the term "Judea and Samaria" is associated with the right wing in Israeli politics.
Etymology
The name Judea is a Greek and Roman adaptation of the Hebrew name Yehudah, which originally encompassed the territory of the Israelite tribe of that name and later of the ancient Kingdom of Judah. Nimrud Tablet K.3751, dated 733 BCE, is the earliest known extra-biblical record of the name Judah.Judea was sometimes used as the name for the entire region, including parts beyond the river Jordan. In 200 CE Sextus Julius Africanus, cited by Eusebius, described "Nazara" as a village in Judea. The King James Version of the Bible refers to the region as "Jewry". 'Judean' was not exclusively used as ethnic identifier; Ptolemy of Ascalon, for example, quoted in a work by Ammonius of Alexandria, distinguishes between Judeans originating within the land of Judea, "and forcefully circumcised Idumeans who could likewise be designated 'Judeans.'"
'Judea' was a name used by English speakers for the hilly internal part of Mandatory Palestine until the Jordanian rule of the area in 1948. For example, the borders of the two states to be established according to the UN's 1947 partition scheme were officially described using the terms 'Judea' and 'Samaria' and in its reports to the League of Nations Mandatory Committee, as in 1937, the geographical terms employed were 'Samaria and Judea.' Jordan called the area aḍ-ḍiffa al-gharbiya. 'Yehuda' is the Hebrew term used for the area in modern Israel since the region was captured and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. According to Britannica, referring to this region as 'Judea and Samaria' has been associated with the right wing in Israeli politics, which does not support a two state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The term 'West Bank' is what appears on international treaties such as the Oslo Accords established between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government. The names "West Bank" or, alternatively, "the Territories" are also current in Israeli usage. Generally, preference for one term over the other indicates the speaker's position on the Israeli political spectrum.
Historical boundaries
Roman-era definition
The first century Roman-Jewish historian Josephus wrote :In the limits of Samaria and Judea lies the village Anuath, which is also named Borceos. This is the northern boundary of Judea. The southern parts of Judea, if they be measured lengthways, are bounded by a village adjoining to the confines of Arabia; the Jews that dwell there call it Jordan. However, its breadth is extended from the river Jordan to Joppa. The city Jerusalem is situated in the very middle; on which account some have, with sagacity enough, called that city the Navel of the country. Nor indeed is Judea destitute of such delights as come from the sea, since its maritime places extend as far as Ptolemais: it was parted into eleven portions, of which the royal city Jerusalem was the supreme, and presided over all the neighboring country, as the head does over the body. As to the other cities that were inferior to it, they presided over their several toparchies; Gophna was the second of those cities, and next to that Acrabatta, after them Thamna, and Lydda, and Emmaus, and Pella, and Idumea, and Engaddi, and Herodium, and Jericho; and after them came Jamnia and Joppa, as presiding over the neighboring people; and besides these there was the region of Gamala, and Gaulonitis, and Batanea, and Trachonitis, which are also parts of the kingdom of Agrippa. This country begins at Mount Libanus, and the fountains of Jordan, and reaches breadthways to Lake Tiberias; and in length is extended from a village called Arpha, as far as Julias. Its inhabitants are a mixture of Jews and Syrians. And thus have I, with all possible brevity, described the country of Judea, and those that lie round about it.
Elsewhere, Josephus wrote that "Arabia is a country that borders on Judea."
The first century Roman historian Tacitus defined Judaea as bordered by Arabia to the east, Egypt to the south, Phoenicia and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and Syria to the north. His conception, presented in Histories 5.6, mirrors a conventional understanding of Judaea as the territory where Jews predominated from the Hasmonaean era onward, standing apart from the provincial borders of the province of Judaea in his own period.
Geography
Judea is a mountainous region, part of which is considered a desert. It varies greatly in height, rising to an altitude of in the south at the Hebron Hills, southwest of Jerusalem, and descending to as much as below sea level in the east of the region. It also varies in rainfall, starting with about in the western hills, rising to around western Jerusalem, falling back to in eastern Jerusalem and dropping to around in the eastern parts, due to a rain shadow: this is the Judaean Desert. The climate, accordingly, moves between Mediterranean in the west and desert climate in the east, with a strip of semi-arid climate in the middle. Major urban areas in the region include Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Gush Etzion, Jericho and Hebron.Geographers divide Judea into several regions: the Hebron hills, the Jerusalem saddle, the Bethel hills and the Judaean Desert east of Jerusalem, which descends in a series of steps to the Dead Sea. The hills are distinct for their anticline structure. In ancient times the hills were forested, and the Bible records agriculture and sheep farming being practiced in the area. Animals are still grazed today, with shepherds moving them between the low ground to the hilltops as summer approaches, while the slopes are still layered with centuries-old stone terracing. The Jewish Revolt against the Romans ended in the devastation of vast areas of the Judean countryside.
Mount Hazor marks the geographical boundary between Samaria to its north and Judea to its south.
History
Biblical Era
According to the biblical story of the Patriarchs, Abraham came to the Land of Canaan as commanded by God and moved around in the hill country and the Negev. The country is described as populated by Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites and other population groups. This pattern continued with his son Isaac, his son Jacob and his 12 sons and daughter, Dina and their families. The Patriarchs Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca and Jacob were buried at Hebron in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. according to Genesis and Exodus.After the Conquest of Joshua the Israelite tribes conquered and lived in most of the land west of the river Jordan and in the northern part east of that river for close to 400 years.
The biblical account in the Books of Kings describes how King Saul and later King David and his son Solomon succeeded in fighting the last remnants of non-Israelite populations and unified the tribes into one united monarchy. According to our understanding of the text as well as recent archeological findings, this was to a large degree possible through the Israelite adaption of Iron Age technologies. Scholarship has been divided as to the historical veracity of the existence and extension of a kingdom that unified Judea and Samaria, but archeological excavations of the last 30 years have time and again found solid evidence that confirms the bibilcal descriptions.
Regardless, the Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 720 BCE and parts of the population of the 10 northern tribes exiled. The northern Kingdom of Judah remained nominally independent, but paid tribute to the Assyrian Empire from 715 and throughout the first half of the 7th century BCE, regaining its independence as the Assyrian Empire declined after 640 BCE, but after 609 again fell under the sway of imperial rule, this time paying tribute at first to the Egyptians and after 601 BCE to the Neo-Babylonian Empire, until 586 BCE, when it was finally conquered by Babylonia, the temple in Jerusalem destroyed and many of the inhabitants of Judea exiled to Babylonia.
Persian and Hellenistic periods
The Babylonian Empire fell to the conquests of Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE. Judea remained under Persian rule until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, eventually falling under the rule of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire until the revolt of Judas Maccabeus resulted in the Hasmonean dynasty of kings who ruled in Judea for over a century.Early Roman period
Judea lost its independence to the Romans in the 1st century BCE, becoming first a tributary kingdom, then a province, of the Roman Empire. The Romans had allied themselves to the Maccabees and interfered in 63 BCE, at the end of the Third Mithridatic War, when the proconsul Pompey stayed behind to make the area secure for Rome, including his siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. Queen Salome Alexandra had recently died, and a civil war broke out between her sons, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. Pompeius restored Hyrcanus, but political rule soon passed to the Herodian dynasty, who ruled as client kings.In 6 CE, Judea came under direct Roman rule as the southern part of the province of Judaea, although Jews living there still maintained some form of independence and could judge offenders by their own laws, including capital offences, until c. 28 CE. The Hashmonean kingdom, after Pompey's conquest, was divided in 57 BCE by Gabinius, the governor of Syria, into five administrative districts, as mentioned by Josephus, later on the region of historical Judaea proper being further divided; the exact number of Judaean districts and their location is disputed, Schürer amending the ancient authors' list as follows: Jerusalem in the centre, later becoming the district of Orine ; Gophna, Akrabatta north of it; Thamna and Lydda to the northwest; Emmaus to the west; Bethleptepha to the southwest; Idumaea to the south; Engaddi and Herodeion to the southeast; and Jericho to the east. Schürer dismisses Pliny's listing of "Jopica" and Josephus' of Pella, as these were, in his opinion, independent cities not included in Judaea proper.
Other regions outside Judaea proper, which had belonged to the Hasmonean and Herodian kingdoms and came under Roman dominance and then direct rule, remained or became also split into districts with regional capitals, these being Galilee, and Perea in Transjordan ; however, a district administered from a certain Gadara is also mentioned, which can be in three different locations - either in Perea.