The Name of Israel in History

We read the name Israel in the Torah, but we should also look for whether other peoples, other writers, mentioned this name in their writings.

The great writers we know, such as Hesiod or Homer, wrote epics and mythologies about the gods they created, based on human psychology. Every act, every feeling, every human character was worked into legends, tragedies or human stories. That is why the name of Israel is not found in the works they wrote. Apart from the texts of the Tanakh, we find the name Israel for the first time on a stele [a carved stone on which texts, announcements, treaties or memorials were written], 1200 years BCE. The Pharaoh Merneptah, in one of his inscriptions, speaks of the military campaign in which he defeated Israel and the other kingdoms and nations of the Levant.

Another, Moabite, stele, known as the Mesha Stele, bears an inscription of Mesha, King of Moab, in the ninth century BCE. The inscription mentions his victory over Omri:

'Omri was king of Israel and he oppressed Moab for many days, and his son also wanted to oppress Moab. But I, Mesha, was able to defeat Israel, which became a ruin.'

An Israeli tour guide, Avinoam Ben Dor, says that the first appearance of the name of Israel was probably that of the Hellenistic priest (in the time of Alexander the Great) who lived in Egypt at the time of the translation of the Torah. Manetho writes the story of the lepers and adds that the Israelites invaded Egypt because they were not allowed to live there. Thus this priest falsified history, saying that the Israelites stayed there until the Egyptians drove them out of their lands.

In the second century BCE an Egyptian writer, Lysimachus, wrote his own version of the lepers, saying that when the Jewish people were in the desert, Moses proposed to invade and conquer the land of Israel, driving out its inhabitants. The historian Lindsay Hall says that writers such as Josephus or Philo, who were Jews, used the name Israel, but the Greek writers of antiquity did not know what Israel was, although they knew Jews who lived in Sardis, Halicarnassus (today's Bodrum) or Smyrna (today's İzmir).

For this region they speak of the Hittites, but not of Israel. In the Tanakh Greece is called Yavan, a word that must have referred to Ionia. On the other hand Harriet Flashenburg, professor of history, says that Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians knew very well about the Israelites, and copied from them their way of learning and living. Priests of ancient Rome and rabbis studied together. Many Greeks and Romans adopted the way of life of the Jewish world.

The Jews were better educated than the others because they had had to leave their country. The Jewish people had to learn how to live in every society in order to survive. Now Israel is the home of all Jews.