Original subtitles

In the ancient world, rulers worshipped as gods sent out great armies

to create great empires.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

These emperors changed the course of history

by conquering country after country.

One tiny nation conquered again and again

was the Israelites.

Perhaps no people in history were more likely to be forgotten.

But these were not just any people.

These were the people of the Book.

The people of Abraham, the first to encounter the one true God.

Of Moses, the only human being to see God face to face.

And of David,

warrior, king and adulterer.

The Israelites' stories taught unique lessons about God.

And in the hands of great rabbis like Hillel...

and preachers like Jesus of Nazareth,

the Israelites' Bible would change how human beings understood

what was right and what was wrong

and how they should treat one another.

And against all odds,

the Israelites would change human history

as much as any empire that ever existed.

(DRAMATIC PERCUSSION)

In 589 BC, the people of Judah, the last of the Israelites,

rebelled against the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

(FRANTIC YELLlNG)

He responded by ordering his troops to lay waste to Jerusalem...

and destroy the Judeans most precious possession.

The Temple of Solomon.

Then, Nebuchadnezzar ordered that the King of Judah

should watch his sons be put to death

as a sign to all that his royal line had come to an end.

(SOLEMN MUSIC)

Afterward, the Babylonians led the people of Jerusalem into e xile in Babylon.

As they travelled the 600 miles from their tiny homeland to Babylon,

the Judeans future looked grim.

Only a few generations earlier,

the northern tribes of the Israelites had been taken into e xile

and vanished forever.

Now the Judeans too seemed destined to disappear,

with all memory they had e xisted as a people lost forever.

(BlRDSONG)

Their mood was captured in a poem from the Book of Psalms.

"By the rivers of Babyblon we sat and wept

"when we remembered Zion.

"On the poplars there we had hung up our harps,

"for our jailers asked us to sing them a song.

"But how can we sing a song of the Lord in a strange land? "

(BlRDSONG)

In spite of their despair and the incredible odds against them,

the Judeans decided to fight for their survival as a people.

(LAMB BLEATS)

They chose to fight not with spears and swords,

but by writing a book.

In every spare moment they could find,

the greatest of the Judean scribes began to rewrite and edit together

stories about their past, which had been handed down to them by their ancestors.

The book they compiled

was the first edition of the most influential work in human history...

the Hebrew Bible.

The Bible was the first... book.

And you can argue it's good history writing or bad history writing.

I think it's extraordinarily... remarkable history writing for humans' first time out.

But it is the first.

It's the first time humans set down a story like that through many generations.

And the fact that we did it so well the first time out

and that it impacted for so long is, uh...

it's a wonder.

The scribes were driven by what they saw as a sacred mission...

to bring the lessons taught by the stories alive for their fellow e xiles,

so they would understand why they were in Babylon

and how they could get home to Jerusalem.

Their book was a guide to how the Judean e xiles should live,

not a literal history.

MAN: Many sceptics today want to ask

are the stories in the Hebrew Bible true in any sense?

They are true in some senses and not in others.

In other words, the biblical writers want to expand upon events

to shed light upon their meaning, as they understood that meaning.

We moderns say "But wait a minute. We want to know what really happened. "

So for us, sceptical or not, the question is often

"Can stories which are not true in every detail

"nevertheless be morally edifying? "

My answer is yes.

The Bible does not have to be literally true in every detail

to be true in other senses.

The story said that the father of all Jews was Abraham.

Abraham was born in the city of Ur, in Mesopotamia.

According to the Jewish book of tradition and law, the Talmud,

the people of Abraham's land worshipped the sky

and each city venerated a different heavenly body.

Abraham's father made and sold idols to the people of the city of Ur.

But Abraham could not accept his father's ideas about religion.

MAN: There's a very famous legend that says that when Abraham was a young boy,

his father, Terah, owned a shop.

The shop was full of idols.

One day, he said to his son

"Watch the store for a while while I go out. "

And when he came back, he found that every idol in the store had been smashed,

except for the largest idol, that had a wooden staff in its hand.

The father said to Abraham "What went on? I left you in charge. What happened? "

Abraham said "Don't get mad at me.

"The largest god here destroyed all the others. "

His father said "What, are you nuts? They're wood and stone! "

And Abraham said "Aha! That's the point. They're just wood and stone. "

And that story comes to tell us that it was Abraham

who was the first one to discover the idea that there was one God in the universe.

That God created the heavens and the earth

and not the other way around.

(CAMEL SNORTS)

According to the stories,

once Abraham began to voice his belief

that the universe was ruled by a single God,

that God gave him a mission.

"And the Lord said to Abraham

'Leave your country, your kindred and your father's house

'for a country which I will show you.

'And I will make you a great nation.

'I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.

'And all clans on earth will bless themselves by you. '

The stories say God led Abraham to a land near Egypt, called Canaan.

(DARK MUSIC)

In Canaan, God tested Abraham,

and Abraham tried to learn about God.

In their most disturbing meeting,

God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son.

'Abraham, Abraham' God called.

'Take your son, your only son,

'your beloved Isaac,

'and offer him as a burnt offering

'on one of the mountains which I shall point out to you. '

"Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering

"and loaded it on Isaac. "

"When they arrived at the place,

"Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood.

"Then Abraham stretched out his hand

"and seized the knife to kill his son.

"But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven.

'Abraham, Abraham' he said,

'Do not raise your hand against the boy.

'For now I know you fear God.

'You have not refused your son, your only son.

'Take the ram which I have provided and sacrifice it instead. '

MAN: I regard this as a game of chicken.

At the last moment, when Abraham has the knife

poised and ready to make the sacrifice,

who blinked?

Well, God, or his angel, says "Okay.

"I'm satisfied. Don't do it. "

Would Abraham have done it?

Nobody says.

Maybe he was testing the deity

just as the story tells us the deity was testing Abraham.

(SOLEM N M USlC)

The stories say that because of Abraham's obedience,

God made him a promise.

'I swear by my own self

'because you have done this,

'because you have not refused me your son,

'I will shower blessings on you.

'I will make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven. '

(THUNDER RUMBLES)

Abraham is, I think, a... if you will, a mythic figure.

Whether he existed in history or not is almost incidental to what he represents,

which is the turning away from idolatry

and the notion that we become one people who worship one God.

In Jewish imagination,

Abraham is noted for his hospitality, for his welcoming of others,

and I think that is the corollary of his monotheism -

that we all are brothers and sisters

and therefore we are all welcome under the same tent.

(MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

The story of Abraham's relationship with God

would speak so powerfully to future generations

that Abraham would be embraced

as a founding figure of lslam and Christianity,

as well as Judaism.

(MEDlTATlVE MUSIC)

But for the scribes in exile in Babylon,

simply writing down stories about their ancestors was not enough.

Their great challenge was to make sense of their own world.

How had the people that God promised Abraham he would make a great nation

wound up on the verge of e xtinction in Babylon?

FRIEDMAN: One of the burdens of monotheism

is you got nobody to blame when you're in trouble.

In pagan religion, if another nation defeats you,

you can say their god was more powerful than your god.

But in monotheism,

if you're suffering, it must be that you did something wrong.

(UNSETTLING MUSIC)

The scribes' book was, above all, an explanation to their fellow exiles

of what the Israelites had done to lose God's favour.

(CROW CAWS)

The story began with the life of the man

to whom the scribes devoted more words than any other.

His name was Moses

and he was one of the most unlikely heroes ever portrayed.

According to the Bible,

Moses's ancestors had fled from Canaan to Egypt during a famine

and been enslaved there.

Then Moses had to flee Egypt

after killing an Egyptian who was abusing an lsraelite slave.

In the desert, he married a nomad woman

and was given the menial job of tending his father-in-law's sheep.

But God had a different job in mind for Moses.

(LOUD THUNDERCLAP)

"God appeared to him in a flame, blazing from the middle of a bush.

"Moses looked. There was the bush, blazing.

"But the bush was not being burnt up.

"Moses said 'I must go across and see this strange sight. '

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

"When God saw this, he called to Moses from the middle of the bush.

'I am Yahweh, the God of your ancestors,

'the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,

'the God of Jacob.

'I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt

'and I am sending you to Pharaoh

'for you to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. '

"Moses said to God

'Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? '

"God said 'I shall be with you. '

(DRAMATIC DRUM ROLL)

"Moses then said to God 'Please, my Lord, send someone else,

'for I have never been eloquent.

'I am slow and hesitant of speech. '

MAN: The sense that we get from the Bible is that Moses is overwhelmed,

humbled and frightened.

He's frightened because Moses recognises

that meeting God is not only an exhilarating experience,

but it makes demands on the human being that meets God.

And Moses knew, from that moment on, his life couldn't be the same.

And because he had just achieved a stable life,

you get from him both a sense of 'This is an enormous moment for me' -

as it would be for any human being-

and 'I wish I could run away from it. '

(MlDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

Reluctantly, Moses went to Egypt.

There, on God's orders, he inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians.

During the tenth plague, which gave rise to Passover,

Moses told the Israelites to put blood on their doorposts

so the Angel of Death would pass over

as it struck dead the firstborn son of every Egyptian family.

According to the stories,

after the tenth plague, Egypt's Pharaoh let the Israelites go.

Moses then led them out of Egypt

and into the Sinai Desert.

DEVER: In later traditions in the Hebrew Bible,

the Exodus story is the point of beginning.

That is where the great epic of Israel starts.

But is any of it true?

According to the stories in the Bible, for instance, there would have been

as many as 2 or 3 million Israelites wandering around in the wilderness.

A list of dozens of sites that they visited is given.

The fact of the matter is,

the desert could never have supported more than a few thousand nomads.

And of all the dozens of sites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible,

we can identify only one or two.

So most archaeologists have given up

trying to provide any archaeological background for the stories of the Exodus.

We don't have any evidence.

For the scribes, it was impossible to write an historically accurate account

of what had taken place as much as 700 years before their time.

What was possible was to communicate to their fellow e xiles

the eternal lessons that Moses' story taught.

WOLPE: Modern scholarship disputes many parts of the story of the Exodus.

But what is central about the story

is not that it is factual,

but that it is true.

In other words, the story of the Exodus is a story that embodies

some of the deepest and most profound truths of the human condition -

what it is to be in the wilderness, what it is to hope for a promised land,

what it is to escape slavery

and to be both bewildered and exhilarated by the prospect of freedom.

And this is a story that is a sacred story because it not only embodies truths

but it embodies truths that are animated by and inspired by God.

And so the story of the Exodus can actually be a story by which we lead our lives,

even if there weren't 600, 000 men that left Egypt.

Even if there were five, even if there were none.

T o the writers of the Bible, the most important truths of all

were found in the story of how God gave Moses the laws

that his people were to observe for all time.

The Bible says God gave those laws to Moses

in his only face-to-face meeting with a human being.

(MYSTlCAL MUSIC)

"The Lord descended on Mount Sinai,

"and called Moses to the top of the mountain,

"and Moses went up.

"Then God spoke all these words.

"He said 'I am Yahweh, your God,

'who brought you out of Egypt.

'You shall have no other gods to rival me.

'You shall not make carved images, or bow to them, or serve them.

'You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh.

'Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

'Honour your father and your mother.

'You shall not kill.

'You shall not commit adultery.

'You shall not steal.

'You shall not give false evidence.

'You shall not set your heart on any of your neighbour's possessions. '

"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai,

"the skin of his face was radiant

"because he had been talking to God. "

WOLPE: The revolution in the Ten Commandments

was that God cares not so much for how human beings treat God.

That was, after all, the pagan ideal-

you have to sacrifice to us the right way, you have to watch all your observances,

because the gods will treat you well if you treat them well.

But the Ten Commandments says

God cares how human beings treat each other.

It shifted the focus from 'You honour God by treating God well'

to 'You honour God by treating well the person standing in front of you. '

The Ten Commandments summarised

the essence of the Jewish message for all the ages.

To the scribes,

what happened at Sinai was key to understanding

why they were in trouble with God.

For the Ten Commandments were the heart of a binding covenant

between God and the Israelites.

FRIEDMAN: One of the great discoveries of scholarship of the last century

was that in the ancient Near East

there were all sorts of legal documents, treaty documents,

between nations and individuals.

And, in the Bible,

the covenant between God and Israel

follows the form of those ancient treaties.

It's in the legal terminology of the day.

It would be as if, if the covenant were given today, it would say something like

"Hereinafter in this covenant, God will be known as the party of the first part

"and Israel will be known as the party of the second part.

"Whereas the party of the first part brought the party of the second part

"out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage,

"therefore, you shall have no other gods" and so on.

The covenant is really in legal terminology.

It was understood to be a contract between God and Israel.

"God has done this, this and this for you. Now here's what you have to do. "

(MYSTlCAL MUSIC)

After Sinai, all the rest of the stories of the Israelites

would, at their core,

be about whether or not they had obeyed God's commandments.

It was a challenge they would face without Moses to guide them.

For, according to the stories,

after leading his people through the desert to the promised land of Canaan,

Moses himself was forbidden by God to enter.

(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)

"Moses went up Mount Nebo

"and Yahweh showed him the whole country.

'This is the land which I made an oath to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,

'saying "I shall give it to your descendants."

'I have allowed you to see it, but you shall not cross into it. '

"Then Moses, servant of Yahweh, died.

"Since then, there has never been such a prophet as Moses...

"the man who knew Yahweh face to face. "

WOLPE: Here is somebody who didn't want to be a prophet in the first place,

who was forced to it by God,

all with the aim of entering the promised land,

and now, at the very foot of the promised land,

is told "You cannot enter and you must die. "

And the pain of that moment,

and the sense that we have that Moses's life, for all its triumphs,

was ultimately a life of frustration,

is almost unbearable.

And the only thing that makes it possible for the reader to go on

is that the Bible ends by saying that Moses saw God face to face.

So, even though Moses didn't get to see the land,

which was the aim of his life,

he did get to see God,

which, the Bible tells us, is the aim of every life.

(UNSETTLlNG PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

(UNSETTLlNG PERCUSSlVE MUSIC)

The stories say that after Moses's death,

the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan.

God made the walls of Jericho fall before them

and they swept the Canaanites from the land

in a series of great military victories.

But according to historical evidence,

the Israelites did not invade Canaan at all

but were, in fact, Canaanites themselves.

(HAUNTlNG MUSIC)

DEVER: Why would archaeologists today argue that the earliest Israelites

are not newcomers to Canaan at all but indigenous peoples?

How do we know that?

We know it from such things as their pottery,

which is in the old Late Bronze Age Canaanite tradition.

There is nothing new in the pottery

of these 12th-century settlements that we call 'Israelite'.

They're making a style of pottery that local people had made for centuries.

We also know that the oldest passages of the Hebrew Bible

describing Israelite religion

make it look very much like Canaanite religion.

So the continuities between Canaanite culture of the Late Bronze Age

and so-called Israelite culture of the Iron one are very striking.

(SERENE M USlC)

The historical evidence suggests

that the Israelites were the underdogs of Canaanite society-

slaves, shepherds, nomads-

who started new lives together in the hill country of Canaan.

They became a people not by fighting battles,

but by telling stories.

MAN: One of the mysteries we face is how to explain how a people becomes a people.

How does ethnic and cultural identity come into being?

If early Israel was a motley group of shepherds, nomads, peasants, bandits,

how is it that they moved into this area and formed an identity that was so strong?

One of the things that we've learned in recent years

is that cultural identity is very much a cultural fiction.

This is how the Israelites made their identity,

in large part by telling these stories.

It is as much as if the story were shaping the people

as much as it is that the people are telling the story.

The stories told by the Israelites

were well suited to inspiring and guiding a new community,

for they contained an incredible richness of detail

about the lives and interactions of human beings.

After they became a people, the Israelites continued to tell stories

which explored the good and evil inside the human heart,

to teach lessons about God and his covenant with lsrael.

One of the greatest portraits ever of a human being,

in all his strengths and weaknesses,

was the story of King David.

MAN: David is a story of a human being that really throbs with realism.

It's not just a hero story.

It's a story of a highly dysfunctional family

and a very flawed man,

but a man who could not be ignored.

And that inspired some early literary genius,

perhaps the first literary genius in history,

to set this man's life down on paper or, if you will, on parchment.

(SHEEP BLEAT)

In the first story told about him,

David was only a peasant boy.

Until, one day, God spoke to the prophet Samuel.

'I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem,

'for I have found myself a king among his sons. '

Samuel journeyed to Jesse's home to search for the future king.

"Samuel looked at Jesse's eldest son

"but Yahweh said to Samuel

'Take no notice of his appearance or his height,

'for I have rejected him.

'I do not see as human beings see.

'They look at appearances,

'but I look at the heart. '

One by one, God told Samuel to reject seven of Jesse's sons.

"Samuel then asked Jesse 'Are these all the sons you have? '

"Jesse replied 'Only the youngest is left.

'He is looking after the flock. '

"God said 'Get up and anoint him. He is the one. '

The Israelites already had a king named Saul,

but he was a tormented man who had angered God.

(GENTLE HARP MUSIC)

Unaware of David's destiny,

Saul brought the young boy into his palace

to play the harp to soothe his spirits.

Soon, David was like a son to Saul.

Then, one day, word reached the palace

that the greatest warrior of the Philistines, Goliath,

had challenged the Israelites to send someone out to fight him,

one on one.

(OMlNOUS MUSIC)

No one dared to take up the challenge.

Except... for the king's young harpist.

(PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

"With his sling in his hand, David went to meet Goliath.

"The Philistine looked at David, and what he saw filled him with scorn

"because David was only a boy.

"The Philistine said to him

'Come over here and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air

'and the beasts of the field. '

"But David answered

'You come against me with sword and spear.

'But I come against you in the name of the Lord God. '

For the writers of the Bible,

the story of the underdog, David, killing Goliath

was about far more than just one battle.

MAN: Despite certain fantasies they entertained

of being a powerful people

and being more numerous than the stars in the heavens and so forth,

they knew that they were tiny people

and there were these vast empires to the south and to the east

that could, at any moment, overwhelm them.

So, again and again, they stress the idea

that there is something more important in the affairs of men

than physical power.

After David killed Goliath, his fame spread throughout lsrael.

King Saul's love turned to jealousy

and he tried to kill David again and again.

David fled Saul's court and became an outlaw.

Then, one night, from his hideout, David spotted Saul and his army.

(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)

To David's men, it was the perfect chance both to save David's life

and make him king.

"In the dark, David and one of his men made their way towards the enemy force

"and found Saul lying asleep inside the camp.

"The man then said to David

'Let me pin him to the ground with his own spear. '

"David replied 'Do not kill him.

'But let us take the spear beside his head, and his pitcher of water,

'and let us go away. '

When he reached a nearby hilltop,

David held up Saul's spear and called out to him.

ALTER: David comes out and makes a big speech to Saul

saying that he has no ill intention against Saul.

Then, all of a sudden, in one of those breathtaking pivots

that are so remarkable in biblical narrative,

Saul says "Is it your voice, my son David? "

And he cries.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

After King Saul died in battle with the Philistines,

the young shepherd boy's destiny was finally fulfilled.

David was crowned king.

But using his new power wisely

turned out to be David's greatest challenge.

And by far, the most important lessons taught by David's story

come from his failures.

KIRSCH: David is NOT a plaster saint.

He's not a perfect man.

He's a man governed by his passions and ambitions...

specifically, his passions for women.

So, parallel to his struggle for power,

the Bible allows us to see the intimate details of his private life,

his love affairs with many women,

the most famous of which is his love affair with Bathsheba.

(TANTALlSl NG M USlC)

One day, while standing on the roof of his palace,

David saw a young woman bathing on a nearby rooftop.

"David made enquiries about this woman

"and was told 'Why, that is Bathsheba. '

"David then sent messengers to fetch her.

"She came to him and he lay with her. "

When Bathsheba told him she was pregnant,

David arranged to have her husband killed in battle.

ALTER: He looks out the window of the palace

and sees this beautiful woman bathing on the roof of a house below him.

And that's where he gets into trouble.

But the trouble is not just sex.

The trouble is his bumbling attempts to cover up the adultery

and when he can't do that, to get rid of the husband by murder.

Once he's done that, everything starts to fall apart in his life.

After David married Bathsheba, God sent a prophet to confront him.

And David confessed to his sin.

WOLPE: In the ancient world, the king is the law.

And the key moment of this story of David and Bathsheba

is when David stands there and says

"Yes, I sinned and will be punished. "

Because it is at that moment that we realise

that Israel's revolution has won,

that, in fact, David recognises that God is above all human beings

and that no human being-not a king, not a warrior, not even a prophet-

can be above the law.

(MELANCHOLY PERCUSSlVE MUSIC)

In punishment for his sin,

God cursed David and his descendants.

"For this, your household shall never be free of the sword.

"You have worked in secret, but I shall work for all Israel to see. "

In his later years, David would be betrayed by his favourite son

and grow to be a frail and lonely old man.

For the writers of the Bible,

David's breaking of the commandments and God's curse upon his house

helped to e xplain the disasters lsrael would suffer

in the years after David.

The Bible says, and the archaeological record confirms,

that in 720 BC,

the Assyrians conquered the northern ten tribes of the Israelites

and deported them to the far-flung reaches of their empire.

Before long, they assimilated with their new neighbours

and most of the Israelites were lost forever from the pages of history.

Soon after, the Assyrians began to threaten

the last remaining tribe of the Israelites... Judah.

The account of what happened is one of the most important in the Bible,

for hidden within it is the surprising story

of how monotheism actually took root in Judah.

In 640 BC, the land of Judah was ruled by King Josiah.

Josiah was desperately afraid that his people were unprepared

to face the threat, not just from Assyria,

but from Egypt and Babylon.

Most Judeans were still rural people

who cared nothing about Jerusalem and its king.

They also knew little about lsrael's covenant with the one God.

In fact, many Judeans appear to have worshipped a goddess named Asherah,

who they believed was the God of lsrael's wife.

DEVER: FROM a superficial reading of the Hebrew Bible,

you would suppose that all the early Israelites were monotheist.

Most archaeologists and most biblical scholars now believe, however,

that monotheism developed very late and perhaps did not emerge full-blown

until after the fall of Jerusalem in the early 6th century.

So, most of the early Israelites were polytheist.

They worshipped a new god, Yahweh, perhaps,

but alongside them they worshipped El,

the old male deity of the Canaanite pantheon.

And, above all, they worshipped Asherah, the mother goddess. We now know that.

This is very disturbing to many people, but God had a lady friend.

But King Josiah and his allies among the temple priests in Jerusalem

decided to rally the nation around the belief in one all-powerful God.

And so, in 622 BC,

they claimed that, deep within the Temple,

they had found an unknown book written by Moses

called Deuteronomy.

(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC)

MAN: While they were cleaning out the Temple,

suddenly someone comes running out to the high priest.

"Look! We found a book in the Temple. "

Now, from the language of... in which this book is quoted,

we know that we are dealing with the Book of Deuteronomy.

Contemporary scholars believe

that the Book of Deuteronomy was actually written around that time

and placed in the Temple to be discovered in order to motivate the reform.

The Book of Deuteronomy banned the worship of Asherah

and other pagan gods.

Even more importantly,

it said that Yahweh himself could only be worshipped

at the Temple in Jerusalem.

And so, according to the Bible,

Josiah sent his troops to the mountaintops

where Israelites had been making sacrifices for centuries.

"Josiah destroyed all the shrines on the high places

"which the kings of Israel had built to provoke Yahweh's anger.

"All the priests of the high places who were there,

"he slaughtered on the altars...

"and on those altars burned the human bones. "

FRIEDMAN: It was one of the major religious revolutions of ancient Israel

because now you couldn't just go any place you wanted to sacrifice the animal.

You could only do it at one place.

This was the beginning of monotheism in Israel.

The archaeological record and the biblical record itself

attest to the fact that monotheism didn't catch on overnight.

People didn't just run out saying "Oh, I see! There's only one God.

"I'll just get rid of all these statues I have in the house

"that belonged to my great-grandfather and everyone before him

"and I'll stop worshipping all these gods that I've always worshipped. "

It was an extraordinary new thought for people.

Deuteronomy was an incredible achievement.

It brought monotheism to life for Judeans by retelling the story of Moses,

focusing above all on his teachings about how human beings should treat one another.

The first to be inspired by the new book

was one of the great social prophets, Jeremiah,

who told the people of Judah

of the promise God made to them in Deuteronomy.

"If you truly treat one another fairly...

"if you do not steal from the stranger, the orphan or the widow...

"if you do not shed innocent blood...

"and if you do not follow other gods...

"then I shall let you stay in this place,

"in the country I gave forever to your ancestors of old. "

VISOTZKY:. The demand is that we care for one another, and love one another.

And in so doing, the prophets tell us, that is how you find God.

The social prophets are ferocious in their insistence

that if you have wealth, it must be shared.

You can't just simply, as Amos says,

Iie on your couches of ivory and drink wine.

If you're not feeding the poor,

it doesn't make a difference whether you go to church or synagogue, you're failing God.

With the nation now governed by the laws of Deuteronomy,

King Josiah believed he would have God on his side

in his battle to save Judah.

(MEN CONVERSE EXClTEDLY)

He decided to launch a surprise attack on the Egyptian-Assyrian alliance

that he judged to be the greatest danger to his people.

In 609 BC, Josiah and his men ambushed an Egyptian army.

But in the battle that followed, the Judeans were routed...

and King Josiah was killed.

(FLUTE PLAYS WlSTFULLY)

After Josiah's death,

the kings that followed him re-established the worship of Asherah

and all of the other gods.

In response to their abandonment of monotheism,

the prophet Jeremiah told the people of Judah

that he had received an ominous message from God.

"The word of Yahweh came to me.

'Make your way down to the potter's house. '

"So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was, working at the wheel.

"But the vessel he was making came out wrong,

"as may happen with clay when a potter is at work.

"So he began over again.

"Then the word of Yahweh came to me.

'House of Israel, can I not do to you what this potter does?

'Listen. I am preparing a disaster for you. '

According to Jeremiah,

God was so angry, he decided to send the Judeans into e xile

and start over.

(FIERCE, PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

"Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babyblon, advanced on Jerusalem...

"and carried off all the treasures of the temple of Yahweh

"and all the treasures of the palace.

"Then he carried Jerusalem off into exile. "

(MOURNFUL MUSIC)

With the Babylonians' conquest of Judah,

the scribes had come to the end of their story

of how the chosen people were sent into e xile.

Yet, even with this new Bible in their possession,

the Judeans seemed destined to disappear,

Iike all the other tiny nations uprooted from their homelands.

For in a world where empires swept away all who stood in their path,

how could a book of stories save a people from extinction?

But in Babylon, something remarkable happened.

As the Judean exiles read and studied the Bible,

their vision of who they were was transformed.

FRIEDMAN: These would be great stories even if they were just stories of the past.

But for the people of Israel, these stories were THEIR story.

So when you learned the story of Israelites becoming free of slavery in Egypt

and experiencing extraordinary things on the way out,

you didn't just read that as a great story to tell the kids.

It was your own belief

in the power, the importance of liberation, of becoming free.

So it's not just history, it's not just memory.

It's a life. It's part of you.

The exiles also came to a new understanding

of why they were in Babylon,

from reading the Bible.

ZEVIT:. It contains a record of the covenant

between the people of Israel and their God.

But it also lists the penalties for violating the covenant

and among the penalties that are listed is exile.

Here, you have a historical book that tells a religious story.

It's not a real historical book, it's a... vehicle expressing a religious philosophy,

but the religious philosophy is 'God is fair'

and if you are punished, there's a reason for it.

The stories also contained another message.

For those who accepted their guilt and changed their ways,

there was hope.

"If you return to your God,

"if, with all your heart and all your soul, you obey his voice,

"then he will bring back your captives.

"Should you have been banished to the very sky's end,

"your God will gather you again even from there. "

ZEVIT:. For the short term, it was obvious what they had to do.

They had to look at the covenant

and they had to start living by the covenant in exile.

And what you actually see in the Babyblonian exile

is the transformation of Israelite religion

into something new that we can call the earliest form of Judaism.

In Babylon, the Judeans embraced the belief in one all-powerful God

as never before.

And soon, in one of the most remarkable twists in history,

their conviction that their God would allow a faithful people to return home

was going to come true.