Josh, Judges and Ruthie

Well, the interesting thing about the area that the Book of Judges claims the Israelites moved into, is that this area was the very sparsely settled hill country. In the Amarna letters only one settlement is mentioned in the hill country, that being Shechem.Even up through Rameses II's campaigns in Palestine and Syria, the hill country was virtually ignored.If we were being faithful to the biblical sequence of events, we could narrow the time frame down by about 100 years by taking Exodus 1.11 at face value, or at least by assigning it some historical value. If the Israelites did help to build the city of Rameses, then the earliest that could be would be 1304 BCE, the latest being 1279 BCE, but the generally agreed date for Rameses II ascension is 1290 BCE. So, the very earliest that the entry into Palestine could have occurred would be 1250 BCE, this is the very extreme as we don't know how far into the reign of Rameses the Exodus occurred, and we have no idea how long the Elders led Israel. We could be looking at a period for the Judges of less than 200 years, so the information in the Book of Judges will take a lot of sorting out, because, at face value, we are talking about a period well in excess of 200 years.Anyway, the area we are talking about in Judges is the sparsely settled central hill country of Palestine, where the Israelites would have probably had no involvement in political affairs until the campaign of Merneptah (c.1209 BCE), where, interestingly enough, Israel (if it is the same as the Bible’s ”Israel) is still referred to as a people rather than a land.The small system of city-staets continued after Amarna period, with probably Hazor being the strongest power.Brian.

Okay. I agree with your analysis of the situation in the South. The one area of posible conflict I see is that it's likely that the Israelites would likely have been seen as a peoples as opposed to a Nation throughout the period of Judges. There is little in Judges that indicates any organization beyond the clan or tribal level.The situation in the North also needs to be considered. The period we are looking at is close to the growth period of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom. During that period, say 1350-1200BCE the attention of all the powers in the North, the Hittites, the Babylonians are on Assyria. The area of Palestine is more or less ignored while the power structure in the north is stabilized. The area to the north remains in a state of flux until well into the period of discussion, with the only recorded incursion into the area of Palestine around 1120 when Phoenicia is brought under Assyrian rule under Tiglath-Pileser I.So I think it's reasonable to place Judges in the period from about 1250-1050 BCE.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion