The Old Testament: Canon, History, and Literature

PREFACE

This book is intended to help students and other readers encounter the Old Testament as a canon of books understood against their historical background and as literary works. After a coverage of introductory matters (part 1), books are discussed in the canonical order of the Hebrew Bible (parts 2–5), followed by the deuterocanonical books of Christian canonical tradition (part 6). Historical considerations lead to two exceptions to the canonical sequence of organization. The Minor Prophets (that is, the book of the Twelve) are treated in approximate chronological order, and Daniel is discussed as the last component of the Writings section. Books are described against the background of the history that prompted their composition. Literary issues such as structure, theme, and narrative shape receive attention when this is helpful for achieving a fuller understanding.

This organizational scheme has advantages for both student and teacher. For example, experience shows that it is difficult to motivate students actually to read the Old Testament itself, rather than limiting themselves to the textbook. Linking textbook chapters directly to biblical books is intended to facilitate this practice. Moreover, academic study of the Bible at the university or theology-school level usually focuses more directly on the literature itself rather than on the details of ancient history. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is usually explored in the context of world literature, religion, or theology. A book-by-book approach that recognizes the importance of canon is appropriate for pursuing these topics. Finally, this approach recognizes and respects the reality that different configurations of this literature continue to function as canonical scripture for Judaism and the three major divisions of Christianity.

All dates cited are BCE (Before the Common Era) unless otherwise noted. Scripture is quoted from the Common English Bible (CEB) except as indicated. Chapter and verse designations follow those of the English Bible. References to ancient texts are abbreviated as:

ANET

Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Ed. James B. Pritchard. 3rd ed. Princeton University Press, 1969.

COS

Context of Scripture. Ed. W. W. Hallo and K. L. Younger. 3 vols. Brill, 1997–2002.

Part I

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Chapter 1

OLD TESTAMENT AND HEBREW BIBLE AS SCRIPTURE

Why Learn about the Old Testament?

The Old Testament is part of humanity’s cultural heritage. Even people who have never read parts of it will be able to recognize a huge wooden boat with paired animal heads poking out of its windows as Noah’s Ark, or a bearded man holding two stone slabs as Moses. Eve and Adam appear regularly in cartoons. The Old Testament may be appreciated as an example of ancient literary art with a religious theme like the Iliad or Bhagavad-Gita. Western art and music history would be unintelligible without familiarity with the stories and themes of the Old Testament. Popular language is peppered with allusions to the Old Testament: forbidden fruit (Gen 3:3), the skin of my teeth (Job 19:20), writing on the wall (Dan 5:5).

As part of the world’s literary or cultural canon, the Old Testament provides insights about the human condition. It explores topics such as political leadership, gender relationships, power disparities, personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as social and political ethics. As a source for the academic study of religion, the Old Testament provides insight into one example of religion over a thousand-year period as it was believed and practiced by one people. Many today, both inside and outside organized faith communities, find comfort in Psalms, challenge and hope in the Prophets, and ethical guidance in the Ten Commandments. As revered scripture, the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible has been a significant factor in shaping Judaism and Christianity, and its stories and characters have strong connections to Islam as well.

Scripture and Canon

The faith communities of Judaism and Christianity recognize similar collections of religiously themed writings as authoritative. Christians designate the first section of their Bible as the Old Testament. Jewish scripture is often called the Hebrew Bible, among other names. Although today bound as a single volume, Bibles (from biblia, meaning books in Greek) are made up of what were originally individual documents written on separate scrolls. Thus the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible are really anthologies, collecting together various sorts of ancient literary compositions from different historical periods. These individual works were produced over the course of almost a thousand years by a people who knew themselves first as Israel and later as Jews.

The earliest biblical materials appear to be from the tenth century BCE. These are the legal document called the Covenant Code in Exodus 20:22–23:19 and the poetic Song of Deborah that makes up Judges 5. The latest book in the Hebrew Bible is Daniel (composed in 164), and certain books in the Old Testament of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches were composed somewhat later.

A recognized list of revered and authoritative religious books is called a canon. Canon derives from the Greek word meaning reed used for measuring and thus standard or norm. A scriptural canon is brought together over time by the needs and practices of a faith community. In the case of the Jewish people, a variety of literary works proved to be especially meaningful and useful to the community over the centuries. Books inherited from past generations were understood to speak words of challenge, comfort, and identity to Jews confronted by new situations and dangers. Those highly valued scrolls were reread, recopied, and sometimes expanded. Other, less popular works were not recopied so often, and many of these simply vanished. Books seen as most beneficial were increasingly drawn on as authoritative sources for teaching, ethics, self-identity, and worship life. Eventually and by degrees, these cherished books evolved into the canon of Judaism.

Christianity, at first a dissident movement within Judaism, used the evolving Jewish canon as scripture. Christians discovered material in those books that supported and gave expression to their belief that Jesus was the promised messiah and that the end of the present age was about to occur. However, because opinions and practices about certain books were still in flux among different groups of Jews in different parts of the world, the canons of Judaism and Christianity developed in different directions after the two religions diverged.

Table 1. Diverging Canons

The Jewish Canon of the Hebrew Bible

The biblical canon of Judaism consists of twenty-four books divided into three groups. These books are written in Hebrew, with parts of Daniel and Ezra composed in the related language of Aramaic. The Torah (Law or Teaching), consisting of five books, is assigned the highest level of sanctity. Authorship of these books was traditionally attributed to Moses. The Nebiim (Prophets) section incorporates four books recounting history (designated as Former Prophets) and four books conveying the words and actions of prophets (the Latter Prophets). In the Former Prophets section, Samuel and Kings are treated as single books. The Latter Prophets consist of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the book of the Twelve, which is made up of twelve shorter compositions grouped together. The eleven books of the final Kethuvim (Writings) subdivision are more diverse in content, incorporating poetry, wisdom, stories, and history. Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles are each reckoned as single books. The acronym Tanak, utilizing the first consonants of the three canonical divisions (Torah, Nebiim, Kethuvim), is a common designation for the canon of the Jewish Bible.

The historical path that led to these particular books being considered, first as respected and useful, and eventually as the only books in a closed and fixed canon, is obscure. The evidence is fragmentary and ambiguous. Pointers to this ongoing process do appear in the Hebrew Bible, however. Second Kings 23:1-3 reports that King Josiah of Judah had a newly rediscovered covenant scroll (or Instruction scroll according to 22:8, 11) read publicly, and then he proceeded to reform national religious life in accordance with it. The nature of his reforms indicate that this scroll was an early form of the book of Deuteronomy. According to Ezra 7:25-26, the priest Ezra was commissioned by the Persian imperial government to promulgate and enforce the laws of your God. Nehemiah 8:1-3 then recounts that Ezra read out the Book of the Law of Moses (or Instruction scroll from Moses, CEB) to the assembled nation. This document was almost certainly related in some way to portions of the present Torah section of the Jewish canon.

The division of the Hebrew Bible into three categories is historically significant. Because the Writings section is a relatively diverse collection of books mostly composed at a comparatively late date, scholars generally agree that the Torah and Prophets were together recognized as authoritative (or canonical) before the Writings. This conclusion is borne out by references to scripture in later texts. The book of Sirach (composed about 180) praises a catalogue of biblical heroes in chapters 44–49 that corresponds to the content and order of the Torah and Prophets, but does not mention any luminaries in the Writings section except for Nehemiah. The prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach (about 132) refers to the Law, the Prophets, and the other ancestral scrolls (vv. 8-10, similarly vv. 1-2 and 24-25). In Luke 24:44 (about 80–90 CE), Jesus expounds on the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

The general outline of the Hebrew Bible canonization process may be expressed as follows. Two clusters of books that would come to be known as Torah and Prophets came together in the consciousness of the community as particularly authoritative. This development took place for the two collections in a parallel fashion, but perhaps the process finished first for the Torah. The connected narrative of Genesis through Numbers and then Deuteronomy constituted the Torah. At the conclusion of the Torah section, the appointment of Joshua by Moses in Deuteronomy linked directly forward to the continuous account of the books Joshua through Kings, and to this were added other books featuring prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve). This Prophets collection was considered to be closed at some point, possibly as early as 350. Because of this, other valued materials such as Psalms could not be slotted into the Torah and Prophets collection and were labeled Writings. It is significant that the order of the books in the Writings section was never completely finalized in Jewish tradition. Several different sequences are represented in manuscripts and later printed versions.

Fig. 1. Aleppo Codex. This tenth-century CE Hebrew manuscript is the earliest example of the contribution of the Masoretes to the preservation of the text of the Hebrew Bible.

The canonical situation remained fluid up to the last part of the first century CE, in part because Judaism remained a diverse religion encompassing competing factions and movements. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls produced or used by a dissident community at Qumran included copies of every book of the final form of the Jewish canon except Esther. However, that group also produced and collected a library of other works that supported their own particular interests and practices. Moreover, neither the content nor the order of the book of Psalms was stabilized in the Qumran community. In a similar way, quotations and allusions in the New Testament show that early Christianity, as a movement within Judaism, valued all the books of the Jewish canon that would later be fixed, but also several others.

It is impossible to fix a sharp date for closing the Jewish canon as an authoritatively fixed and settled list. The final delineation of the canon was triggered by two crises. First, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE required a recentering of Jewish religious life into other directions. Second, the expanding Christian movement challenged Jewish faith and identity. As a result, the wide variety of factions and trajectories within Judaism were replaced by the dominant Pharisee movement, which represented the future of Judaism. Rabbinic literature shows that by the second century CE, the extent and shape of the normative Jewish canon was fixed, and that for all practical purposes this process was completed by the end of the first century CE.

The Christian Canon of the Old Testament

The development of the Christian Old Testament canon diverged from that of Judaism after the two faith communities separated. This process began in the first century CE. Quotations and allusions in the New Testament show that the Christian movement adopted both the Jewish concept of authoritative scripture and the books of the evolving Jewish canon. Passages from those books were treated as sources for the proclamation of the Christian message and the understanding that Jesus was the promised messiah. Individual scriptural quotations were gathered into documents called Testimonia in order to provide background for events in the Jesus story, keys to an explanation of his mission, and apocalyptic teachings about the impending end of the world. The books most often quoted explicitly by the New Testament are Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, the twelve prophets, and Psalms.

Most Christians, however, utilized those books in Greek translation. Beginning around 250 BCE, Jews in Egypt had begun a process of translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek in order to meet the needs of Jewish communities in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. This translation process began with the five books of the Torah and then extended to other books. This compendium of translations was eventually called the Septuagint (related to the Latin word for seventy) because of a legend that it had been produced simultaneously by seventy translators. The Septuagint is commonly designated by the Roman numeral LXX.

Fig. 2. Codex Sinaiticus. Produced in the fourth century CE, this is one of the most significant manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint.

The practice of treating scrolls accessible in Greek as scripture, combined with the circumstance that the concept of a fixed and closed canon had not yet completely taken hold in the first century CE, led Christians to value a wider roster of books than the twenty-four that eventually constituted the canon of Judaism. As a result, as the Christian Old Testament became fixed, most Christians ended up treating Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch as canonical scripture. Although several of these books had originally been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, their Greek translations were part of the Septuagint translation stream embraced by the Christian movement. To complicate matters further, the Greek versions of Esther and Daniel contained more material that the original Hebrew versions of those books.

Moreover, the order of books in the Christian canon is based on a different principle that that of the Jewish canon. Instead of a three-part division of Law, Prophets, and Writings, the Christian sequence follows the first five books (Pentateuch, Greek for five volumes) with books recounting history in chronological order. Judges is followed by Ruth. This historical sequence includes Tobit and Judith and ends with 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees. Books of a poetical and wisdom nature follow, with Job coming first, including Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach. The Christian canon sequence ends with the prophets, to which category Daniel is added. Works treated as single books in the Jewish canon are divided in the Christian canon: 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings (actually 1–4 Reigns in the Septuagint), 1 and 2 Chronicles, and Ezra and Nehemiah. The twelve Minor Prophets appear as twelve individual books.

Thus, the Christian canon puts the prophets at end of the sequence and treats the apocalyptic book of Daniel as a prophetic book. This format may reflect early Christianity’s strong interest in final judgment and the end of the world. The Christian Old Testament concludes with Malachi’s promise of a future return of Elijah as messenger (Mal 3:1; 4:5), a theme that is picked up in the New Testament Gospels (for example, Matt 11:10). Most versions of the Hebrew Bible conclude instead with a reference to a return to Jerusalem (2 Chr 36:23). Consequently, the conclusion of the Hebrew Bible points to Jerusalem; the end of the Christian Old Testament points to the story of Jesus.

Christianity gradually abandoned the earlier scroll form for biblical books and produced its Bible in the codex format. This process culminated in the production of large codex Bibles in the fourth century CE. A codex consists of pages written on both sides and stitched together into a volume like a modern book. A codex was easier to consult than a scroll and could hold more text since each page had two sides for writing. The codex format meant that the notion of canon as an abstract list of separate works received a unitary physical form. Individual scrolls kept together in a basket or on a shelf were replaced by a single bound volume: the Bible. Judaism adopted the codex form for some manuscripts in the early eighth century CE.

Differences between the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament consulted by Christians and the original Hebrew text used by Judaism became a source of controversy between the two rival faith communities. As the Christian church became culturally and politically dominant, it often used Septuagint renderings as a polemical weapon against Jews. In part as a reaction to a long and tragic history of persecution and misunderstanding, today some people object to calling the first part of the Christian canon the Old Testament in comparison with the New Testament. They argue that old implies a supersession of the Jewish scriptures as obsolete and inferior and their replacement by something new and better. They suggest replacement terms such as First Testament and Second Testament instead. In contrast, others point out that old does not necessarily imply any criticism and can refer merely to a difference in chronology. Certainly the New Testament itself values the Old Testament highly and treats it as scripture. In any case, the term Old Testament with reference to canon first appears in Christian writing at the end of the second century CE.

Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Canons

Developments in Christian history led to further complications. Western Christianity (centered at Rome) and Eastern Christianity developed various differences in theology and practice. The resulting alienation of the Latin Catholic West from the Greek Orthodox East led to slight differences in their respective canons. Orthodox churches recognize a few more books as canonical than Catholic Christianity does. While the Eastern Church continued to use the Greek Septuagint as its Old Testament (along with translations based on it), Christians in the West began to utilize scripture in a Latin translation known as the Vulgate. This translation was made from the original Hebrew by Jerome at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century CE.

Following the view of some earlier church leaders, Jerome advanced the opinion that books not found in the Hebrew Bible should not be considered canonical. He used the term apocrypha (hidden) for these books. Although Jerome’s position was not adopted, a minority of Catholic theological thinkers continued to share his view. However, in the sixteenth century the emerging Protestant movement marginalized those books not found in the Hebrew Bible, sometimes explicitly denied their canonicity, and printed them as an isolated separate section in their Bibles as Apocrypha. For the books they retained as canon, Protestants continued to use the traditional sequence found in the Septuagint and Vulgate. In reaction, the Roman Catholic Church definitely affirmed the canonicity of seven disputed books at the Council of Trent (1546). These books are referred to as deuterocanonical. Until the nineteenth century, most Protestant Bibles continued to print the Apocrypha (with some variation as to what books were included) in a separate section. Today many study Bibles and ecumenical Bibles include the seven deuterocanonical books, along with other books valued by the Orthodox tradition.

As a result of this prolonged and complex process of evaluation, acceptance, and rejection, the Jewish canon and the Christian canons are characterized by diversity rather than uniformity. The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament embrace different types of literature, display diverse ideologies and theologies, and reflect a wide range of historical periods. Because the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible are so pluralistic, they have been able to continue to function as scripture for their respective faith communities even as circumstances have radically changed over the centuries. In addition, the internal pluralism that characterizes the Bible means that some parts of the canon have been able to serve as alternative and corrective voices. These alternative voices can modify or push against other parts of the biblical text that may now be seen as inappropriate or morally problematic. The impact of the biblical canon on Judaism and Christianity has been and continues to be a dynamic process.

Establishing the Earliest Text

Any literature that has been transmitted from ancient times through a process of repeated hand copying will inevitably accumulate textual errors and uncertainties. The Old Testament is no exception, and the various paths through which it has come down to us give evidence of alterations and errors in copying that have crept into its text. The disciplined attempt to achieve an earlier and more correct text is called text criticism.

Such errors and variants originated in various ways. Letters were misread for other letters that looked similar. Words or lines were accidently left out, often because a scribe’s eyes jumped over words or phrases that ended in a similar way. Sometimes words or lines were inadvertently repeated. Occasionally an explanatory or pious note that had been written into the margin of a manuscript would be mistakenly incorporated in the biblical text itself when it was recopied. Sometimes scribes thought that a word or passage was incorrect, offensive, or inappropriate and simply corrected it.

Evidence for making corrective judgments about the text comes from various sources. The work of the Jewish Masoretes, who guarded and transmitted the traditional Hebrew text in the early medieval period, preserves important information. The Samaritan religious group treasured their own version of the Torah (Samaritan Pentateuch), which is sometimes different from the text handed down within Judaism. The Greek Septuagint translation reveals the wording of the Hebrew manuscripts that were used by its translators from about 250 BCE on. Manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran show that competing texts of biblical books co-existed in the second and first century BCE.

Most modern Bibles use footnotes to indicate places where errors or alterations in the traditional Hebrew text have been corrected. However, for religious or cultural reasons, some Jewish and Christian faith communities continue to utilize only the traditional, standardized Hebrew text.

Further Reading

James C. Paget and Joachim Schaper, eds. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to 600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Lee Martin McDonald. The Formation of the Biblical Canon: The Old Testament, Its Authority and Canonicity. Vol. 1. New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017.

Chapter 2

GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND RELIGION

Geography

Israel’s Homeland

Up until the late sixth century, the world of the Old Testament and its people consisted of a narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and desert lands to the east. This region is bounded on the south by the Sinai Desert and to the north by the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges. It is naturally oriented north and south by its central mountain ridge and the valley of the Jordan River. An ancient name for the part of this region west of the Jordan was Canaan, a term that also incorporated lands farther to the north (today Lebanon). The Greeks and Romans termed this region Palestine after the Philistine people who lived on its southern coastlands. The name Palestine has become politically contentious in recent decades, but remains the most common designation for this territory in biblical studies. The Old Testament sometimes uses the phrase from Dan to Beer-sheba (for example, Judg 20:1) to designate the extent of the Israelite homeland. Israelites inhabited areas to the east of the Jordan River as well, and Transjordan is sometimes employed to refer to that region. Although the slopes down to the Jordan Valley are steep, the Jordan River itself could be crossed by fords at several points. Deserted, dry terrain surrounded Israel’s homeland to the south and to the east.

Palestine forms the southern part of a region conventionally described as the Fertile Crescent. This arc of arable land stretches northward from Palestine and Syria and then eastward and southward down through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. The eastern arm of this crescent is watered by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and their tributaries. The western arm (Palestine and Syria) receives enough rain to make agriculture possible. The Fertile Crescent is bounded on the north and east by high mountain ranges. Within the southern concave hollow of its arc lies desert.

Map 1. Fertile Crescent

Israel’s homeland formed a land bridge between the great power centers of the ancient world. Egypt lies to the south of this bridge, and Asia Minor and Mesopotamia are to the north. This fateful location meant that Palestine, especially its northern portion, was open to trade and outside influences. Foreign armies marched through Palestine on a regular basis. When both Egypt and Mesopotamia were robust and expansionistic, Palestine was an arena of conflict between them. When either Egypt or the empires to the north were dominant, the small nations of Syria and Palestine were subjugated. Only when both Egypt and the Mesopotamian states were weak or preoccupied with internal affairs could small states like Israel and Judah flourish. This, for the most part, was the geopolitical situation from about 1200 to about 745 BCE. Relative freedom from outside interference allowed Israel to develop as a people in the pre-monarchic period and then prosper for some centuries as two parallel kingdoms.

Physical Regions

The terrain of Palestine is rugged. There are no rivers helpful for agriculture and few good ports. The region is characterized by a rapid transition in topography and climate from west to east. A low coastal plain, poorly drained in ancient times, runs along the Mediterranean shoreline, growing narrower as one moves north. Much of the coastal plain between Joppa and Mount Carmel, called Sharon, was marshy and forested in ancient times. South of the Sharon are broken foothills, the Shephelah (lowland). Eastward from the coastal plain, the terrain rises to a region of central highlands and then drops off abruptly into the rift of the Jordan Valley. On the east side of the Jordan, the land rises again to an elevated plateau.

The north part of the central highlands (the hill country NRSV) of Ephraim was the heartland of the northern kingdom of Israel. After Assyria conquered this territory and incorporated it into its empire, it bore the name Samaria. The most important city in this region was Shechem, which guarded the strategic pass between the two mountains of Gerizim and Ebal. Judah’s highlands (or hill country) lay to the south, with Jerusalem as the principal city. Several valleys run up to Judah’s highlands from the coastal plain through the Shephelah, providing routes by which invading armies could threaten Jerusalem. Shechem and Jerusalem had each dominated their respective highland regions from at least the fourteenth century, long before the emergence of Israel. Consequently, the division of Israel’s homeland into the two kingdoms of Judah in the south and Israel to the north seems to have been a fundamental administrative reality caused by economic and topographic differences.

Map 2. Physical Regions of Palestine

The wide and fertile Jezreel Valley (or Esdraelon) runs west to east. It divides the northern part of the central highlands from the region of Galilee to the north. The Jezreel Valley was (and is) a rich agricultural region. It provided an easy pathway for both international trade and invading armies. The port city of Acco was situated at its northwest terminus. The route through the valley was dominated by the cities of Megiddo to the west and Beth-shean to the east, where the Jezreel Valley meets the Jordan Valley.

Lower (southern) Galilee features fertile valleys. Upper (northern) Galilee is more rugged and reaches higher elevations. In ancient times, much of both Galilee and the central highlands was forested.

East of the central highlands, the Jordan River runs through Lake Chinnereth (New Testament: Sea of Galilee). It then descends through a deep valley (the Arabah). The northern portion of this valley is mostly fertile, but farther south the Arabah becomes desert. The existence of the very ancient city of Jericho there was made possible by a plentiful perennial spring. Ravines go up westward from Jericho, one of which leads directly to Jerusalem. The Dead Sea marks the lowest elevation on earth, and because it has no outlet, it has a high concentration of salt and other dissolved minerals. The Arabah continues southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, an arm of the Red Sea.

To the east of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea rises a plateau, where rain dropped by prevailing west winds makes cultivation and stock raising possible. Farther east lies desert. Four waterways cut up the area east of the Jordan. The Yarmuk River runs into the Jordan just south of the Sea of Galilee and divides Bashan to the north from Gilead to the south. Bashan and Gilead were part of the Israelite homeland. Farther south, about halfway down the Jordan, the Jabbok drains Gilead. The Arnon runs into the Dead Sea at about its midpoint. The Zered enters the Dead Sea at its south end.

The region’s most important travel route ran northward from Egypt along the Mediterranean coast, keeping a few miles inland in order avoid sandy and marshy ground. As it headed north, the route was forced inland by Mount Carmel and proceeded to Megiddo, where it divided. One branch went north by heading back westward to the seacoast at Acco and on to Phoenicia through Tyre and Sidon. The other branch went eastward along the Jezreel Valley and then turned north along the west side of Lake Chinnereth to Damascus. East of the Jordan River, a second international trade route ran northward along the plateau from the Gulf of Aqaba to Damascus. Numbers 20:17 calls this Transjordan route the King’s Highway. A road of regional importance ran along the central spine of the central highlands linking Beer-sheba, Hebron,