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Appendix 5: A History of The Jewish People<br />
the patriarchs (Saul, David, Solomon, etc.) were written<br />
down. (These writings have not survived – probably<br />
because Jews were still illiterate and the first five books of<br />
the Christian Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible or the<br />
Torah or the Pentateuch were written much later and<br />
backdated to claim an older origin.) Inscriptions dating<br />
back to 10 th century BCE have been claimed to support<br />
the theory that early Jews were literate. Some of these<br />
inscriptions are in Phoenician script ‡ . The few that are<br />
supposed to be in Hebrew are undecipherable <strong>for</strong> most<br />
Hebrew scholars. Some fanatics have found 3000-year-old<br />
Hebrew inscriptions even in the United States! † ) In 922<br />
BCE, ten tribes to the north rebelled and Jewish<br />
settlements were divided into two - Israel in the north and<br />
Judea in the south. In 721 BCE, the neighbouring<br />
Assyrian kingdom (Upper Tigris or northern Iraq), on their<br />
way to invade Egypt, destroyed Israel. Some Assyrian<br />
documents claim that 27,290 Israelis were carried off by<br />
the conquerors. These Jews eventually got assimilated<br />
among the inhabitants of Mesopotamia (eastern Syria,<br />
south-eastern Turkey, and most of Iraq). Jewish tradition<br />
claims these people as the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. In 612<br />
BCE, Judah was destroyed by Babylonia (central and<br />
southern Iraq) as part of King Nebuchadnezzar takeover of<br />
Assyria. The Babylonians destroyed the (mythical/humble)<br />
Temple of Solomon and took prominent residents of<br />
Judah in chains to Babylonia. (In Babylonia, Jews came in<br />
126 <strong>World</strong> Government Slave Handbook