Jewish people, who have passed down their traditions from generation to generation.

Author: Wang Linggui Tang Yulin Sun Wei Liu Xin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Emerging 4,000 years ago, Jewish civilization is one of the oldest civilizations in the world and a cultural entity that has remained unbroken from ancient times to the present, alongside Chinese culture. However, Jewish civilization has experienced many twists and turns in its development. For nearly 2,000 years, it had no fixed homeland or stable area of activity, spreading across the world in a nomadic form. During this long period, Jews and Jewish civilization were often regarded as heretics in the West, especially in Europe, and frequently faced persecution, suppression, and even destruction. The Jewish policies of Nazi Germany are a prime example. Despite the hardships of being rootless, Jews and Jewish civilization not only survived but also thrived, making significant contributions to the progress of human civilization.
1.1 God’s Test The wandering history of the Jewish people over thousands of years has further enriched the complex connotations of "Jew." In a sense, the Jewish nation seems to have been destined for wandering since the beginning of its ancestors. The Semites, like waves of migration, moved from the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia, one of the oldest continents on Earth. Approximately 10,000 years ago, humans lived here. These humans were the Semites, descendants of Shem, the eldest son of Noah who stepped off the Ark, as told in the Bible’s Old Testament, and are the ancestors of the Jewish people. Around 9,000 years ago, roughly after the end of the Earth’s fourth ice age, the climate in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula changed dramatically. Due to prolonged drought and soil desertification, vast oases turned into deserts, making it difficult for people to survive there. As a result, the various Semite tribes began the earliest large-scale migration movement in human history. The direction of this migration was the Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan River valleys in the northern part of the peninsula, including Palestine. The Semites, clad in animal skins and wearing date palm leaf skirts, moved in tribes, led by tribal chiefs, driving camels and flocks of sheep, blowing low-pitched sheep horns, and struggling to cross the Arabian Desert. Occasionally, they would stop at places with water and grass and then move forward after a while. In this way, the migration of the Semite tribes surged wave after wave, moving forward and pausing intermittently for several centuries. At that time, the main northern branches of the Semite migration included the Amorites, Akkadians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Arameans (mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament as Ammonites), and Hebrews, among other tribes. Around 5,000 BCE, the Sumerians from the Persian Plateau settled in the Mesopotamian plain downstream of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Due to the use of bronze tools and the development of water irrigation, economic and cultural prosperity emerged, giving rise to some ancient slave-owning city-states. One of these was Ur, located in the southwestern corner of Basra Province in present-day southern Iraq, mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament as the Kingdom of Ur of the Chaldeans. Around 2,100 BCE, the Amorites migrated southward from the upper reaches of the Euphrates River to the Mesopotamian plain. In the second half of the 20th century BCE, the sixth king of the Amorites, Hammurabi, unified the downstream regions of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through military force and established the city of Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates River, a vital water and land hub.