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The story of a covenant people, from Avraham to the State of Israel. Pick an era, meet the kings and the prophets who warned them, and see where the Jewish people lived in exile. Every source is here in Hebrew and English.
Fourteen eras, from Avraham to today. Tap an era to see its dates, its main events, its people, and one big idea.
Two ways to count. This page uses BCE ("before the common era") and CE ("common era"). The dates are the ones most historians use. For the early periods we also give the traditional Jewish count from Seder Olam (a book of biblical chronology from the time of the Mishnah). The two counts agree from the Second Temple onward, except for the Persian period, which Seder Olam counts as much shorter.
Avraham makes a brit (covenant) with one God.
After slavery in Egypt, the whole nation accepts the Torah.
David makes Jerusalem the capital. Shlomo builds the Temple.
Assyria exiles the ten tribes of the north. Only Judah is left.
Babylon destroys the First Temple. Exile to Bavel.
Cyrus of Persia lets the Jews go home. The Second Temple is built. Purim happens in the Persian empire.
The Maccabees win back the Temple.
Rome destroys the Second Temple. At Yavneh, Torah learning takes the Temple's place.
The Oral Torah is written down: the Mishnah, then the Talmud.
Spain expels its Jews, ending one of the greatest communities in Jewish history.
Six million Jews are murdered.
The State of Israel. The Jewish people comes home a second time.
Next, we zoom in on two parts of this story: the First Temple kingdoms and their prophets (moments 3 to 5), and the long exile that followed (moments 8 to 12).
Zoom in on the First Temple. After Shlomo died (about 930 BCE), the kingdom split. Ten tribes in the north became the kingdom of Israel. Judah and Binyamin in the south stayed loyal to the house of David.
Look at the two columns. In the north, power changed hands by murder again and again: nine different families ruled in about two hundred years. In the south, every king but one came from David's family, for almost three hundred and fifty years. The prophets stand between them, speaking to both. Above them all, the empires of Assyria and then Babylon close in.
Tap a king to read about him.
Dates are approximate and follow the common modern chronology. Scholars differ by a few years, and some kings ruled together with their fathers for a time.
The kings had power. The prophets had the word of God. A navi (prophet) is a person God sends to speak to the people. From about 800 BCE, the prophets started saying something new.
Idol worship is a deal. In the ancient world, you brought a god an offering and expected something back: rain, a good harvest, a win in battle. That is a transactional relationship: a trade. It does not ask you to change. And a religion that does not ask you to change can live side by side with cheating the poor.
Judaism is meant to change you. That is a transformational relationship. The prophets told the people that God does not want their sacrifices if they ignore the widow, the orphan and the poor. They spoke about the future, not only the past. And they taught that God is the God of the whole world, not of one nation only.
It started in a time of wealth. Under Yeravam II in the north and Uzziyah in the south (the 700s BCE), the rich got richer and the poor were sold for debts. That is when Amos and Hoshea began to speak.
I give, you give. Nothing about me has to change.
Justice and kindness first. Then your offering means something.
About 760 BCE · to the north
A shepherd from Tekoa in Judah, sent to preach in the rich northern kingdom of Yeravam II. He lists the sins of the nations around Israel, and then turns on Israel itself: they sell an innocent man for money and a poor man for a pair of shoes.
About 750 to 725 BCE · the north
The last prophet of the northern kingdom. His own painful family life becomes a picture of Israel leaving God for other gods, and of God's love that does not give up.
About 740 to 700 BCE · Judah
Prophesies in Jerusalem through four kings, up to Chizkiyahu and the Assyrian siege. He attacks empty ritual, calls for justice, and gives the great visions of comfort and of a God of all nations.
Just before this, God says of the people's festivals: "Your new moons and your holidays My soul hates" (1:14). Later: "I will make you a light to the nations" (49:6).
About 735 to 700 BCE · Judah
A villager from the Judean lowlands, at the same time as Yeshayahu. He asks the big question: what does God want from me? Calves? Thousands of rams? His answer is three things.
The question comes in 6:6: "With what shall I come before God?"
627 to after 586 BCE · Judah
Warns for forty years that Jerusalem will fall. False prophets promise peace, and he is beaten and jailed. He tells the people that the Temple will not protect them if they do evil: look at Shiloh. After the destruction he writes to the exiles in Bavel: seventy years, and you will come home.
Also: "Peace, peace, and there is no peace" (6:14). And the promise: "the sound of joy and the sound of gladness, the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride" (33:11).
593 to 571 BCE · in exile
A kohen (priest) exiled to Bavel. He sees a vision of God's chariot (the merkavah) in Bavel itself: God is with the people in exile. He teaches that each person is responsible for himself, and that God wants the wicked to change, not to die.
What happened next. Most people did not listen. Israel fell to Assyria in 722 BCE, and Judah fell to Babylon in 586 BCE. But Yirmiyahu and Yechezkel had already taught the lesson that would keep the people alive: God goes with His people into exile.
The exile in Bavel did not end the story. In 538 BCE Cyrus let the Jews return, and the Second Temple stood for almost six hundred years. Then Rome destroyed it in 70 CE, and after the Bar Kochba revolt failed (135 CE), most Jews lived outside the land for the next eighteen centuries.
For most of the last 2,000 years, most Jews lived outside the Land of Israel. One center would fade and another would rise. Here are seven of the great ones, from the first exile in Bavel to the return home.
586 BCE to about 1040 CE
The first exile and the longest-lasting center. The Jews who stayed after the return built a community that lasted fifteen hundred years. Here the Talmud Bavli was written, and from here the Geonim answered questions from the whole Jewish world. The Exilarch led the community.
People: Rav, Shmuel, Rav Ashi, Rav Saadia Gaon, Rav Hai Gaon
About 900 to 1492
Under Muslim rule, Spain had a golden age: Jewish poets, philosophers, doctors and even a Jewish vizier (chief minister) who led armies. Then came the Almohads (a strict Muslim movement), the Christian reconquest, riots in 1391, forced conversions, and the expulsion of 1492. Many of the expelled went to the Ottoman empire.
People: Chasdai ibn Shaprut, Shmuel HaNagid, Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, the Rambam, the Ramban, Don Yitzchak Abarbanel
About 950 to 1350
Jews settled along the Rhine River from the time of Charlemagne. Rabbeinu Gershom taught in Mainz and Rashi in Troyes. The Crusades (1096) and the Black Death (1348) brought massacres, and expulsions from England (1290) and France pushed Jews east.
People: Rabbeinu Gershom, Rashi, the Tosafists, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, the Rosh
The 1500s
After the expulsion from Spain, many of the greatest rabbis gathered in Tzfat in the Galil, then under the Ottomans. For about fifty years this small town was the center of Jewish law and Kabbalah. Doña Gracia Mendes, a wealthy former converso, also helped rebuild nearby Tiberias.
People: Rabbi Yosef Karo, the Arizal, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz (author of Lecha Dodi)
The 1600s and 1700s
The Dutch Republic offered religious freedom. Conversos (Jews forced to become Christian in Spain and Portugal) came back to Judaism here. Rabbi Menashe ben Israel asked Oliver Cromwell to let Jews return to England, and they were allowed back in 1656.
People: Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese community
About 1500 to 1939
Poland and Lithuania welcomed Jews and became the largest Jewish community in the world. The Council of Four Lands governed Jewish life for almost two hundred years. Chassidut and the great Lithuanian yeshivot grew here. In the Shoah (1939 to 1945), the Nazis and their helpers murdered six million Jews, most of them from these lands, and this world was destroyed.
People: The Rema, the Maharal (Prague), the Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin
Always, and again a center today
Jews never fully left the land. Groups made aliyah (moved to Israel) again and again: the Ramban in 1267, the Tzfat rabbis, the students of the Baal Shem Tov and the Vilna Gaon. Zionism brought a mass return, and in 1948 the State of Israel was founded. Today it is again the largest Jewish community in the world.
People: The Ramban, Rabbi Yosef Karo, the Ramchal, Rav Kook, David Ben-Gurion
Not on this list but just as real: the Jews of North Africa, Yemen, Iraq and Persia, Italy, the Ottoman lands, and America, home today to the largest Jewish community outside Israel.
From Yehudah (Judah). After the northern kingdom of Israel was exiled in 722 BCE, only Judah was left. The people became Yehudim, people of Judah. In the Book of Esther, Mordechai is already called אִישׁ יְהוּדִי, "a Jewish man," even though he was from the tribe of Binyamin.
They are the three periods of rabbis after the Talmud. The Geonim headed the yeshivot of Bavel (about 589 to 1038). The Rishonim ("the first ones") are the rabbis of the Middle Ages, about 1000 to 1500: Rashi, the Rambam, the Ramban. The Acharonim ("the later ones") are the rabbis from the Shulchan Aruch onward.
Not really. Cyrus gave permission to rebuild a Temple, not to build a state. Judea stayed a small province of the Persian empire. The return was religious, not political. Still, it was a return from exile, and that had never happened to any nation before.
The Talmud itself argues about it: some said he should have asked to spare Jerusalem. One answer is that he knew he would not get Jerusalem, and that he could ask for only one thing. He chose the thing the Jewish people could not live without: its sages and its Torah learning.
Every verse on this page links to its source on Sefaria. These are the main texts and histories behind it.
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Hebrew texts are from Sefaria. English renderings and explanations are Torah Tech originals, and any mistakes are ours. Ancient dates are approximate.
This page is for learning. Where historians and the traditional count disagree, we show both.
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