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There are varying beliefs about cattle in societies and religions.
Cattle are considered sacred in the Indian religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, as well as in some Chinese folk religion and in traditional African religions. Cattle played other major roles in many religions, including those of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Israel, and ancient Rome.
The history of ancient Israel and Judah spans from the early appearance of the Israelites in Canaan's hill country during the late second millennium BCE, to the establishment and subsequent downfall of the two Israelite kingdoms in the mid-first millennium BCE. This history unfolds within the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. The earliest documented mention of "Israel" as a people appears on the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian inscription dating back to around 1208 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that ancient Israelite culture evolved from the pre-existing Canaanite civilization. During the Iron Age II period, two Israelite kingdoms emerged, covering much of Canaan: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.
According to the Hebrew Bible, a "United Monarchy" consisting of Israel and Judah existed as early as the 11th century BCE, under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon; the great kingdom later was separated into two smaller kingdoms: Israel, containing the cities of Shechem and Samaria, in the north, and Judah, containing Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple, in the south. The historicity of the United Monarchy is debated—as there are no archaeological remains of it that are accepted as consensus—but historians and archaeologists agree that Israel and Judah existed as separate kingdoms by c. 900 BCE and c. 850 BCE, respectively. The kingdoms' history is known in greater detail than that of other kingdoms in the Levant, primarily due to the selective narratives in the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, which were included in the Bible.
Solomon (/ˈsɒləmən/), also called Jedidiah, was the fourth monarch of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible. The successor of his father David, he is described as the penultimate ruler of all Twelve Tribes of Israel under a united Israel and Judah. His reign is hypothesized to have lasted from 970 to 931 B.C. According to the biblical narrative, his reign brought commercial prosperity through alliances and trade, but his accumulation of wealth, horses, and foreign wives, many of whom introduced idolatry, led to divine punishment. After Solomon’s death, his son Rehoboam’s harsh policies led the northern Israelites to reject David’s line and follow Jeroboam, splitting the kingdom into Israel in the north and Judah in the south, according to the Hebrew Bible.
Considered a Jewish prophet, Solomon is portrayed as wealthy, wise, powerful, and a dedicated follower of Yahweh (God), as attested by the eponymous Solomon's Temple. He is also traditionally regarded as the author of the biblical books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. He is also the subject of many later references and legends, most notably in the Testament of Solomon, part of biblical apocrypha from the 1st century CE.
The article deals with the biblical and historical kings of the Land of Israel—Abimelech of Sichem, the three kings of the United Kingdom of Israel and those of its successor states, Israel and Judah, followed in the Second Temple period, part of classical antiquity, by the kingdoms ruled by the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties.
The Hebrew Bible describes a succession of kings of a United Kingdom of Israel, and then of divided kingdoms, Israel and Judah.
The Land of Israel (Hebrew: אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל, Modern: Éretz Yisra'él, Tiberian: ʾEreṣ Yīsrāʾēl, land of Jacob, later known as Israel) is the traditional Jewish name for an area of the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious, and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine. The definitions of the limits of this territory vary between passages in the Hebrew Bible, with specific mentions in Genesis 15, Exodus 23, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47. Nine times elsewhere in the Bible, the settled land is referred as "from Dan to Beersheba", and three times it is referred as "from the entrance of Hamath unto the brook of Egypt" (1 Kings 8:65, 1 Chronicles 13:5 and 2 Chronicles 7:8).
These biblical limits for the land differ from the borders of established historical Israelite and later Jewish kingdoms, including the United Kingdom of Israel, the two kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah, the Hasmonean kingdom, and the Herodian kingdom. At their heights, these realms ruled lands with similar but not identical boundaries.
Queen of Heaven (Latin: Regina Caeli) is a title given by the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy, to Mary, mother of Jesus, and, to a lesser extent, in Evangelical Lutheranism and Anglicanism. The title has long been a tradition, included in prayers and devotional literature and seen in Western art in the subject of the Coronation of the Virgin from the High Middle Ages, long before the Church gave it a formal definition status.
The Catholic teaching on this subject is expressed in the papal encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1954. Therein, the pope states that Mary is called Queen of Heaven because her son, Jesus Christ, was charged as being "King of Israel" and the heavenly king of the universe. This would render the mother of the king as the "queen mother" of Israel.
The Kingdom of Judah was an Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Centered in the highlands to the west of the Dead Sea, the kingdom's capital was Jerusalem. It was ruled by the Davidic line for four centuries. Jews are named after Judah, and primarily descend from people who lived in the region.
The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as one of the two successor states of the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David, and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late 8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed. In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah might have been limitedly populated, comprising some fortified sites and many unfortified rural settlements. The Tel Dan Stele, discovered in 1993, shows that the kingdom existed in some form by the middle of the 9th century BCE, but it does not indicate the extent of its power. Recent excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, however, support the existence of a centrally organized and urbanized kingdom by the 10th century BCE, according to the excavators.
Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple (Hebrew: בַּיִת רִאשׁוֹן, romanized: Bayyit Rīšōn, lit. 'First Temple'), was a biblical Temple in Jerusalem believed to have existed between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE. Its description is largely based on narratives in the Hebrew Bible, in which it was commissioned by biblical king Solomon before being destroyed during the Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 587 BCE. No excavations are allowed on the Temple Mount, and no positively identified remains of the destroyed temple have been found. Most modern scholars agree that the First Temple existed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by the time of the Babylonian siege, and there is significant debate among scholars over the date of its construction and the identity of its builder.
The Hebrew Bible, specifically within the Book of Kings, includes a detailed narrative about the construction's ordering by Solomon, the penultimate ruler of the United Kingdom of Israel. It further credits Solomon as the placer of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, a windowless inner sanctum within the structure. Entry into the Holy of Holies was heavily restricted; the High Priest of Israel was the only authority permitted to enter the sanctuary, and only did so on Yom Kippur, carrying the blood of a sacrificial lamb and burning incense. In addition to serving as a religious building for worship, the First Temple also functioned as a place of assembly for the Israelites. The First Temple's destruction and the subsequent Babylonian captivity were both events that were seen as a fulfillment of biblical prophecies and thus affected Judaic religious beliefs, precipitating the Israelites' transition from either polytheism or monolatrism (as seen in Yahwism) to firm Jewish monotheism.
The Hebrews (Hebrew: עִבְרִיִּים / עִבְרִים, Modern: ʿĪvrīm / ʿĪvrīyyīm, Tiberian: ʿĪḇrīm / ʿĪḇrīyyīm; ISO 259-3: ʕibrim / ʕibriyim) were an ancient Semitic-speaking people. Historians mostly consider the Hebrews as synonymous with the Israelites, with the term "Hebrew" denoting an Israelite from the nomadic era, which preceded the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah in the 11th century BCE. However, in some instances, the designation "Hebrew" may also be used historically in a wider sense, referring to the Phoenicians or other ancient Semitic-speaking civilizations, such as the Shasu on the eve of the Late Bronze Age collapse. It appears 34 times within 32 verses of the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars regard "Hebrews" as an ethnonym, while others do not, and others still hold that the multiple modern connotations of ethnicity may not all map well onto the sociology of ancient Near Eastern groups.
By the time of the Roman Empire, the term Hebraios (Greek: Ἑβραῖος) could refer to any member of the Jewish people in general (as Strong's Hebrew Dictionary puts it: "any of the Jewish nation") or, at other times, specifically to those Jews who lived in Judea, which was a Roman province from 6 CE to 135 CE. However, at the time of early Christianity, the term instead referred to Jewish Christians, as opposed to the Judaizers and to the gentile Christians.
The Davidic line refers to the descendants of David, who established the House of David (Hebrew: בֵּית דָּוִד Bēt Dāwīḏ) in the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. In Judaism, the lineage is based on texts from the Hebrew Bible, as well as on later Jewish traditions.
According to the biblical narrative, David of the tribe of Judah engaged in a protracted conflict with Ish-bosheth of the Tribe of Benjamin after the latter succeeded his father Saul to become the second king of an amalgamated Israel and Judah. Amidst this struggle, Yahweh had sent his prophet Samuel to anoint David as the true king of the Israelites. Following Ish-bosheth's assassination at the hands of his own army captains, David officially acceded to the throne around 1010 BCE, replacing the House of Saul with his own and becoming the Israelite third king. He was succeeded by his son Solomon, whose mother was Bathsheba. Solomon's death led to the rejection of the House of David by most of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, with only Judah and Benjamin remaining loyal: the dissenters chose Jeroboam as their monarch and formed the Kingdom of Israel in the north (Samaria); while the loyalists kept Solomon's son Rehoboam as their monarch and formed the Kingdom of Judah in the south (Judea). With the success of Jeroboam's Revolt having severed Israel's connection to the House of David, only the Judahite monarchs, except Athaliah, were part of the Davidic line.