Judea
Greco-Roman name for the land of the tribe of Judah, whose only stable
border was fixed by the Dead
Sea to the east. The tribal homeland had about a fifteen mile
radius in the hill country of the southeastern corner of Palestine,
with its center at Hebron.
There mountain ridges rose to almost 3400 feet above the level of
the Mediterranean only to descend 4,700 feet eastward to the surface
of the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on the face of this planet.
David's
conquest of Jerusalem on the border with Benjamin shifted Judea's center further north. During the reigns of David
and Solomon [10th
c. BCE] the tribe of Judah absorbed the
ancestral lands of Benjamin (to the north of Jerusalem), Dan (to the west) and Simeon (to the south). So after Solomon the northern boundary of Judah
ran on a line just north of Modein in the west to Jericho in
the east. After the Babylonian exile [6th c. BCE], the province of Judea was reduced to a ring
of about a 10 mile radius around Jerusalem.
After Judea won independence from Hellenistic
Syria [2nd c. BCE], Judah
Maccabee's brother Jonathan extended its borders westward to the Mediterranean from Joppa to Gaza and John
Hyrcanus annexed the historic Judean homeland in the south that
had been claimed by Idumea.
Though later Hasmoneans extended Judean control over Samaria,
Perea, Galilee and the Golan, these
were treated as occupied territories and never integrated into Judea
even under Herod. So,
except for Samaria these territories were easily separated from
Judea after Herod's death. During the 1st c. CE the Roman province of Judea proper was about 45 miles square.
Sources: Into
His Own |