Heroes
From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle
Chapter One
God's Heroes: Deborah, Judith, Samson and David
No people in history were more in need of heroes than the Hebrews. Cast in their role, by events, as "strangers and sojourners," they came originally in the time of Abraham, deep in the second millennium BC, from what is now southern Iraq, and entered recorded history between 1450 and 1250 BC. They were a slave people, without country and possessions, with little art or technology and no skill or record in warfare. They were subjects of the Egyptians, the greatest power of the Bronze Age, and woefully oppressed. They were not numerous either. It is one of the miracles of the human story that this tiny people, instead of disappearing into oblivion through the yawning cracks of history, as did thousands of other tribal groups—and even scores of famous nations—should still be in self-conscious existence today, an important piece on the great world chessboard, recognizably the same entity as nearly four thousand years ago.
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