Judea or Judæa (pron.: /dʒuːˈdiː.ə/;[1] from Hebrew: יהודה, Standard Yəhuda Tiberian Yəhûḏāh, Greek: Ιουδαία, Ioudaía; Latin: Iudaea) is the name of the mountainous southern part of the Land of Israel, roughly corresponding to the southern West Bank.[2][3] The region is named after the biblical tribe of Judah and associated Kingdom of Judah, which is commonly dated from 934 until 586 BCE.[4] The name of the region continued to be incorporated through the Babylonian conquest, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods as Babylonian Judea, Persian Judea, Hasmonean Judea, and consequently Herodian Judea and Roman Judea, respectively. As a consequence of the Bar Kokhba revolt, in 135 CE the region was renamed and merged with Roman Syria to form Syria Palaestina by the victorious Roman Emperor Hadrian. The term Judea as a geographical term was officially revived in the 20th century as part of the Israeli district name for most of the West Bank - the Judea

File:Kingdoms of Israel and Judah map 830.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia






Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms of the ancient Levante. The Kingdom of Israel emerged as an important local power by the 9th century BCE before falling to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Israel's southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah, emerged in the 8th century[1] and enjoyed a period of prosperity as a client-state of first Assyria and then Babylon before a revolt against the Neo-Babylonian Empire led to its destruction in 586 BCE. Following the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, 539 BCE, some Judean exiles returned to Jerusalem, inaugurating the formative period in the development of a distinctive Judahite identity in the Persian province of Yehud. Yehud was absorbed into the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, but in the 2nd century BCE the Judaeans revolted against the Hellenist Seleucid Empire and created the Hasmonean kingdom. This, the last nominally independent Judean kingdom, came to an end in 63 BCE with its conquest by Rome.

History of the Levant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Levant is a geographical term that refers to a large area in Southwest Asia, south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Arabian Desert in the south, and Mesopotamia in the east. It stretches 400 miles north to south from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai desert, and 70 to 100 miles east to west between the sea and the Arabian desert.[1] The term is also sometimes used to refer to modern events or states in the region immediately bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea: Cyprus, Palestinian territories, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria.

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