Why are there no references to jews in either Herodotus or Strabo?

Question

Can it be there never was a Jewish Kingdom,but rather that they were an insignificant tribe? Both historians wrote extensively of Palestine,Syria and Phoenicia,not there are no references to jews. Doesn't this suggest their self-history is false?

Answer 1

Because by that time most of the Jews were in the Diaspora and not around as a single entity.

This is obvious even to a three-year-old.

Answer 2

Because both were qualified historians and they would not have reported a mythological kingdom or people. All historical evidence suggests the ancient hebrews were merely a small ethnic group residing in an isolated pocket of ancient Palestine. No historian notes their existence until the Roman era.  

Answer 3

All evidence suggests that if they in Palestine at all they must have been either a very small ethnic group or widely dispersed. There was certainly no Kingdom. It's utter nonsense.  

Answer 4

Firstly the Good Book did all that, are you wanting to dispute that too.

And then Josephus Flavius did, in 66-73 CE As a prisoner of the Romans, Josephus volunteered to write the history of the Great Revolt. General (later Emperor) Vespasian agreed. Josephus thus provided the Romans (and now us) with a first-hand account of the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It must be emphasized that Josephus was writing for Vespasian, so his work is definitely biased. He mentions several times in his Greek writings that he created an Aramaic version of the events as well, but it, unfortunately, is not extant.

All the ones coming after are fact changers, deniers of truth, just like you.

Answer 5

You are free to be as deluded as you'd like to be, but you're still wrong.  Here's an education for you.  I'll just deal with Herodotus; Strabo follows from the same information:

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, leading to the first diaspora in Jewish history that scholars can document as fact.

From here on, the Judeans, from which the term “Jews” derives, “would have to define themselves in relation to the new peoples amidst whom they were living” in exile, said Rachel Friedman, a classics professor at Vassar College who also teaches in the Jewish Studies Program there. In the Babylonian exile, lasting less than 50 years before the Persian period began, the Judeans would be forced to ask: who is a Jew?

But these Judeans communities living in exile were forming their own wildly divergent forms of Judaism — “Ywhm-ism,” the belief in a single god named YWHM, is in fact a more common denominator, many scholars suggest. So there was no clear answer to who, or what, was a Jew. A piece of papyrus found in Elephantine in Egypt from this time suggests that the Jewish community there had built their own temple to YWHM, something then prohibited in Hebraic law. The “Murashu texts” found in Nippur in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) show some Jews even prospering in exile. Both suggest there was no reason for these Jews to return to Jerusalem, which would complicate any attempt at a unified Jewish identity.

Maybe then Herodotus didn’t just skip over Jewish culture; there was no single, identifiable Jewish culture to speak of at that time.

Nice try, sonny, but you're going to have to work harder if you want to play in the big leagues.

Answer 6

They scarcely existed at the time,so there obviously was never any Kingdom of David,etc. Herodotus makes one brief reference to a small ethnic group he refers to as the Kolchis and which most historians agree probably refers to the hebrews. I'm interested to note that most of the jewish respondents actually agree that as a nation of sorts,the hebrews did not yet exist in the 5th century. This naturally begs the question: then how could they have had a huge and wealthy kingdom encompassing all of ancient Palestine? Obviously the biblical account is a mere fairy tale. And given that they have no "ancestral" claim to Palestine whatsoever.  

Answer 7

Yes. Herodotus wrote in the fifth century before Christ,Strabo in the third century b.c. If there were any truth to what is obviously mere mythology jews and/or a jewish kingdom would certainly have been noted.