Odd thing to notice: I've been thinking of 2nd Temple Judaism as a footnote to the pre-Babylonian history, but in fact it was nearly six hundred years long. American hasn't lasted half that long yet.
It's easy to lose that sense of scale, from two millenia away.
Conversation
Replying to
Still feels pretty spikey, but yeah: it compresses far better than more present history.
Of course, a bit of that compression was "we wiped all trace of them from the face of the earth". We know almost nothing about Aram, for instance, that the Bible didn't say.
2

