From Wikipedia

The Kingdom Of David
Episode One

By The Rivers Of Babylon 

In 589 B.C. the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar attacked and destroyed Jerusalem, the main city of the Judean kingdom. After its fall, the citizens were taken into exile in Babylonia. Only a few generations earlier their 10 northern cousins in the Kingdom of Israel had suffered a similar fate and had vanished forever as they had been integrated into the neighboring societies found throughout the region.

In order to fight for their survival as a people, the Judeans decided to write a book instead of taking up armed struggle. They rewrote and edited together stories of their past and assembled them into what we today know as the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. The documentary states that it shouldn't be taken as literal history. It then states that it was written to teach the exiled the reasons why they were in Babylon as well as being a guide as to how they should live their lives.

Abraham

Abraham was born in the city of Ur in Mesopotamia. The documentary briefly recounts the stories of Abraham believing in one god and the ultimate test that God gave him to sacrifice his son. Such stories, whether true or not, represent the turning away from idolatry. As a result, Abraham is considered the founding figure of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

For the scribes in Babylon, simply writing down stories of their ancestors was not enough. Their great challenge was to make sense of their own world. How did such a promised people of God end up near extinction in Babylon? In paganism, if you’re defeated it was because someone else's god was more powerful than yours. But, with monotheism, if someone is suffering, then the individual must have done something wrong. This new book describes to the Judeans what they did to lose God’s favor.

Moses

The documentary recounts Moses's encounter with the flaming bush and his involvement with the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. the Exodus is where the great epic of Israel starts. According to William G. Dever, archeologist, the desert can only support a few thousand nomads, not the purported 3-million that legend tells us accompanied Moses. Furthermore, only 1 or 2 sites mentioned in Exodus have been identified. For the scribes to write an accurate historical account of what occurred 700 years earlier was improbable. What was probable was bringing to text the eternal lessons that the story of Moses taught.

The Ten Commandments

To the scribes, the most important truths of all were how God gave Moses the laws that the people were to preserve for all time. God gave them to Moses in a face-to-face meeting. The revolution in the Ten Commandments was that God cared about how human beings treated each other. One honors God by treating well the person standing in front of him. The commandments were viewed as a legal contract where God will bless an individual if the individual would follow His rules. After Sinai, all the stories of the Israelites would be whether or not they had obeyed God’s commandments.

Canaan

Archeologist feel, through the study of pottery fragments, that the Israelites didn’t invade Canaan, but were really Canaanites themselves. They were the lower classes within Canaanite society that inhabited the countryside. As they told their stores over and over, those stories helped shape a culture. After they became a people, they continued telling the stories about the good and evil in every human heart.

The Story of King David

David’s story is that of a very flawed man. His problem wasn’t just sex, but the fact that he tried to cover it up through murder. After committing such a sin, his life falls apart. Monotheism triumphs over the king’s laws when David acknowledges his sin. As punishment for his sin, God cursed David and his descendants. For the writers of the Bible, David’s sins and God’s curse on his house help explain the disaster the Israelites would suffer in the years after his death. The curse first manifested itself in 720 BC when the northern tribes were conquered and scattered.

Book of Deuteronomy

By 620 BC, according to the documentary, most Israelites living in Judea were rural folk that had little contact with Jerusalem and its religious rituals. Furthermore, it’s evident that they worshiped other gods, such as the female goddess Asherah, besides the One True God. King Josiah, feeling such practices by his subjects were dooming his country to foreign conquest, rallied the people around a book that had just been discovered while renovating the temple - Deuteronomy. Most modern scholars feel the book had recently been written and then planted in the temple to be discovered in order to motivate a reformation. The main reform was that God could only be worshiped at one spot only - the Temple in Jerusalem. As a result, many other religious altars were burned and destroyed along with their attendants. Scholars feel that the beginnings of monotheism by the people as a whole occurred at this time.

Jeremiah and the Babylonian Exile

Feeling that God was on his side, King Josiah launched an attack on the Egyptian/Assyrian alliance in 609 BC. When Josiah was killed, his successors reinstituted polytheism. Jeremiah tried to warn the people of their grave mistake to no avail. Nebuchadnezzar’s ease at conquering and destroying Jerusalem in 597 BC was proof of God’s curse on David and his heirs.

Judean society would have ceased if not for the scribes putting in writing all the legends of the people. The writings told them the reason for their exile. The message told them that God is fair and if they were being punished there was a reason for it. The message also stipulated that for those who accept their guilt and change their ways, there’s hope.