Still, you cannot turn the ancient Israelites into Irishmen. History, language and archaeology demonstrate that they are different.
And when it comes to supporting millions of people in states around the Middle East, you pretty much have to wait until Cleisthenes invented demoracy circa 500 BCE. He also invented the credit union and that made it possible for the Athenians to propagate an advanced olive tree ~ that tree made them exceedingly wealthy (which is another story) but when it was spread throughout Greece and the Middle East it allowed for a vast increase in human population.
Before Cleisthenes you are talking about city states of a few thousand people with rural areas virtually devoid of population. Empires were strings of small city states before the Greeks began colonizing the Mediterranean.
It takes a lot of technology to keep a large population together.