Authors: Israel Finkelstein,Neil Asher Silberman
And this was so, because the people of Israel had sinned against the L
ORD
their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the L
ORD
drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs which the kings of Israel had introduced. And the people of Israel . . . built for themselves high places at all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city; they set up for themselves pillars and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree; and there they burned incense on all the high places, as the nations did whom the L
ORD
carried away before them. . . . They went after false idols, and became false, and they followed the nations that were round about them, concerning whom the L
ORD
commanded them that they should not do like them. And they forsook all the commandments of the L
ORD
their God, and made for themselves molten images of two calves; and they made an Asherah, and worshiped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings, and used divination and sorcery, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the L
ORD
, provoking him to anger. Therefore the L
ORD
was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah only. . . . When he had torn Israel from the house of David they made Jeroboam the son of Nebat king. And Jeroboam drove Israel from following the L
ORD
and made them commit great sin. The people of Israel walked in all the sins which Jeroboam did; they did not depart from them, until the L
ORD
removed Israel out of his sight, as he had spoken by all his servants the prophets. So Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day. (
2
K
INGS
17
:
7
–
23
)
Of course, today, through the help of archaeological work and ecological studies, we can see that the end was inevitable. Israel was destroyed and Judah survived because in the grand scheme of Assyria’s imperial designs, Israel—with its rich resources and productive population—was an incomparably more attractive target than poor and inaccessible Judah. Yet to
an audience in Judah in the grim years after the Assyrian conquest of Israel, facing the threat of empire and foreign entanglements, the biblical story of Israel served as a hint, a warning of what could happen to
them.
The older and once powerful kingdom of Israel, though blessed with fertile lands and productive people, had lost its inheritance. Now, the surviving kingdom of Judah would soon act the part of a divinely favored younger brother—like Isaac, Jacob, or their own ancestral king David—eager to snatch up a lost birthright and redeem the land and the people of Israel.
The key to understanding the passion and power of the Bible’s great historical saga is a recognition of the unique time and place in which it was initially composed. Our story now approaches that great moment in religious and literary history, because it was only after the fall of Israel that Judah grew into a fully developed state with the necessary complement of professional priests and trained scribes able to undertake such a task. When Judah suddenly faced the non-Israelite world on its own, it needed a defining and motivating text. That text was the historical core of the Bible, composed in Jerusalem in the course of the seventh century
BCE
. And because Judah was the birthplace of ancient Israel’s central scripture, it is hardly surprising that the biblical text repeatedly stresses Judah’s special status from the very beginnings of Israel’s history.
It was in the ancient Judahite capital of Hebron—in the cave of Machpelah—that the revered patriarchs and matriarchs were buried, as we read in the book of Genesis. It was Judah, among all of Jacob’s sons, whose destiny was to rule over all the other tribes of Israel (Genesis
49
:
8
). The Judahites’ fidelity to God’s commands was unmatched among other Israelite warriors; at the time of the invasion of Canaan, only they were said to have fully eradicated the idolatrous Canaanite presence from their tribal inheritance. It was from the rural Judahite village of Bethlehem that David,
Israel’s greatest king and military leader, emerged onto the stage of biblical history. His reported heroic exploits and intimate relationship with God became important scriptural themes. Indeed, David’s conquest of Jerusalem represented the final act of the drama of the conquest of Canaan. Jerusalem, now transformed into a royal city, became the site of the Temple, a political capital for the Davidic dynasty, and a sacred focus for the people of Israel through all eternity.
Despite Judah’s prominence in the Bible, however, there is no archaeological indication until the eighth century
BCE
that this small and rather isolated highland area, surrounded by arid steppe land on both east and south, possessed any particular importance. As we have seen, its population was meager; its towns—even Jerusalem—were small and few. It was Israel, not Judah, that initiated wars in the region. It was Israel, not Judah, that conducted wide-ranging diplomacy and trade. When the two kingdoms came into conflict, Judah was usually on the defensive, forced to call in neighboring powers to come to its aid. Until the late eighth century, there is no indication that Judah was anything more than a marginal factor in regional affairs. In a candid moment the biblical historian quotes a fable in which he diminishes Judah to the status of the “thistle of Lebanon,” as compared to Israel, the “cedar of Lebanon” (
2
Kings
14
:
9
). On the international scene, Judah seems to have been just a rather small and isolated kingdom that, as the great conquering Assyrian king Sargon II derisively put it, “lies far away.”
But beginning in the late eighth century
BCE
, something extraordinary happened. A series of epoch-making changes, beginning with Israel’s fall, suddenly altered the political and religious landscape. Judah’s population swelled to unprecedented levels. Its capital city became a national religious center and a bustling metropolis for the first time. Intensive trade began with surrounding nations. Finally, a major religious reform movement—focused on the exclusive worship of YHWH in the Jerusalem Temple—started cultivating a revolutionary new understanding of the God of Israel. An analysis of the historical and social developments of the ninth and eighth centuries
BCE
in the Near East explains some of these changes. The archaeology of late monarchic Judah offers even more important clues.
There is no reason to doubt seriously the reliability of the biblical list of Davidic kings who ruled in Jerusalem over the two centuries that followed the time of David and Solomon. The books of Kings intricately interweave the histories of the northern and southern kingdoms into a single, composite national history, frequently referring to now-lost royal annals called “the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah” and “the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.” The accession dates of the kings of Judah are precisely correlated with those of the kings of Israel—as in a typical passage, from
1
Kings
15
:
9
, that states, “In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel Asa began to reign over Judah.” This system of cross-dating, which can be checked by external datable references to individual Israelite and Judean kings, has proved to be generally reliable and consistent—with a few slight chronological revisions for certain reigns and the addition of possible coregencies (see
Figure
3
, p.
20
).
Thus we learn that eleven kings (all but one heirs of the Davidic dynasty) ruled in Jerusalem between the late tenth and mid–eighth century
BCE
. The reports of each reign are laconic. In no case is there the kind of dramatic, damning character portrayal seen in the biblical presentation of the northern king Jeroboam or the idolatrous house of Omri. But that is not to say that theology plays no role in the biblical description of the history of Judah. God’s retribution was swift and crystal clear. When sinful kings ruled in Jerusalem and idolatry was rampant, we learn, they were punished and Judah experienced military setbacks. When righteous kings reigned over Judah and the people were faithful to the God of Israel, the kingdom prospered and expanded its territory. Unlike the northern kingdom, which is described in negative terms throughout the biblical text, Judah is basically good. Though the number of Judah’s good and bad kings is almost equal, the length of their reigns is not. Good kings cover most of the history of the southern kingdom.
Thus as early as the days of Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and successor, “Judah did what was evil in the sight of the Lord”; its people worshiped at high places “on every high hill” and imitated the practices of the nations (
1
Kings
14
:
22
–
24
). The punishment for this apostasy was quick and painful. The Egyptian pharaoh Shishak marched on Jerusalem in the fifth
year of Rehoboam (
926
BCE
) and took away a heavy tribute from the treasures of the Temple and the palace of the Davidic kings (
1
Kings
14
:
25
–
26
). The lesson was not learned by Rehoboam’s son Abijam, who “walked in all the sins which his father did before him; and his heart was not wholly true to the L
ORD
his God” (
1
Kings
15
:
3
). The misfortunes of Judah continued with intermittent conflicts with the armies of the kingdom of Israel.
Matters took a turn for the better during the reign of Asa, who ruled in Jerusalem for forty-one years beginning in the late tenth century. Asa reportedly “did what was right in the eyes of the L
ORD
, as David his father had done” (
1
Kings
15
:
11
). It is not surprising, therefore, that in his time Jerusalem was saved from the assault of Baasha, king of Israel. Asa appealed for help from the king of Aram-Damascus, who attacked Israel’s far northern borders, thus forcing Baasha to withdraw his invasion force from the northern outskirts of Jerusalem.
The next king, Jehoshaphat (the first Hebrew monarch to bear a name compounded with a variant of the divine name YHWH:
Yeho
+
shaphat
= “YHWH has judged”), was praised for walking in the way of his righteous father, Asa. He ruled in Jerusalem for twenty-five years in the first half of the ninth century
BCE
, concluded peace with the kingdom of Israel, and joined it in successful offensive operations against Aram and Moab.
The kingdom of Judah experienced ups and downs through the following centuries, reaching a low point when Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram married into the sinful family of Ahab and Jezebel. Predictable misfortune resulted: Edom (long a dependency of Judah) rose up in revolt, and Judah lost rich agricultural territories to the Philistines in the western Shephelah. Even more serious were the bloody repercussions of the fall of the Omrides that rocked the royal palace in Jerusalem. Ahaziah—the son of Jehoram and the Omride princess Athaliah—was killed in the course of Jehu’s coup. Back in Jerusalem, Athaliah, on hearing news of the death of her son and all her relatives at the hands of Jehu, ordered the liquidation of all the royal heirs of the house of David and took the throne herself. For six years a priest of the Temple named Jehoiada waited. When the time was ripe he publicly announced that a Davidic heir had been saved from Athaliah’s carnage, and produced the boy Jehoash, son of Ahaziah from another wife. With the anointing of Jehoash as the rightful Davidic king, Athaliah was
slain. The period of northern, Omride influence in the southern kingdom, in the course of which the cult of Baal was introduced to Jerusalem (
2
Kings
11
:
18
), came to a bloody end.
Jehoash reigned in Jerusalem for forty years and “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all his days” (
2
Kings
12
:
2
). His most important act was the renovation of the Temple. In his time Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, threatened Jerusalem. He left the city in peace only after demanding—and collecting—a crippling tribute from the Judahite king (
2
Kings
12
:
18
–
19
); but this was not as terrible as the destruction that Hazael spread in the northern kingdom.
The Judahite pendulum of good and bad kings—and sometime both mixed together—would continue. Amaziah, a moderately righteous king who “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not like David his father” (
2
Kings
14
:
3
), launched a successful war against Edom, only to be defeated and captured by the armies of the kingdom of Israel, which invaded the territory of Judah and broke down the wall of Jerusalem. And so the story continued, through the reigns of the righteous Azariah (also known as Uzziah), who expanded the borders of Judah in the south, and his son Jotham.
A dramatic turn for the worse came with the death of Jotham and the coronation of Ahaz (
743
–
727
BCE
). Ahaz is judged exceptionally harshly by the Bible, going far beyond the usual measure of apostasy:
And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the L
ORD
his God, as his father David had done, but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel. He even burned his son as an offering, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the L
ORD
drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree. (
2
K
INGS
16
:
2
–
4
)