The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (38 page)

All this suggests that the institutions of Jerusalem—Temple and palace—did not dominate the lives of the rural population of Judah in anything close to the extent suggested by the biblical texts. Continuity with the past, not sudden political or religious innovations, was Judah’s most obvious characteristic in the early centuries of the Iron Age. In fact, this is to be seen clearly even in the matter of religious practices, about which the later historians of the kingdom of Judah seem to be so singularly obsessed.

The books of Kings are explicit in their description of the apostasy that brought so much misfortune to the kingdom of Judah. It is set out in typical detail in the report of Rehoboam’s reign:

And Judah did what was evil in the sight of the L
ORD
, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they committed, more than all that their fathers had done. For they also built for themselves high places, and pillars, and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree; and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to the abominations of the nations which the L
ORD
drove out before the people of Israel. (
1
K
INGS
14
:
22
–
24
)

Likewise at the time of King Ahaz, some two hundred years later, the nature of the sins seems to be substantially the same. Ahaz was a notorious apostate who walked in the way of the kings of Israel and even burned his son as an offering (
2
Kings
16
:
2
–
4
).

Biblical scholars have demonstrated that these are not arbitrary isolated pagan practices, but part of a complex of rituals to appeal to heavenly powers for the fertility and well-being of the people and the land. In their outward form they resembled the practices used by neighboring peoples to honor and gain the blessings of other gods. Indeed, the archaeological finds of clay figurines, incense altars, libation vessels, and offerings stands throughout Judah merely suggest that the practice of religion was highly varied, geographically decentralized, and certainly not restricted to worship of YHWH only in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Indeed, for Judah, with its relatively underdeveloped state bureaucracy and national institutions, religious rituals were carried out in two distinct arenas—sometimes working in concert, sometimes in open conflict. The first was the Temple in Jerusalem, about which there is abundant biblical description from various periods but (since its site was obliterated in later building operations) virtually no archaeological evidence. The second focus of religious practice was among the clans scattered throughout the countryside. There, complex networks of kinship relations dominated all phases of life, including religion. Rituals for the fertility of the land and the blessings of the ancestors gave people hope for the well-being of their families and sanctified their possession of their village fields and grazing lands.

Biblical historian Baruch Halpern and archaeologist Lawrence Stager have compared the biblical descriptions of clan structure with the remains of Iron Age settlements in the hill country and have identified a distinctive architectural pattern of extended family compounds, whose inhabitants probably performed rituals that were sometimes quite different from those in the Temple of Jerusalem. Local customs and traditions insisted that the Judahites inherited their houses, their land, and even their tombs from their God and their ancestors. Sacrifices were offered at shrines within domestic compounds, at family tombs, and at open altars throughout the countryside. These places of worship were rarely disturbed, even by the most “pious” and aggressive of kings. Thus it is no wonder that the Bible repeatedly notes that “the high places were not taken away.”

The existence of high places and other forms of ancestral and household god worship was not—as the books of Kings imply—apostasy from an earlier, purer faith. It was part of the timeless tradition of the hill country
settlers of Judah, who worshiped YHWH along with a variety of gods and goddesses known or adapted from the cults of neighboring peoples. YHWH, in short, was worshiped in a wide variety of ways—and sometimes pictured as having a heavenly entourage. From the indirect (and pointedly negative) evidence of the books of Kings, we learn that priests in the countryside also regularly burned incense on the high places to the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Since the high places were presumably open areas or natural hilltops, no definite archaeological traces of them have as yet been identified. So the clearest archaeological evidence of the popularity of this type of worship throughout the kingdom is the discovery of hundreds of figurines of naked fertility goddesses at every late monarchic site in Judah. More suggestive are the inscriptions found in the early eighth century site of Kuntillet Ajrud in northeastern Sinai—a site that shows cultural links with the northern kingdom. They apparently refer to the goddess Asherah as being the consort of YHWH. And lest it be assumed that YHWH’s married status was just a sinful northern hallucination, a somewhat similar formula, speaking of YHWH and his Asherah, appears in a late-monarchic inscription from the Shephelah of Judah.

This deep-rooted cult was not restricted to the rural districts. There is ample biblical and archaeological information that the syncretistic cult of YHWH flourished in Jerusalem even in late monarchic times. The condemnations of various Judahite prophets make it abundantly clear that YHWH was worshiped in Jerusalem
together
with other deities, such as Baal, Asherah, the hosts of heaven, and even the national deities of the neighboring lands. From the biblical critique of Solomon (probably reflecting late monarchic realities), we learn of worship in Judah of Milcom of Ammon, Chemosh of Moab, and Ashtoreth of Sidon (
1
Kings
11
:
5
;
2
Kings
23
:
13
). Jeremiah tells us that the number of deities worshiped in Judah equaled the number of its cities and that the number of altars to Baal in Jerusalem equaled the number of bazaar stalls in the capital (Jeremiah
11
:
13
). Moreover, cult objects dedicated to Baal, Asherah, and the host of heaven were installed in the Temple of YHWH in Jerusalem. Ezekiel
8
describes in detail all the abominations practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem, including the worship of the Mesopotamian god Tammuz.

Thus the great sins of Ahaz and the other evil kings of Judah should not
be seen as exceptional in any way. These rulers merely allowed the rural traditions to go on unhampered. They and many of their subjects expressed their devotion to YHWH in rites performed at countless tombs, shrines, and high places throughout the kingdom, with the occasional and subsidiary worship of other gods.

Through most of the two hundred years of the era of the divided monarchy, Judah remained in the shadows. Its limited economic potential, its relative geographical isolation, and the tradition-bound conservatism of its clans made it far less attractive for imperial exploitation by the Assyrians than the larger, richer kingdom of Israel. But with the rise of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III (
745
–
727
BCE
) and Ahaz’s decision to become his vassal, Judah entered a game with enormous stakes. After
720
, with the conquest of Samaria and the fall of Israel, Judah was surrounded by Assyrian provinces and Assyrian vassals. And that new situation would have implications for the future almost too vast to contemplate. The royal citadel of Jerusalem was transformed in a single generation from the seat of a rather insignificant local dynasty into the political and religious nerve center of a regional power—both because of dramatic internal developments and because thousands of refugees from the conquered kingdom of Israel fled to the south.

Here archaeology has been invaluable in charting the pace and scale of Jerusalem’s sudden expansion. As first suggested by Israeli archaeologist Magen Broshi, excavations conducted there in recent decades have shown that suddenly, at the end of the eighth century
BCE
, Jerusalem underwent an unprecedented population explosion, with its residential areas expanding from its former narrow ridge—the city of David—to cover the entire western hill (
Figure
26
). A formidable defensive wall was constructed to include the new suburbs. In a matter of a few decades—surely within a single generation—Jerusalem was transformed from a modest highland town of about ten or twelve acres to a huge urban area of
150
acres of closely packed houses, workshops, and public buildings. In demographic terms, the city’s population may have increased as much as fifteen times, from about one thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants.

A similar picture of tremendous population growth emerges from the archaeological surveys in Jerusalem’s agricultural hinterland. Not only were many farmsteads built at this time in the immediate environs of the city, but in the districts south of the capital, the formerly relatively empty countryside was flooded with new farming settlements, both large and small. Sleepy old villages grew in size and became, for the first time, real towns. In the Shephelah too, the great leap forward came in the eighth century, with a dramatic growth in the number and size of sites. Lachish—the most important city in the region—provides a good example. Until the eighth century it was a modest town; it was then surrounded by a formidable wall and transformed into a major administrative center. Likewise, the Beersheba valley in the far south witnessed the establishment of a number of new towns in the late eighth century. All in all, the expansion was astounding; by the late eighth century there were about three hundred settlements of all sizes in Judah, from the metropolis of Jerusalem to small farmsteads, where once there were only a few villages and modest towns. The population, which had long hovered at a few tens of thousands, now grew to around
120
,
000
.

In the wake of Assyria’s campaigns in the north, Judah experienced not only sudden demographic growth but also real social evolution. In a word, it became a full-fledged state. Starting in the late eighth century, the archaeological indications of mature state formation appear in the southern kingdom: monumental inscriptions, seals and seal impressions, and ostraca for royal administration; the sporadic use of ashlar masonry and stone capitals in public buildings; the mass production of pottery vessels and other crafts in central workshops, and their distribution throughout the countryside. No less important was the appearance of middle-sized towns serving as regional capitals and the development of large-scale industries of oil and wine pressing, which shifted from local, private production to state industry.

The evidence of new burial customs—mainly but not exclusively in Jerusalem—suggests that a national elite emerged at this time. In the eighth century some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem began to cut elaborate tombs in the rock of the ridges surrounding the city. Many are extremely elaborate, with gabled ceilings and architectural elements such as cornices and surmounting pyramids skillfully carved from the bedrock. There is no
doubt that these tombs were used for the burial of nobility and high public officials, as indicated by a fragmentary inscription on one of the tombs in the village of Siloam in Jerusalem (to the east of the city of David), dedicated to “[ . . . ]yahu who is in charge of the House.” It is not out of the realm of possibility that this was the tomb of Shebna (whose name may have been compounded with the divine name to become Shebnayahu), the royal steward whom Isaiah (
22
:
15
–
16
) condemns for his arrogance in hewing a tomb in the rock. Elaborate tombs are also found in a few places in the Shephelah, indicating a sudden accumulation of wealth and differentiation of social status in Jerusalem and in the countryside in the eighth century.

The question is, where did this wealth and apparent movement toward full state formation come from? The inescapable conclusion is that Judah suddenly cooperated with and even integrated itself into the economy of the Assyrian empire. Although King Ahaz of Judah started cooperating with Assyria even before the fall of Samaria, the most dramatic changes undoubtedly came after the collapse of Israel. The sudden growth of settlement far to the south in the Beersheba valley may hint that the kingdom of Judah took part in the intensification of the Arabian trade in the late eighth century under Assyrian domination. There is good reason to believe that new markets were opened to Judahite goods, stimulating intensified production of oil and wine. As a result, Judah went through an economic revolution, from a traditional system based on the village and clan to cash-cropping and industrialization under state centralization. Wealth began accumulating in Judah, especially in Jerusalem, where the kingdom’s diplomatic and economic policies were determined and where the institutions of the nation were controlled.