The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (46 page)

One thing is clear. The Deuteronomistic historian, who saw Josiah as a divinely anointed messiah destined to redeem Judah and lead it to glory was clearly at a loss to explain how such a historical catastrophe could occur and left only a curt, enigmatic reference to Josiah’s death. The dreams of this king and would-be messiah were brutally silenced at the hill of Megiddo. Decades of spiritual revival and visionary hopes seemingly collapsed
overnight. Josiah was dead and the people of Israel were again enslaved by Egypt.

If this was not devastating enough, the following years brought even greater calamities. After the death of Josiah, the great reform movement apparently crumbled. The last four kings of Judah—three of them sons of Josiah—are negatively judged in the Bible, as apostates. Indeed, the last two decades in the history of Judah are described by the Deuteronomistic History as a period of continuous decline, leading to the destruction of the Judahite state.

Josiah’s successor Jehoahaz, seemingly anti-Egyptian, ruled for only three months and reverted to the idolatrous ways of the earlier kings of Judah. Deposed and exiled by Pharaoh Necho, he was replaced by his brother Jehoiakim, who also “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” adding insult to impiety by exacting tribute from the people of the land in order to hand it over to Pharaoh Necho, his overlord.

There is clear documentation in the Bible (including the prophetic works of the time), confirmed by extrabiblical sources, that describes the tumultuous struggle between the rival great powers that took place in the years that followed the death of Josiah. Egypt apparently maintained control of the western territories of the former Assyrian empire for several more years, bringing to a new height the dreams of resurrecting the pharaonic glory of old. But in Mesopotamia, the power of the Babylonians steadily grew. In 605
BCE
, the Babylonian crown prince later known as Nebuchadnezzar crushed the Egyptian army at Carchemish in Syria (an event recorded in Jeremiah 46:2), causing the Egyptian forces to flee in panic back toward the Nile. With that defeat, the Assyrian empire was finally and irrevocably dismembered, and Nebuchadnezzar, now king of Babylon, sought to gain complete control over all the lands to the west.

The Babylonian forces soon marched down the Mediterranean coastal plain, laying waste to the rich Philistine cities. In Judah, the pro-Egyptian faction that had taken over the Jerusalem court a few months after the death of Josiah was thrown into a panic—and their desperate appeals to
Necho for military assistance against the Babylonians merely heightened their political vulnerability in the terrible days that lay ahead.

And so the Babylonian noose around Jerusalem tightened. The Babylonians were now intent on the plunder and complete devastation of the Judahite state. After the sudden death of Jehoiakim, his son Jehoiachin faced the might of the terrifying Babylonian army:

At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to the city, while his servants were besieging it; and Jehoiachin the king of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon, himself, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his palace officials. The king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign, and carried off all the treasures of the house of the L
ORD
, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the L
ORD
, which Solomon king of Israel had made, as the L
ORD
had foretold. He carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths; none remained, except the poorest people of the land. And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon; the king’s mother, the king’s wives, his officials, and the chief men of the land, he took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon. And the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon all the men of valor, seven thousand, and the craftsmen and the smiths, one thousand, all of them strong and fit for war. (
2
K
INGS
24
:10–16)

These events that took place in 597
BCE
are also documented by the Babylonian Chronicle:

In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against the City of Judah and on the second day of the month of Adar he seized the city and captured the king. He appointed there a king of his own choice and taking heavy tribute brought it back into Babylon.

The Jerusalem aristocracy and priesthood—among whom the Deuteronomistic ideology burned most passionately—were taken off into exile, to leave increasing conflict among those remaining factions of the Davidic royal house and court who had no clear idea what to do.

But that was only the first step in the forcible dismantling of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar immediately replaced the exiled Jehoiachin with his uncle Zedekiah, apparently a more docile vassal. It was a mistake; a few years later Zedekiah plotted with neighboring kings to rise up again, and like a character in a Greek tragedy, he doomed himself and his city. In 587
BCE
Nebuchadnezzar arrived with his formidable army and laid siege to Jerusalem. It was the beginning of the end.

With the Babylonian forces rampaging through the countryside, the outlying cities of Judah fell one by one. Clear archaeological evidence for the last years of the southern kingdom has come from almost every late-monarchic site excavated in Judah: in the Beersheba valley, in the Shephelah, and in the Judahite highlands. At the fortress of Arad, a center of Judahite control and military operations in the south, a group of ostraca, or inscribed potsherds, were found in the rubble of the destruction containing the frantic orders for the movements of troops and transportation of food supplies. At Lachish in the Shephelah, ostraca found in the ruins of the last city gate offer a poignant glimpse of the last moments of the independence of Judah as the signal fires from the neighboring towns are snuffed out, one by one. Presumably written to the commander of Lachish from an outpost in the vicinity, it reveals an impending sense of doom:

And may my lord know that we are watching for the signals of Lachish according to all the signs that my lord gave. For we do not see Azekah . . . 

This grim report is confirmed by a description in the book of Jeremiah (34:7), that notes that Lachish and Azekah were indeed the last cities in Judah to withstand the Babylonian assault.

Finally, all that was left was Jerusalem. The biblical description of its last hours is nothing less than horrifying:

. . . the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land. Then a breach was made in the city; the king with all the men of war fled by night . . . And they went in the direction of the Arabah. But the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king, and overtook him in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was scattered from him. Then they captured the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, who passed sentence upon him. They
slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him in fetters, and took him to Babylon. (
2
K
INGS
25
:3–7)

The last act in the tragedy took place about a month later:

Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguards, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the L
ORD
and the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem . . . And all the army of the Chaldeans . . . broke down the walls around Jerusalem. And the rest of the people who were left in the city . . . Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile.
(2
K
INGS
25:8–11)

The archaeological finds convey only the last horrible moments of violence. Signs of a great conflagration have been traced almost everywhere within the city walls. Arrowheads found in the houses and near the northern fortifications attest to the intensity of the last battle for Jerusalem. The private houses, which were set alight and collapsed, burying all that was in them, created the charred heaps of rubble that stood as a testament to the thoroughness of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians for the next century and a half (Nehemiah 2:13).

And so it was all over. Four hundred years of Judah’s history came to an end in fire and blood. The proud kingdom of Judah was utterly devastated, its economy ruined, its society ripped apart. The last king in a dynasty that had ruled for centuries was tortured and imprisoned in Babylon. His sons were all killed. The Temple of Jerusalem—the only legitimate place for the worship of YHWH—was destroyed.

The religion and national existence of the people of Israel could have ended in this great disaster. Miraculously, both survived.

In order to understand the full story of ancient Israel and the making of biblical history, we cannot stop at Josiah’s death, nor can we halt at the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the fall of the Davidic dynasty. It is crucial to examine what happened in Judah in the decades that followed the Babylonian conquest, to survey the developments that occurred among the exiles in Babylon, and to recount the events that took place in post-exilic Jerusalem. In these times and places, the texts of both the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History underwent far-reaching additions and revisions, arriving at what was substantially their final form. Meanwhile the people of Israel developed new modes of communal organization and worship in Babylon and Jerusalem during the sixth and fifth centuries
BCE
that formed the foundations of Second Temple Judaism and thus of early Christianity. The events and processes that took place in the century and half after the conquest of the kingdom of Judah—as we can reconstruct them from the historical sources and archaeological evidence—are therefore crucial for understanding how the Judeo-Christian tradition emerged.

Before continuing with the biblical story we must take note of the meaningful change in the biblical sources at our disposal. The Deuteronomistic History, which narrated the history of Israel from the end of the
wandering in the wilderness to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, ends abruptly. Other biblical authors take over. The situation in Judah after the destruction is described in the book of Jeremiah, while the book of Ezekiel (written by one of the exiles) provides information on the life and expectations of the Judahite deportees in Babylonia. Events that took place when the successive waves of exiles returned to Jerusalem are reported in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. This is also the moment in our story when we must change our terminology: the kingdom of Judah becomes Yehud—the Aramaic name of the province in the Persian empire—and the people of Judah, the Judahites, will henceforth be known as
Yehudim,
or Jews.

This climactic phase of the history of Israel begins with a scene of utter disaster and hopelessness. Jerusalem is destroyed, the Temple is in ruins, the last reigning Davidic king, Zedekiah, is blinded and exiled, his sons slaughtered. Many members of the Judahite elite are deported. The situation has reached a low point and it seems as if the history of the people of Israel has reached a bitter and irreversible end.

Not quite so. From the concluding chapter of 2 Kings and from the book of Jeremiah, we learn that part of the population of Judah had survived and was not deported. The Babylonian authorities even allowed them a measure of autonomy, appointing an official named Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, to rule over the people who remained in Judah, admittedly “the poorest of the land.” Mizpah, a modest town north of Jerusalem, became the center of Gedaliah’s administration and a haven for other Judahites, like the prophet Jeremiah, who had opposed the ill-fated uprising against Babylonia. Gedaliah tried to persuade the people of Judah to cooperate with the Babylonians and rebuild their lives and future, despite the destruction of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem. But soon Gedaliah was assassinated by Ishmael, the son of Nethaniah, “of the royal family”—possibly because Gedaliah’s cooperation with the Babylonians was viewed as posing a threat to the future hopes of the Davidic house. Other Judahite officials and Babylonian imperial representatives present at Mizpah were also killed. The surviving members of the local population decided to flee
for their lives, leaving Judah virtually uninhabited. The people “both small and great” went to Egypt, “for they were afraid of the Chaldeans” (as the Babylonians were also known). The prophet Jeremiah fled with them, bringing to an apparent end centuries of Israelite occupation of the Promised Land (2 Kings 25:22–26; Jeremiah 40:7–43:7).

The Bible provides few details about the life of the exiles during the next fifty years. Our only sources are the indirect and often obscure allusions in various prophetic works. Ezekiel and Second Isaiah (chapters 40–55 in the book of Isaiah) tell us that the Judahite exiles lived both in the capital city of Babylon and in the countryside. The priestly and royal deportees established new lives for themselves, with the exiled Davidic king Jehoiachin—rather than the disgraced and blinded Zedekiah—possibly maintaining some sort of authority over the community. From scattered references in the book of Ezekiel, it seems that the Judahite settlements were placed in undeveloped areas of the Babylonian kingdom, near newly dug canals. Ezekiel, himself an exiled priest of the Jerusalem Temple, lived for a while in a settlement on an ancient mound named Tel-abib (in Hebrew, Tel Aviv; Ezekiel 3:15).

Of the nature of their life, the biblical texts reveal little except to note that the exiles settled in for a long stay, following the advice of Jeremiah: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease” (Jeremiah 29:5–6). But history would soon take a sudden and dramatic turn that would bring many of the exiles back to Jerusalem.