అధ్యాయం 9: యూదా పరివర్తన

English original

[ PART THREE ]

Judah and the Making of Biblical History

English original

[ 9 ] The Transformation of Judah (c. 930–705 BCE) 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

English original

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. Good Kings and Bad 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

English original

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 LORD 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 LORD, 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

English original

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 LORD 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 LORD drove out before the people of Israel. And he

English original

sacrificed and burned incense on the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree. (2 KINGS 16:2–4) The result was disastrous. The restive Edomites took Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba, and Rezin, the powerful king of Damascus, and his ally Pekah, king of Israel, went to war against Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. With his back to the wall, King Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria, for help, with gifts from the Temple: “And the king of Assyria hearkened to him; the king of Assyria marched up against Damascus, and took it, carrying its people captive to Kir, and he killed Rezin” (2 Kings 16:9). Judah was at least temporarily saved by the clever stratagem of a wicked king appealing to the mighty Assyrian empire. But the time for a far-reaching religious change had come. The unending cycle of apostasy, punishment, and repentance was about to be broken. For Ahaz’s son Hezekiah, who ruled in Jerusalem for twenty-nine years, embarked on a sweeping religious reform, restoring the purity and fidelity to YHWH that had been lacking since the days of King David. One of the strongest manifestations of the cult that was practiced in the countryside of Judah was the popularity of the high places—or open-air altars—which were rarely disturbed, even by the most righteous of kings. Like a mantra, the Bible recites a formula in the summary of the acts of every just king, that “the high places were not taken away”; the people of Judah continued to sacrifice and to burn incense on the high places. Hezekiah was the first to remove the high places as well as other objects of idolatrous worship: And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had burned incense to it; it was called Nehushtan. He trusted in the LORD the God of Israel; so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the LORD; he did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments which the LORD commanded Moses. And the LORD was with him; wherever he went forth, he prospered. (2 KINGS 18:3–7) The biblical picture of Judah’s history is therefore unambiguous in its belief that the kingdom had once been exceptionally holy but had sometimes abandoned the faith. Only the accession of Hezekiah was able to restore Judah’s holiness. Yet archaeology suggests quite a different situation—one in which the golden age of tribal and Davidic fidelity to YHWH was a late religious ideal, not a historical reality. Instead of a restoration, the evidence suggests that a centralized monarchy and national religion focused in Jerusalem took centuries to develop and was new in Hezekiah’s day. The idolatry of the people of Judah was not a departure from their earlier monotheism. It was, instead, the way the people of Judah had worshiped for

English original

hundreds of years. The Hidden Face of Ancient Judah Until a few years ago, virtually all biblical archaeologists accepted the scriptural description of the sister states of Judah and Israel at face value. They portrayed Judah as a fully developed state as early as the time of Solomon and tried their best to produce archaeological proof of the building activities and effective regional administration of the early Judahite kings. Yet as we have shown, the supposed archaeological evidence of the united monarchy was no more than wishful thinking. And so it was also with the monuments attributed to the successors of Solomon. The identification of forts reportedly built by Solomon’s son Rehoboam throughout Judah (according to 2 Chronicles 11:5–12) and the linking of the massive fortifications at the site of Tell en-Nasbeh north of Jerusalem with the defense works undertaken by the Judahite king Asa at the biblical city of Mizpah (1 Kings 15:22) proved to be illusory. Like the Solomonic gates and palaces, these royal building operations are now known to have taken place almost two hundred years after the reigns of those particular kings. Archaeology shows that the early kings of Judah were not the equals of their northern counterparts in power or administrative ability despite the fact that their reigns and even accession dates are intertwined in the books of Kings. Israel and Judah were two different worlds. With the possible exception of the city of Lachish in the foothills of the Shephelah, there are no signs of elaborate regional centers within Judah on the scale of the northern sites of Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor. Likewise, Judahite urban planning and architecture was far more rustic. Monumental building techniques—such as the use of ashlar masonry and Proto- Aeolic capitals that typified the elaborate Omride building style in the northern kingdom—did not appear in the south before the seventh century BCE. Even if royal structures of the house of David in Jerusalem (supposedly obliterated by later buildings) achieved some measure of impressiveness, if not grandeur, there is no evidence for monumental construction in the few towns and villages anywhere else in the southern hills. Despite the long-standing contention that the opulent Solomonic court was the scene of a flourishing of belles lettres, religious thought, and history writing, evidence for widespread literacy is utterly lacking in Judah during the time of the divided monarchy. Not a single trace of supposed tenth century Judahite literary activity has been found. Indeed, monumental inscriptions and personal seals—

English original

essential signs of a fully developed state—appear in Judah only two hundred years after Solomon, in the late eighth century BCE. Most of the known ostraca and inscribed weight stones—further evidence of bureaucratic record keeping and regularized trade standards—appear only in the seventh century. Nor is there any evidence for mass production of pottery in centralized workshops or industrial production of oil for export until the same late period. The estimated population figures show precisely how unequal Judah and Israel were. As mentioned, archaeological surveys indicate that until the eighth century the population of the Judahite highlands was about one-tenth that of the highlands of the northern kingdom of Israel.

English original

TABLE SIX

JUDAHITE KINGS FROM REHOBOAM TO AHAZ

KING:

Rehoboam

DATES*

931–914

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

First king of Judah; fortifies cities

EXTRABIBLICAL EVIDENCE:

Shishak’s campaign

KING:

Abijam

DATES*

914–911

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Fights Jeroboam of Israel

KING:

Asa

DATES*

911–870

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Cleans Judah from foreign cults; fights Baasha of Israel with the assistance of the king of Damascus; builds two forts on the northern border of Judah

KING:

Jehoshaphat

DATES*

870–846**

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Fights the Arameans with Ahab and Moab with Jehoram; marries his son to an Omride princess

KING:

851–843**

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Edom revolts against Judah

English original

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS:

Mentioned in the Tel Dan inscription?

KING:

Ahaziah

DATES*

843–842

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

An Omride offspring; killed in the course of the Jehu coup in Israel

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS:

Mentioned in the Tel Dan inscription?

KING:

Athaliah

DATES*

842–836

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Murders many of the House of David; killed in a bloody coup

KING:

Jehoash

DATES*

836–798

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Renovates the temple; saves Jerusalem from Hazael; killed in a coup

KING:

Amaziah

DATES*

798–769

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Defeats Edom; attacked by Joash king of Israel

KING:

Azariah (also known as Uzziah)

DATES*

785–733**

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

English original

Secluded in leper’s house; days of the prophet Isaiah

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS:

Two seals carry his name

KING:

Jotham

DATES*

759–743**

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Good

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Pressed by the kings of Israel and Aram; days of Isaiah

KING:

Ahaz

DATES*

743–727**

BIBLICAL EVALUATION:

Bad

BIBLICAL TESTIMONY:

Attacked by the kings of Israel and Aram; calls Tiglath-pileser III for help; days of Isaiah

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS:

Pays tribute to Tiglath-pileser III; prosperity in the Judahite hill country begins * According to the Anchor Bible Dictionary and Galil’s The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah ** Includes years as co-regent

English original

In light of these findings, it is now clear that Iron Age Judah enjoyed no precocious golden age. David and his son Solomon and the subsequent members of the Davidic dynasty ruled over a marginal, isolated, rural region, with no signs of great wealth or centralized administration. It did not suddenly decline into weakness and misfortune from an era of unparalleled prosperity. Instead it underwent a long and gradual development over hundreds of years. David and Solomon’s Jerusalem was only one of a number of religious centers within the land of Israel; it was surely not acknowledged as the spiritual center of the entire people of Israel initially. So far we have produced only negative evidence of what Judah was not. Yet we do have a picture of what Jerusalem and its vicinity must have been like at the time of David and Solomon and their early successors. That picture does not come from the Bible. It comes from the Tell el-Amarna archive of Egypt in the Late Bronze Age. The Faraway City-State in the Hills Among the more than 350 cuneiform tablets from the fourteenth century BCE discovered at the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, the modern Tell el- Amarna, containing correspondence between the pharaoh of Egypt and the kings of Asiatic states and petty rulers of Canaan, a group of six tablets offers a unique insight on the royal rule and economic possibilities in the southern highlands— precisely where the kingdom of Judah would later arise. Written by Abdi-Heba, the king of Urusalim (the Late Bronze Age name for Jerusalem), the letters reveal the character of his kingdom as a thinly settled highland region, loosely supervised from the royal citadel in Jerusalem. As we now know from surveys and the recognition of repeated cycles of occupation throughout the millennia, Judah’s distinctive society was determined in large measure by its remote geographical position, unpredictable rainfall, and rugged terrain. In contrast to the northern hill country with its broad valleys and natural overland routes to the neighboring regions, Judah was always marginal agriculturally and isolated from the main trade routes, offering any would-be ruler only meager opportunities for wealth. Its economy was concentrated around the self-sufficient production of the individual farming community or pastoral group. A similar picture emerges from Abdi-Heba’s correspondence. He controlled the highlands from the region of Bethel in the north to the region of Hebron in the south—an area of about nine hundred square miles, in conflict with neighboring

English original

rulers in the northern highlands (Shechem) and the Shephelah. His land was very sparsely populated, with only eight small settlements detected so far. The sedentary population of Abdi-Heba’s territory, including those living in Jerusalem, probably did not exceed fifteen hundred people; it was the most thinly populated area of Canaan. But there were many pastoral groups in this remote highland frontier zone —possibly outnumbering the settled village population. We may assume that the main authority in the remote parts of Abdi-Heba’s territory was in the hands of the outlaws known as Apiru, the bedouin-like Shosu, and the independent clans. Abdi-Heba’s capital, Urusalim, was a small highlands stronghold, located in the southeastern ridge of ancient Jerusalem, which would later be known as the city of David. No monumental buildings or fortifications from the fourteenth century BCE have been found there, and as suggested by the historian Nadav Naaman Abdi- Heba’s capital was a modest settlement for the elite who ruled over the surrounding region’s few agricultural villages and large number of pastoral groups. We do not know the fate of the dynasty of Abdi-Heba and we do not have sufficient archaeological evidence to understand the changes that took place in Jerusalem in the transition from the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age. Yet from the larger perspective of environment, settlement patterns, and economy, nothing seems to have changed dramatically over the succeeding centuries. A few agricultural villages (admittedly increasing slightly in number) existed on the central plateau, pastoral groups continued to follow seasonal cycles with their flocks, and a tiny elite exerted nominal rule over all of them from Jerusalem. Of the historical David we can say almost nothing, except to note the uncanny similarity between the ragtag Apiru bands that threatened Abdi-Heba and the biblical tales of the outlaw chief David and his band of mighty men roaming in the Hebron hills and the Judean desert. But whether or not David conquered Jerusalem in the daring Apiru-like raid described in the books of Samuel, it seems clear that the dynasty he established represented a change in rulers but hardly altered the basic way that the southern highlands were ruled. 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.

English original

The Traditional Religion of Judah 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 LORD, 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 LORD drove out before the people of Israel. (1 KINGS 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

English original

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

English original

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. A Sudden Coming of Age 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

English original

thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants.

English original

Figure 26: The expansion of Jerusalem from the “City of David” to the Western Hill

English original

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

English original

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. The Birth of a New National Religion Along with the extraordinary social transformation in the late eighth century BCE came an intense religious struggle that had a direct connection to the emergence of the Bible as we know it today. Before the crystallization of the kingdom of Judah as a fully bureaucratic state, religious ideas were diverse and dispersed. Thus, as we have mentioned, there was the royal cult in the Jerusalem Temple, there were the countless fertility and ancestor cults in the countryside, and there was the widespread mixing of the worship of YHWH with that of other gods. As far as we are able to tell from the archaeological evidence of the northern kingdom, there was a similar diversity of religious practice in Israel. Aside from memories of the strident preaching of figures like Elijah and Elisha, the anti-Omride puritanism of Jehu, and the harsh words of prophets like Amos and Hosea, there was never any concerted or long-lasting effort by the Israelite government to sanction the worship of YHWH alone. But after the fall of Samaria, with the increasing centralization of the kingdom of Judah, a new, more focused attitude toward religious law and practice began to

English original

catch hold. Jerusalem’s influence—demographic, economic, and political—was now enormous and it was linked to a new political and territorial agenda: the unification of all Israel. And the determination of its priestly and prophetic establishment to define the “proper” methods of worship for all the people of Judah—and indeed for those Israelites living under Assyrian rule in the north—rose accordingly. These dramatic changes in religious leadership have prompted biblical scholars such as Baruch Halpern to suggest that in a period of no more than a few decades in the late eighth and early seventh century BCE, the monotheistic tradition of Judeo- Christian civilization was born. That is a big claim—to be able to pinpoint the birth of the modern religious consciousness, especially when its central scripture, the Bible, places the birth of monotheism hundreds of years earlier. But in this case too the Bible offers a retrospective interpretation rather than an accurate description of the past. Indeed, the social developments going on in Judah in the decades after the fall of Samaria offer a new perspective on how the traditional tales of wandering patriarchs and of a great national liberation from Egypt served the cause of religious innovation—the emergence of monotheistic ideas—within the newly crystallized Judahite state. Sometime in the late eighth century BCE there arose an increasingly vocal school of thought that insisted that the cults of the countryside were sinful—and that YHWH alone should be worshiped. We cannot be sure where the idea originated. It is expressed in the cycle of stories of Elijah and Elisha (set down in writing long after the fall of the Omrides) and, more important, in the works of the prophets Amos and Hosea, both of whom were active in the eighth century in the north. As a result, some biblical scholars have suggested that this movement originated among dissident priests and prophets in the last days of the northern kingdom who were aghast at the idolatry and social injustice of the Assyrian period. After the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, they fled southward to promulgate their ideas. Other scholars have pointed to circles connected with the Temple of Jerusalem intent on exercising religious and economic control over the increasingly developed countryside. Perhaps both factors played a part in the close-packed atmosphere of Jerusalem after the fall of Samaria, when refugees from the north and Judahite priests and royal officials worked together. Whatever its makeup, the new religious movement (dubbed the “YHWH-alone movement” by the iconoclastic historian Morton Smith) waged a bitter and continuing conflict with the supporters of the older, more traditional Judahite religious customs and rituals. It is difficult to assess their relative strength within the kingdom of Judah. Even though they seem to have been initially a small minority,

English original

they were the ones who later produced or influenced much of the biblical historiography that has survived. The moment was fortuitous for this; with the expansion of bureaucratic administration came a spread in literacy. For the first time the authority of written texts, rather than recited epics or ballads, had an enormous effect. As should be abundantly clear by now, the passages in the books of Kings about the righteousness and sinfulness of the earlier kings of Judah reflects the ideology of the YHWH-alone movement. Had the supporters of the traditional modes of syncretistic worship won out in the end, we might have possessed an entirely different scripture—or perhaps none at all. For it was the intention of the YHWH- alone movement to create an unquestioned orthodoxy of worship—and a single, Jerusalem-centered national history. And it succeeded brilliantly in the crafting of what would become the laws of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History.1 Biblical scholars have usually emphasized the strictly religious aspects of the struggle between the Jerusalem factions, but there is no doubt that their positions encompassed strong views on domestic and foreign policy as well. In the ancient world, as today, the sphere of religion could never be separated from the spheres of economics, politics, and culture. The ideas of the “YHWH-alone” groups had a territorial aspect—the quest for the “restoration” of the Davidic dynasty over all Israel, including the territories of the vanquished northern kingdom, where, as we have seen, many Israelites continued to live after the fall of Samaria. This would bring about the unification of all Israel under one king ruling from Jerusalem, the destruction of the cult centers in the north, and the centralization of the Israelite cult in Jerusalem. It is easy to see why the biblical authors were so upset by idolatry. It was a symbol of chaotic social diversity; the leaders of the clans in the outlying areas conducted their own systems of economics, politics, and social relations—without administration or control by the court in Jerusalem. That countryside independence, however time-honored by the people of Judah, came to be condemned as a “reversion” to the barbarity of the pre-Israelite period. Thus, ironically, what was most genuinely Judahite was labeled as Canaanite heresy. In the arena of religious debate and polemic, what was old was suddenly seen as foreign and what was new was suddenly seen as true. And in what can only be called an extraordinary outpouring of retrospective theology, the new, centralized kingdom of Judah and the Jerusalem-centered worship of YHWH was read back into Israelite history as the way things should always have been.

English original

King Hezekiah’s Reforms? It is difficult to know when the new, exclusivist theology first had a practical impact on the conduct of affairs in Judah; various reforms in the direction of YHWH-alone worship are mentioned in the books of Kings as early as the time of King Asa in the early ninth century BCE. But their historical reliability is questionable. One thing seems to be fairly clear: the accession of King Hezekiah to the throne of Judah in the late eighth century BCE was remembered by the authors of the books of Kings as an event without precedent. As described in 2 Kings 18:3–7, the ultimate goal of Hezekiah’s reform was the establishment of the exclusive worship of YHWH, in the only legitimate place for that worship—the Temple of Jerusalem. But Hezekiah’s religious reforms are difficult to detect in the archaeological record. The evidence found for them, especially at two sites in the south—Arad and Beersheba—is disputed.2 Baruch Halpern has therefore proposed that Hezekiah banned countryside worship but did not close the state temples in the kingdom’s administrative centers. Yet there is no question that by the reign of King Hezekiah, a profound change had come over the land of Judah. Judah was now the center of the people of Israel. Jerusalem was the center of the worship of YHWH. And the members of the Davidic dynasty were the only legitimate representatives and agents of YHWH’s rule on earth. The unpredictable course of history had elected Judah to a special status at a particularly crucial moment. The most dramatic events were yet to come. In 705 BCE, the venerable Assyrian king Sargon II died, leaving his largely untested son Sennacherib to inherit his throne. Troubles in the east of the empire ensued, and the once invincible façade of Assyria seemed in danger of toppling. For many in Jerusalem, it must have seemed that YHWH had miraculously readied Judah—just in the nick of time—to fulfill its historic destiny.