The Southern Kingdom of Judah
The Southern Kingdom of Judah
So far we have been following the rise and fall of the northern kingdom. The Books of Kings and Chronicles also give some account of the southern kingdom during the same period. But its history was not so colorful, and the names of its earlier kings are not so well known, except perhaps for Jehoshaphat, Ahab’s contemporary.
Now, however, the southern kingdom was to continue alone for a further 135 years. Its period of independence was ennobled in particular by two great religious reforms. The first was promoted by King Hezekiah, with the encouragement of the prophets Isaiah and Micah. The second reforming king was Josiah, who was encouraged by his distant cousin the prophet Zephaniah and by the young prophet Jeremiah.
At the very beginning of his reign Hezekiah repaired and reopened the temple. Then he resolutely removed from his kingdom all the paraphernalia of Assyrian idolatry which his father Ahaz had introduced.
These reforms were certainly the fruit of the faithful witness of Isaiah and Micah, who had been denouncing idolatry, empty ritual and social injustice and calling the people to repentance during both the preceding reigns, while Amos and Hosea were proclaiming God’s word to the northern kingdom. Here is one of Micah’s great oracles:
With what shall I come before the LORD
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Mic. 6:6–8)
Sargon King of Assyria was killed in action in 705 BC and succeeded by his son Sennacherib. This seems to have been the signal for Hezekiah’s revolt against Assyrian suzerainty. Not until 701 BC, however, did Sennacherib reach the rebel kingdom of Judah. Having taken its fortified cities, he laid siege to Jerusalem, shutting Hezekiah up (to use his own expression) “like a bird in a cage.” Fortunately, Hezekiah had taken the precaution of securing the city’s water supply by building his famous tunnel from a spring outside the walls to the Pool of Siloam. Even so, the situation appeared desperate. As Isaiah described it:
The Daughter of Zion is
left like a shelter in a vineyard,
like a hut in a field of melons,
like a city under siege. (Isa. 1:8)
The Assyrian commander taunted the inhabitants of the beleaguered city:
Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, “The LORD will deliver us.” Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? (2 Kings 18:32–34)
King Hezekiah consulted Isaiah, and the prophet replied:
This is what the LORD says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. (2 Kings 19:6; cf. Isa. 37:33–35)
The central doctrine of Isaiah’s theology was the sovereignty of God. His call to the prophetic office came to him in a vision of the Lord as king, reigning from an exalted throne. He believed that God was king of the nations and used them as instruments of his own purpose.
So Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem was lifted. According to the biblical record, “that night the angel of the LORD went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp” (2 Kings 19:35; cf. Isa. 37:36). It is possible that Herodotus is referring to this incident when he describes a night invasion of the Assyrian camp by field mice. But he says the mice rendered the soldiers defenseless by eating their bowstrings, quivers and shield straps, where in reality they may rather have been carriers of bubonic plague.
By whatever means it was accomplished, Israel regarded it as an outstanding divine deliverance:
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble….
“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted on the earth.”
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. (Ps. 46:1, 10–11)
The half-century following Hezekiah’s death was a time of religious apostasy. His son Manasseh, an abject vassal of Assyria, adopted a policy of religious syncretism and reintroduced the abomination of Canaanite and Assyrian worship which Hezekiah had destroyed. The astral cult, spiritism, Baal worship and even the horrors of child sacrifice defiled the land. Amon his son, who reigned only two years, seems to have been no better.
But good King Josiah, who reigned from 639 to 609 BC, turned the scales again and inaugurated even more thoroughgoing reforms than his great-grandfather Hezekiah. He ascended the throne of Judah as a boy of eight. When he was still a youth of sixteen, “he began to seek the God of his father David,” which presumably means that he reformed himself and his immediate entourage of court. Four years later “he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, Asherah poles, carved idols and cast images” (2 Chron. 34:3), and the following year Jeremiah received his call to be a prophet.
It was not until five years later still that, as a young man of twenty-six, Josiah led the radical reform of the whole nation. It was the result of the discovery during repairs in the temple of “the Book of the Law,” which appears to have been some edition or part of the Book of Deuteronomy. The king summoned the people, “both great and small,” to a large public assembly and himself read to them the rediscovered law book. He then renewed the nation’s covenant with God, had all idolatrous objects of Assyrian and Canaanite worship removed from the city and the provinces, closed down the local sanctuaries, prohibited spiritism and human sacrifice and ordered the Passover to be celebrated in Jerusalem.
Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the LORD as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with the Law of Moses. (2 Kings 23:25)
We may be sure that, behind the scenes, Jeremiah was encouraging this reformation. At the same time the prophet deplored what he saw to be its comparative superficiality. He drew the people’s attention to the fate of faithless Israel, and added:
“In spite of all this, her unfaithful sister Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense,” declares the Lord. (Jer. 3:10)
Jeremiah often referred to the “stubbornness” of men’s evil heart, “deceitful above all things and beyond cure,” and looked forward to the days of the new covenant when God would put his law within men and “write it on their hearts” (Jer. 7:24; 17:9; 31:33).
In any event, Jeremiah was proved right. The results of Josiah’s reform did not last, and his son Jehoiakim quickly succeeded in undoing his good work. The new king seems to have used slave labor to build a luxurious palace for himself, and so brought upon his head one of Jeremiah’s fiercest denunciations:
“Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness,
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his countrymen work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.”
He says, “I will build myself a great palace
with spacious upper rooms.”
So he makes large windows in it,
panels it with cedar
and decorates it in red.
Does it make you a king,
to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
Is that not what it means to know me?”
declares the LORD.
“But your eyes and your heart
are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood
and on oppression and extortion.” (Jer. 22:13–17)
Such outspoken talk was not calculated to establish Jeremiah in King Jehoiakim’s favor. So when a scroll containing Jeremiah’s warnings of the coming judgment upon Judah was read to the king as he sat in his winter house before a brazier, he cut it up with a penknife and threw it bit by bit into the fire (Jer. 36:21–23).
During these years the international scene underwent some important changes. For the past 200 years the Assyrians had been the dominant power in the Near-East, and the countryside of Israel and Judah had been repeatedly overrun by their armies. But in 616 BC Assyria was invaded by Nabopolasser, the founder of the Babylonian dynasty, and in 612 Nineveh (the Assyrian capital) fell after a siege of two and a half months. No tears were shed over her downfall. The Book of Jonah illustrates how reluctantly an Israelite would contemplate Nineveh’s repentance and forgiveness, and the prophet Nahum expresses the widespread reaction to Nineveh’s oppression:
Woe to the city of blood,
full of lies,
full of plunder,
never without victims! …
“I am against you,” declares the LORD Almighty….
Everyone who hears the news about you
claps his hands at your fall,
for who has not felt
your endless cruelty? (Nah. 3:1, 5, 19)
Even after the fall of Nineveh Assyria did not immediately concede defeat. In 609 Pharaoh Necho of Egypt went to her aid, but was himself defeated in 605 by the Babylonians at the Battle of Carchemish on the Euphrates. Now Babylon was supreme, and Judah transferred her homage from Necho to Nebuchadnezzar.
When Nebuchadnezzar’s army failed to defeat Necho at the Egyptian border in 601, King Jehoiakim withheld his tribute money. This was tantamount to a rebellion. But Jehoiakim died in 598 before Nebuchadnezzar had had time to quell the revolt, and his son Jehoiachin was left to bear the punitive wrath of Babylon. It fell upon him the following year. Jerusalem was besieged and captured. Three thousand members of the nobility were taken captive to Babylon, and so were the temple treasures. Among the exiles was Ezekiel, who was both a prophet and a priest, and who foretold the departure of God’s glory from the temple because of Judah’s inveterate sin.
Nebuchadnezzar appointed Zedekiah to the throne of Judah, yet another of King Josiah’s sons. He was a weak and indecisive character. His counselors advised him to look to Egypt for help, but Jeremiah insisted that Judah’s only hope of survival was to submit to Babylon. Himself a firm patriot, Jeremiah found it very hard to witness his country’s humiliation, and even harder because of his policies to be suspected of treason. His was a voice crying in the wilderness. He stood and suffered alone.
Unfortunately, Zedekiah “did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke the word of the LORD” (2 Chron. 36:12). In 589 BC he openly rebelled against Babylon. None of the hoped-for help from Egypt was forthcoming, and Jerusalem had to endure a second siege, this time for eighteen months. The famine conditions were appalling. Jeremiah continued to urge surrender, bringing upon himself first imprisonment and then an attempt on his life.
In 587–586 a breach was made in the walls and the city fell. The city walls were broken into rubble and Solomon’s magnificent temple was burned to the ground.
The tiny remnant who were left were put in the charge of Gedaliah, and Jeremiah went on urging them to submit to the authority of Babylon. But Gedaliah was assassinated, and the survivors fled to Egypt, dragging the hapless Jeremiah with them.
The best way to feel Israel’s despair when her temple had been destroyed and her people exiled is to read the Book of Lamentations:
How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave….
All the splendor has departed
from the Daughter of Zion.
Her princes are like deer
that find no pasture;
in weakness they have fled
before the pursuer….
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look around and see.
Is any suffering like my suffering
that was inflicted on me,
that the LORD brought on me
in the day of his fierce anger? (Lam. 1:1, 6, 12)
Yet the godly were not taken by surprise. They knew that God’s covenant with Israel was founded not only on his promise to be their God but on their undertaking to obey. From the beginning Moses had warned them of the consequence of disobedience, and the prophets had gone on insisting that judgment was inevitable if the nation did not repent:
The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. (2 Chron. 36:15)