Kindle Notes & Highlights
622 Scroll of Deuteronomy is said to be discovered in Jerusalem during reign of Josiah.
“The record would suggest that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with, and derived from, Canaanite culture. In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature.”
MINIMALIST HISTORIANS ARE still only a minority, but they have gained significant ground since the early 1990s. They consider much of the Bible’s presentation of history, including the political side, to contain only a very minimum of solid fact.
Some minimalists contend that David and Solomon had no empire at all—not even a small one. Israel and Judah may have existed in ancient times, they say, but always as separate entities.
such. In the real world of that time, for instance, only a few dozen villagers lived as farmers in all the Judaean highlands. Timber, grazing and steppe were all marginal possibilities. There could not have been a kingdom for any Saul or David to be a king of simply because there were not enough people.
While the minimalist viewpoint denies that political unity between Israel and Judah ever existed, it does not rule out the possibility of a special affinity between the two. This would explain why in the Bible the Judahites see themselves included in the broad term “Israelites.”
By good fortune, the mists of history dissipate sharply in the decades just before the forging of the Hebrew-Kushite alliance.
For example, because the Bible and an Assyrian text of the late eighth century BC both speak of a Judahite monarch named Hezekiah, we know that this king is not simply mythic.
IN THE SUMMER of 701 BC, in an out-of-the-way corner of the Near East, the inhabitants of a modest hilltop city feared for their lives.
The Assyrians had left this capital city of 20,000, which they called Ursalimmu, for the very end of their rampage through the kingdom.
But the reason for the Assyrian evacuation is one of history’s great puzzles.
Only after the failed siege did the city’s religious character take on important changes.
Prior to Sennacherib’s invasion, the Jerusalemites’ god was a national deity with no special powers beyond the immediate region in which he was located.
when Assyria failed to take Jerusalem this meant that Yahweh had bested Ashur and possessed more power than he and those other kingdoms’ gods. It would take several generations to develop this interpretation fully.
Because it was via Jerusalem’s survival of that siege that Yahweh revealed the city’s importance to him, they gave the story of that experience an extraordinary prominence:
But three extended narratives devoted to the same event is unique.
Bible. In 1815, for example, when Lord Byron wrote about the crisis in a popular poem, “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” he did not have to bother explaining who Sennacherib was, nor did he even have to mention Jerusalem explicitly.
Conventional historians say that Israel, with its 10 tribes, could claim a population at that time of about 800,000 and that Judah, with two tribes, may have had 200,000 to 250,000 people.
The invaders chopped Israel’s territory into four parts: three of these segments became provinces of the Assyrian empire and the fourth endured as the semi-independent state of Samaria. This rump kingdom, whose capital was also called Samaria, may have measured a scant 45 miles or so in length and 35 miles in breadth,10 making it about one-third the size of the former Israel.
For vassal states that dared rebel, the empire reserved the ultimate penalty—annihilation of the state.
The strategy was to fill the formerly restive territory’s leadership vacuum with disoriented foreigners preoccupied with making a fresh start in life—not with fomenting further trouble.
He did so by deporting, by his own count, 27,290 inhabitants of the Samarian territory.17 This uprooting would have started in 720 and continued to perhaps 715.18
One can say, then, that the invasion of 701 marked the eighth Assyrian onslaught on Khor within the lifetime of adult Jerusalemites. All of these offensives, including the last one as it rolled relentlessly through Phoenicia, Philistia and most of Judah prior to arriving at the walls of Jerusalem, had wreaked a degree of terror and destruction that was exceptional even for those brutal times.
The Assyrian besiegers had explicitly announced their intention to deport the vanquished Judahites en masse to faraway lands,23 and such action against the sibling kingdom of Israel had caused the disappearance of everything having to do with its people’s national identity, religion and culture.
It is not much of a jump to assume, then, that if Jerusalem had perished so would everything having to do with Hebrew identity.
That is because, suggests the Bible, Hezekiah “held fast to the Lord; he did not depart from following him but kept the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses.”8 Well before Sennacherib’s invasion, according to the Bible, the young king would have ordered the destruction of the places where his subjects worshipped other gods and allowed only one place of worship in his entire realm—that of Yahweh at Jerusalem. It is because of Hezekiah’s prior loyalty to him that Yahweh protects Jerusalem from the Assyrians.
reign. Even those conventional scholars who consider Moses and David to be authentic historical figures are part of this consensus. Most would say that Moses himself would not have been monotheistic. The first commandment does not say, “I am the one and only deity.” Rather, its peculiar word-ing—“ You shall have no other gods before me”—assumes that other gods exist.
that the psalm dates from well after the events of 701 BC.
IF PIOUS YAHWISTS from Jerusalem several centuries after Sen-nacherib’s invasion12 could have travelled back in time and visited their city in the months leading up to that crisis, they would have found the local religion almost unrecognizable. Many concepts and practices with which the visitors would have been familiar would not yet have emerged. They would have found, for example, no synagogues,13 no observance of the Sabbath for the purpose of worship14 and no circumcision.15 The visitors would also have encountered little (possibly no) worship of Yahweh to the exclusion of other gods.
Morton Smith of Columbia University,
Whether a few Judahites or none at all worshipped Yahweh as the sole deity, what is clear is that the vast majority of Judahites in 701 would have been polytheists.
While a figure called Moses may have been well known in Hebrew tradition in Hezekiah’s time,28 many reputable scholars believe it unlikely that “his” laws had yet revolutionized mainstream Hebrew thought.
Commandments in particular, they say, may date from no earlier than the seventh century BC.
in Cincinnati, points out that the writings of the original prophet Isaiah show that he “knew nothing of a chosen people.”
The visitors would have been Jews, the people of Judah in 701 BC were not. The term “Jew” came into being to describe the followers of Judaism, and conventional historians think that Judaism only took form about a century and a half (the process was gradual) after Hezekiah’s reign,
after the Deliverance: the understanding of the Covenant, the sense of divine election and the belief in the primacy of Moses’ law.
All six reflect the just-desserts philosophy.
The Deuteronomistic History tells of the dramatic discovery of the Book of Deuteronomy.42 In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign—which would be 622 BC—workmen were
repairing the Temple of Solomon, says Second Kings, when the high priest came across a scroll that apparently had been concealed inside the edifice. The scroll was ostensibly centuries old.
The Bible presents these sacred imperatives in two places, here and in the Book of Exodus, but many scholars agree that this lesser-known Deuteronomy version is the older of the two.
it says that Josiah, upon learning the content of the scroll, was so appalled at how his kingdom had departed from Moses’ instructions that he at once purged his realm of paganism.
Philip Davies of the University of Sheffield, in England, dates the composition itself of the Book of Deuteronomy to the sixth or even the fifth century BC45—long after the lifetime of this supposed great royal patron.
Isaiah, who preached from at least 736 to 701,1 is one of the most shadowy.
“Repent!” This was his way, Isaiah says, of warning against Judah’s joining the anti-Assyrian rebellion of 713 that was led by the Philistine city of Ashdod. The prophet said he intended his nakedness to serve as a preview of how the Assyrians would strip the vanquished rebels of their clothing and march them off as prisoners of war.
In Isaiah 31, this change is particularly jarring; that text insists that Jerusalem’s defenders “will all perish together,” yet the very next sentence trumpets that Yahweh himself will help them and will “fight upon Mount Zion.” Yahweh, the text goes on to say, “will protect and deliver” Zion, and the Assyrians “shall flee.”3 (Had Isaiah based his prediction of the Assyrian invasion’s
holus-bolus
Here’s another enigma about Isaiah: no one knows how his statements (as well as those of most other biblical prophets) came to be written down.
The message that Yahweh wanted people to live righteously, rather than simply go through the motions of ritualistic worship, including the offering of sacrifices, is perhaps the most enduring contribution of Isaiah and, as well, of Micah, Judah’s other prophet of that period.
30Omission of any mention of the sponsor of so successfully audacious a project seems consistent with the lack of loyalty that the civic leaders evinced when they deserted their king.
Second Kings describes how, prior to the Assyrian onslaught, the people of Israel “built themselves high places,” that is, hilltop altars for the worship of gods other than Yahweh. They also “set up pillars and sacred poles” of the fertility cult, “did evil things, angering YHWH” and “abandoned all the commands” of the deity, so that the god deployed Assyria to bring punitive ruination to their kingdom.
