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Session II: Survival, Destruction, and Restoration, ca. 701 BCE-63 CE

In 722/21, the Assyrians swallowed the last remaining traces of the northern kingdom of Israel as they continued their advance westward toward their ultimate goal: Egypt.With Shalmaneser III's sudden death at this time, the throne fell to Sargon II, who spent much of his reign consolidating the conquests of his predecessor. In 720 BCE, Sargon II recaptured what was left of Samaria and sent much of its remaining population into exile. It is from this period of conquest that the tradition of the 10 lost tribes of Israel arose. On the road to Egypt, only a few potential adversaries blocked the Assyrian advance. Among them were two former enemies who became reluctant allies: Judah and Philistia. Aided by Egypt, the Judean king Hezekiah decided to break away from Assyrian domination soon after the death of Sargon II in 705 BCE. It was only a matter of time until Sargon's successor, Sennacherib, would send a massive army toward Egypt, with a side trip designed to obliterate Judah and Jerusalem.

Within the Biblical world, Hezekiah was ranked with David and Solomon as among the ablest kings ever to rule from Jerusalem. He was also considered one of the most righteous. His 'religious adviser' and occasional adversary was none other than Isaiah, widely regarded as the greatest of Israel's prophets. Being a righteous king sometimes meant making unpopular decisions. Just before the Assyrian invasion, Hezekiah shut down a number of local sacrificial altars throughout Judah, claiming that the purity of ritual observance required that offerings be made only at the Temple in Jerusalem. Imagine some higher authority sending you a letter saying that your synagogue in San Francisco was no longer accepted as a place of worship, so you had to go to Los Angeles for High Holiday services! Hezekiah's decision caused such an outcry that the Assyrian military leader (the Rabshakeh) would later use this as he harangued the besieged Jerusalemites standing on their walls, encouraging them to overthrow Hezekiah and surrender without a fight. Hezekiah's popularity ratings certainly dropped when he chose to defend religious purity and the Jerusalem priestly establishment. But the people rallied around the beleaguered king when the same sense of righteousness compelled him to break away from the ruthless and corrupt Assyrian Empire.

In rebelling against Assyria, Hezekiah took one of the greatest calculated risks in the history of the ancient world. He gambled that his alliances with Philistia and King Tirhaka of Egypt would bring him needed assistance when the Assyrian hordes hit his territory. Egypt under the new Dynasty 25 kings had recently revived from her military lethargy, and showed promise in defending herself and her neighbors from the Assyrian war machine. But Hezekiah knew his best defense would be his own defense. In the ancient world, you could lose everything but your capital and still survive as a nation. This would be Hezekiah's strategy.

To save Jerusalem, Hezekiah's engineers and workmen completed a 1,750 foot underground tunnel which connected the water source of the Gihon Spring (near Warren's Shaft which may have been David's access to the city) to the Siloam Pool, now located inside the new city wall (see below). When the Assyrians arrived to besiege Jerusalem, they would find not a drop of water from the Gihon Spring to supply their army. All the water would flow, underground, to supply the needs of the residents of Jerusalem within its strong walls.

THE BROAD WALL
OLD CITY, JERUSALEM
You are looking at Hezekiah's Broad Wall, a section of a new wall he built around the expanded areas of ancient western Jerusalem between 705 and 701 BCE. Located in the heart of what is now the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, both archaeologists and city planners of the restored Jewish Quarter agreed that this wall section should remain open in an area where highly profitable housing and shops could have been built.

Why? Simply put, this wall probably saved Jerusalem, Judah, and the Jewish people in 701 BCE. Egypt, Philistia, and the best secret water tunnel in the world would have meant nothing if this wall had not stood the test.

In the end, the best efforts of Philistia and Egypt only slowed the Assyrian advance. Their army marched through relentlessly, besieging and destroying the fortified towns on the roads leading to Jerusalem, including the great city of Lachish Within days, the Assyrians surrounded the walls of Jerusalem, and the fate of the city and nation seemed assured.

So important was Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem to the writers of the Bible that the story is told in three places in the text: Isaiah 36-37, II Kings 18-20 and II Chronicles 32. To read these texts and discover what happened in 701 BCE, click <here>.

The Isaiah and II Kings versions of the story assign Jerusalem's survival in 701 BCE to Isaiah's vision that God would bring salvation through an avenging angel against the Assyrian camp. Her triumph against Assyrian might can be awarded to Hezekiah for his planning and charismatic leadership as reflected in his passionate speech to the people of Jerusalem in II Chronicles 32. However you choose to interpret it, Jerusalem prevailed against impossible odds.

The true miracle of this watershed event is that it bought time for the Jewish people. Many secular scholars argue that the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) was incomplete in 701 BCE, lacking much of the writing and editing that would create the final versions of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, especially Deuteronomy. One hundred and fifteen years later, when the Jews of a ravaged Jerusalem wearily marched into captivity in Babylon, they took with them a nearly complete Torah. Although now a people without a land, they wandered through Babylon's Ishtar Gate with an identity defined and defended, wherever they might go, by Torah.

The story of Jerusalem's last century before the Babylonian destruction blends triumph and tragedy in equal measure. After the long and apparently corrupt reign of Manasseh, the throne eventually was filled by Josiah, a great reformer cast in the mold of Hezekiah. He shut down many of the pagan cult centers in and around Jerusalem which his predecessors had either tolerated or endorsed. He instituted religious reforms that again purified the fully emerging monotheism of the faith of Israel. In his reign, a 'spring cleaning' and repair program for the Temple led to the 'discovery' of a supposedly lost scroll of the Law. Now widely regarded as the Book of Deuteronomy, this text may well have been composed in Josiah's reign to reinforce the Jerusalem priesthood's current interpretation of religious law. Josiah's reign and achievements were cut short when he confronted Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo as the Egyptian king led an army to rescue an ally which was about to die: the Assyrian empire. Josiah's attempt to halt Necho's progress may have helped seal the fate of Assyria. The new Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar swallowed the last traces of the brutal Assyrian state. Ironically, Jerusalem lost its last great king and watched the destruction of its greatest enemy in the same year: 609 BCE.
 

Perhaps about the time, a man named Ahiel was settling into a house built over a portion of the stepped stone structure of eastern Jerusalem created centuries before by King David. We can guess Ahiel as the homeowner by a store jar fragment inscribed with his name which archaeologists found in this house. Ahiel's home was apparently a version of the house we visited at Tel Qasile earlier in this class. It was quite probably a fairly attractive piece of real estate, commanding an impressive view of the Kidron Valley. In the summer month of Av, 586 BCE, his house commanded a terrifying view of a besieging Babylonian army that was about to break through Jerusalem's walls. Excavators under the direction of the late Hebrew University Professor Yigal Shiloh found that Ahiel's home was one of many put to the torch by Babylonian soldiers who would ultimately reach and destroy the Temple on the ninth day of the month. Tisha B'Av, as it is known in the Jewish cycle of holidays, marks a time of fasting and mourning the loss of the first Temple, as it would later mark the date of the second Temple's destruction by the Romans. The city and the nation's fate were sealed when the Babylonians captured King Zedekiah of Judah and his sons. In an atrocity worthy of the Assyrians, the Babylonians executed Zedekiah's sons before his eyes. It would be the last act Hezekiah would see. Babylonian soldiers put out his eyes and he was carried off in chains to Babylon.

Ahiel's Toilet
Ahiel not only had a nice house, he had that rarest of ancient conveniences, a bathroom. This beautifully carved stone toilet possessed two openings: one for 'number two' and a smaller opening, apparently designed for gentlemen who preferred to be seated while completing a 'number one.' Hebrew University archaeologists labored through the unenviable task of excavating the cesspit which beckoned below. They soon discovered that the cesspit, to no one's surprise, had been left untouched since the last 'deposits' were made by the besieged residents of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. These archaeologists stopped laughing when the results of their diagnostic 'samples' of the cesspit came back from the lab. Traces of bacteria and other cellular 'wastes' confirmed that the people of Jerusalem were indeed starving to death on a diet of weeds and whatever else they could find to eat.
 
 

Exile in Babylon and other countries had a profoundly sobering effect on the Jewish People. After five centuries as masters of their own land, they were now dispersed in lands not their own. This marks the beginning of the Jewish community outside of Israel, described by the Greek term meaning 'dispersion': Diaspora. Without Torah and deeply rooted memories, it's as likely as not that the Jews of the Babylonian Empire would have totally assimilated within a few generations. The Babylonian Exile certainly spurred the faithful to continue the work of recording the history and the laws of their tradition which would ultimately ripen into the full text of the Hebrew Bible. Even this process of preservation might not have saved the Jewish people save for a strange twist of fate.

The brilliant reign of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar was followed by rulers who rated from lethargic to just plain loony. The latter was fully embodied by Nabonidus, a true lunatic in that he became a completely obsessed devotee of the moon god Sin. In his madness, this powerful leader of the ancient Near East exiled himself for ten years at a distant oasis called Teima, in the heart of what is now Saudi Arabia. Imagine Bill Clinton setting up his capital in Hope, Arkansas (better yet, don't). In the cut-throat world of ancient power politics, Nabonidus' choice was a fatal one. With something approaching relief, the Babylonian world welcomed a new conquering hero in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Achaemenid Persia.

Cyrus ushered in a new, more humane approach to imperial rule. This policy benefited the Jews, who were invited to return to their homeland to rebuild their lives and their Temple. Under Persian sponsorship, a delegation of Jewish leaders returned to Jerusalem toward the end of the sixth century BCE, led by Yeshua and Zerubabbel. Beginning their work around 520 BCE, they completed work on the Second Temple of Jerusalem around 515 BCE. The Book of Ezra notes the ambivalence of the people as they dedicated the new Temple: a few old-timers still remembered the glory of Solomon's Temple in its last days and wept. Others rejoiced that a people and their faith had been delivered rather than destroyed by a Persian king whom the book of Isaiah called God's 'anointed,' an early use of the word 'messiah.'

Jerusalem under the Persians enjoyed two centuries of relative peace. New generations of leaders, including Nehemiah and Ezra, made every effort to restore the Temple, the walls and the faith of the Jews of Jerusalem. For Ezra, the challenge was severe. He confronted a population which had committed a grave sin in his eyes: intermarriage. From priests to the commoner on the street, Ezra condemned the people of Israel for consorting with pagan aliens and diluting both the ethnic and religious identity of the nation. Implicit in his condemnation was the fear that intermarriage would do what no army had ever achieved: destroy the Jewish people.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Ezra and the people of Jerusalem were confronting a challenge to Judaism that faces the community, worldwide, to this day. Ezra's solution was to demand that they put away their foreign spouses and children. While the Biblical text claims that this is what they actually did, it did not end the phenomenon of intermarriage. Without passing judgment on intermarriage, it is fascinating to see that, 2,400 years later, the Jewish people still exist, the land of Israel has been restored to Jewish rule, and thousands of non-Jews every year choose to join the Jewish people.

Ezra not only defended the 'party line' when it came to intermarriage, he also offered innovation. To bring the people closer to Torah and what it prescribed, he publicly read portions of the text to an audience that was apparently ignorant of its content and meaning. In reading and discussing the Torah with the public, Ezra set a new standard for the Torah as a document of the people, to be both revered and studied. We are witnessing the transition from the Temple/Cult-centered faith to Torah-centered Judaism. Although the Temple would continue to stand in one form or another for nearly five centuries, the journey toward Rabbinic Judaism had begun.

In the parade of empires which marched through Judea and Jerusalem, that of Alexander the Great was next in line. Marching through the Coastal Plain in 332 BCE, the Roman historian Flavius Josephus claims that Alexander actually visited the backwater town of Jerusalem to settle a dispute between the Jews and an offshoot group known as the Samaritans. There's little history to be found in this story, but we can say that the Hellenistic Empire that Alexander created continued to meddle in the religious and political affairs of their Jewish subjects for most of the next three centuries. Easily the best known example of this interference is the reign of Antiochus Epiphanies IV, the catalyst for the events we now commemorate as Hanukkah. Antiochus came to throne in 175 BCE, and was pleased to find that a number of the Jerusalem priestly leadership were more than happy to support Antiochus' program of Hellenizing the city. After a disastrous campaign against Ptolemaic Egypt, Antiochus apparently sensed that Judea was about to rebel. His response over the next few years was a brutal repression of the Jewish people, including the destruction of much of Jerusalem and the sacking of the Temple. In the end, Antiochus' goal became the termination of the practice of Judaism. The result was the Revolt of the Maccabees beginning in 167 BCE. Finally in 142 BCE, Simon Maccabee, Perhaps the first Jew to hold supreme religious, military and political rule over Israel, expelled the last Hellenistic forces from Jerusalem.

Qumran, Cave 4

Within a few years after the establishment of the independent Jewish kingdom of the Hasmoneans (as the Maccabees were then known), signs of a significant religious conflict within Judaism appeared. A group of pious renegade Jews could no longer tolerate the new religious leadership in Jerusalem, which apparently struck them as little better than the corrupt priesthood that had ruled the Temple under the earlier tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. These Jews broke away, settling down in a remote site overlooking the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. We know the site as Qumran, and it is here that a small community, whose population never exceeded 250, both acquired and wrote the texts that would become the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.