History
- The Two Kingdoms (920-597 BCE)
The experiment with the
opulence and power of the great eastern kingdoms had ended in disaster
for Israel. Solomon created the wealthiest and most powerful central
government the Hebrews would ever see, but he did so at an impossibly
high cost. Land was given away to pay for his extravagances, and people
were sent into forced labor into Tyre in the north. When Solomon died
(between 926-922 BC), the ten northern tribes refused to submit to his
son, Rehoboam, and revolted. From this point on, there would be two
kingdoms of Hebrews: in the north, Israel, and in the south, Judah. The
Israelites formed their capital in the city of Samaria, and the Judaeans
kept their capital in Jerusalem. These kingdoms remained separate states
for over two hundred years.
Their history is a litany of ineffective, disobedient, and corrupt
kings. When the Hebrews had first asked for a king, in the book of
Judges, they were told that only Yahweh was their king. When they
approached Samuel, he told them the desire for a king was an act of
disobedience. They would pay dearly if they established a monarchy. The
history told in the Hebrew books, I and II Kings, bears out Samuel's
warning. The Hebrew empire soon collapses; Moab soon successfully
revolts against Judah, and Ammon successfully secedes from Israel.
Within a century of Solomon's death, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah
are tiny little states, each no bigger than Connecticut, on the larger
map of the Middle East.
The bad news, of course, is that tiny states never survived in that
region. Located directly between the Mesopotamian kingdoms in the
northeast and the powerful state of Egypt in the southwest, Israel and
Judah were of the utmost commercial and military importance to all these
warring powers. Being small and weak was a liability, and Israel was the
first to learn this lesson.
The Conquest of Israel
In 722 BC, the Assyrians conquered Israel. The Assyrians were aggressive
and effective; the history of their dominance over the Middle East is a
history of constant warfare. In order to assure that conquered
territories would remain pacified, the Assyrians would force many of the
native inhabitants to relocate to other parts of their empire. They
almost always chose the upper and more powerful classes, for they had no
reason to fear the general mass of a population. They would then send
Assyrians to relocate in the conquered territory.
When they conquered Israel, they forced the ten tribes to scatter
throughout their empire. For all practical purposes, you might consider
this a proto-Diaspora ("diaspora"="scattering"), except that these
Israelites disappear from history permanently; they are called "the ten
lost tribes of Israel." Why this happened is difficult to assess. The
Assyrians did not settle the Israelites in one place, but scattered them
in small populations all over the Middle East. When the Babylonians
later conquered Judah, they, too, relocate a massive amount of the
population. However, they move that population to a single location so
that the Jews can set up a separate community and still retain their
religion and identity. The Israelites deported by the Assyrians,
however, do not live in separate communities and soon drop their Yahweh
religion and their Hebrew names and identities.
The Samaritans
One other consequence of the Assyrian invasion of Israel involved the
settling of Israel by Assyrians. This group settled in the capital of
Israel, Samaria, and they took with them Assyrian gods and cultic
practices. But the people of the Middle East were above everything else
highly superstitious. Even the Hebrews didn't necessarily deny the
existence or power of other peoples' gods—just in case. Conquering
peoples constantly feared that the local gods would wreak vengeance on
them. Therefore, they would adopt the local god or gods into their
religion and cultic practices. Within a short time, the Assyrians in
Samaria were worshipping Yahweh as well as their own gods; within a
couple centuries, they would be worshipping Yahweh exclusively. Thus was
formed the only major schism in the Yahweh religion: the schism between
the Jews and the Samaritans. The Samaritans, who were Assyrian and
therefore non-Hebrew, adopted almost all of the Hebrew Torah and cultic
practices; unlike the Jews, however, they believed that they could
sacrifice to God outside of the temple in Jerusalem. The Jews frowned on
the Samaritans, denying that a non-Hebrew had any right to be included
among the chosen people and angered that the Samaritans would dare to
sacrifice to Yahweh outside of Jerusalem. The Samaritan schism played a
major role in the rhetoric of Jesus of Nazareth; and there are still
Samaritans alive today around the city of Samaria.
The Conquest of Judah
"There but for the grace of god go I." Certainly, the conquest of Israel
scared the people and monarchs of Judah. They barely escaped the
Assyrian menace, but Judah would be conquered by the Chaldeans about a
century later. In 701, the Assyrian Sennacherib would gain territory
from Judah, and the Jews would have suffered the same fate as the
Israelites. But by 625 BC, the Babylonians, under Nabopolassar, would
reassert control over Mesopotamia, and the Jewish king Josiah
aggressively sought to extend his territory in the power vacuum that
resulted. But Judah soon fell victim to the power struggles between
Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians. When Josiah's son, Jehoahaz,
became king, the king of Egypt, Necho (put into power by the Assyrians),
rushed into Judah and deposed him, and Judah became a tribute state of
Egypt. When the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians in 605 BC, then Judah
became a tribute state to Babylon. But when the Babylonians suffered a
defeat in 601 BC, the king of Judah, Jehoiakim, defected to the
Egyptians. So the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, raised an expedition
to punish Judah in 597 BC. The new king of Judah, Jehoiachin, handed the
city of Jerusalem over to Nebuchadnezzar, who then appointed a new king
over Judah, Zedekiah. In line with Mesopotamian practice, Nebuchadnezzar
deported around 10,000 Jews to his capital in Babylon; all the deportees
were drawn from professionals, the wealthy, and craftsmen. Ordinary
people were allowed to stay in Judah. This deportation was the beginning
of the Exile.
The story should have ended there. However, Zedekiah defected from the
Babylonians one more time. Nebuchadnezzar responded with another
expedition in 588 and conquered Jerusalem in 586. Nebuchadnezzar caught
Zedekiah and forced him to watch the murder of his sons; then he blinded
him and deported him to Babylon. Again, Nebuchadnezzr deported the
prominent citizens, but the number was far smaller than in 597:
somewhere between 832 and 1577 people were deported.
The Hebrew kingdom, started with such promise and glory by David, was
now at an end. It would never appear again, except for a brief time in
the second century BC, and to the Jews forced to relocate and the Jews
left to scratch out a living in their once proud kingdom, it seemed as
if no Jewish nation would ever exist again. It also seemed as if the
special bond that Yahweh had promised to the Hebrews, the covenant that
the Hebrews would serve a special place in history, had been broken and
forgotten by their god. This period of confusion and despair, a
community together but homeless in the streets of Babylon, makes up one
of the most significant historical periods in Jewish history: the Exile.
From:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/HEBREWS/HEBREWS.HTM
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