The City Chosen by YHWH (736-609)

Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect.
Ezekiel 16:14

In the last third of the 8th century, following the reduction of Samaria and Damascus to provinces of the Assyrian empire, Jerusalem emerges from the shadow of its northern neighbors and develops regional ambitions of its own. The unsung hero of this story is king Ahaz who ushered in the period of transformation of Jerusalem from second-rate residence of subordinate kings to the true golden age of ancient Jerusalem. The transformation of Jerusalem from a small Judahite city to a true center of administration and commerce became evident in archeological discoveries made over the past forty years.

Ahaz (736-716)         
Ahaz was the son of Jotham. The latter had been king in Jerusalem for sixteen years (2 K 15:33) or for twenty years (2 K 15:30); the chronology is confusing since Jotham served as the regent under his leprous father before ruling in his own name. The deuteronomistic historians disapprove of Ahaz; perhaps this is the reason why they never refer to him by his full, theophoric name (in Assyrian sources: Ia-u-ha-zi). Here is the deuteronomistic evaluation of this king, based on a stereotypical litany of evils similarly attributed to other kings as well: “He did not do what was right in the sight of the LORD his God, as his ancestor David had done, but walked in the way of the kings of Israel. He even made his son pass through fire, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel. He sacrificed and made offerings on the high places, on the hills, and under every green tree.” (2 K 16:2-4) Unless “passing through the fire” was a form of child sacrifice that involved the actual death of the son in question, the person who underwent this ordeal at his father’s behest could very well have been the later King Hezekiah, about whom we hear that he abolished all the abominations his father had practiced, possibly including on himself.

The grandfather of Ahaz was either a barely mentioned king by the name of Uzziah (2 K 15:32, Isa 6:1), or Uzziah was merely another name of the leprous king Azariah (cf. 2 Chr. 26:1), in which case Ahaz was the grandson of the latter. The name of his grandmother, the wife of Uzziah/Azariah, is of special interest. Jerusha bat Zadok ties Ahaz to the enigmatic priestly family known by this name. The identity of Zadok and the origins of the Zadokite priesthood in Jerusalem have been much debated. Some scholars have theorized that Zadok was a YHWHistic priest whom David had brought to Jerusalem from Hebron.(1) Others think that Zadok is as close as we get to a genuinely native Jerusalemite tradition that predates the association of the House of David with the city. But this conjecture is also based on biblical passages that hardly provide conclusive historical evidence. Based on Scripture there is a possible connection between Zadok the priest and the pre-Judahite priest-kings of Jerusalem (such as the Melchizedek of Genesis 14). In this view, the Zadokites represented the ancient rulers of the city. The relation between this clan and the earlier inhabitants of the city, the biblical Jebusites (a thinly disguised artificial name meaning “the ones he—an unnamed deity—trampled” that refers to no otherwise known ethnic or political group) is also unclear. In any case, according to the deuteronomistic work of history, Ahaz was both a bad egg and closely related to the Zadokites. He was also an extremely successful ruler whose loyalty to the Assyrians paid off, at least for Jerusalem.

As a freshman king, Ahaz of Judah faced a stark choice: defy the combined power of the Syro-Ephraimite coalition (Damascus and Samaria, the old bullies to the north) and face an attack on Jerusalem like that suffered by his great-grandfather Amaziah forty-five years earlier, which had ended in ignominy and assassination; join the rebellious coalition and defy the Assyrians whose frightful power (and the futility of relying on Egyptian protection) had just been vividly demonstated by Tiglat-Pileser’s swift campaign against the Philistine King Hanunu of Gaza; or call upon the Assyrians for help against Damascus and Samaria, the known bullies, and enter into a relationship of dependence on an even greater bully.

The prophetic literature of the Bible contains genuine material from the time of the Syro-Ephraimite threat of 734/733, offering us an authentic glimpse of the mood at the court of Jerusalem at the time of this crisis. One who offers the king his counsel is the prophet Isaiah b. Amoz, a Jerusalemite, who is said to have received his calling the year Uzziah, presumably the young king’s leprous grandfather, died (see Isa 6:1). As a seasoned analyst of the political situation, Isaiah initially suggests (somewhat patronizingly) that there is nothing to worry about (cf. Isa 7:1-9): “If you do not stand firm in faith you shall not stand at all” (ibid. v. 9). When Ahaz is not satisfied, the prophet, impatiently, offers a sign:

Hear then, O House of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman (i.e., the prophet’s wife) is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (…) Before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. (Isa 7:13ff)

What Isaiah expects is that, before long, the Assyrians will move on their own account and therefore accomplish Jerusalem’s rescue without Ahaz having to deplete the treasury to pay off the empire for its intervention, which was certain to invite a long-term commitment to the Assyrians (cf. Isa 8:5-10). However, this was not to be, and it seems that even Isaiah’s calm was shattered as news are received of the advancing Israelites and Syrians (cf. Isa 10:27d-32).(2) The king, prudently, opts to call on the Assyrians for help (see 2 K 16:7-9).

The introduction of Assyrian dominance in Jerusalem is associated with a cultic reform instituted by king Ahaz upon visiting Damascus, after the Assyrians had just annexed that city. The deuteronomistic work of history suggests that the cultic changes Ahaz instituted in Jerusalem were done “because of the king of Assyria” (2 K 16:18). But the dismantling of bronze implements at the royal shrine that is mentioned in this connection may have had much more mundane reasons. It suggests that there was a heavier price to pay for the Assyrian intervention than the king had expected.

In the century and a half between the Assyrian destruction of Samaria and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the city experienced a veritable boom. A modest mid-8th century expansion eastward of the city walls was abandoned when an entire second city (called the mishneh) was added to the west of the “City of David.” Estimates vary, but between the late eighth and the early sixth century the residential area of the city increased by a factor of between five and twelve compared to the built-up area occupied by the tenth to ninth-century fortress.(3) Since the new five to seven meters wide walls of fortification were added on the foundation of some of the new residences, we may conclude that residential building began at a time of relative security and only later on the massive new fortifications were added. The source of influx of population continues to be debated. Most scholars agree that it is reasonable to assume that many Israelites migrated to Jerusalem after 722 and before 701, i.e., between the fall of Samaria and the siege of Jerusalem (see below). This first demographic influx may have stimulated Hezekiah’s territorial and political ambitions that caused Assyria to lay siege to Jerusalem in 701. By 701, the newly expanded Jerusalem was sufficiently fortified to withstand the Assyrian siege. Sennacherib’s campaign however dampened Jerusalem’s ambition for regional expansion and conspiracy against the empire. Furthermore, although Sennacherib spared Jerusalem, his inscriptions and the archeological record confirm that all other sizable cities, forts, and residential towns of Judah were destroyed at this time. It is therefore very likely that the subsequent growth of Jerusalem was the direct result of migration of Judahites from the outlying regions to the only remaining fortified center, the city of Jerusalem.(4)

Hezekiah (716-687)
According to 2 K 18:1-2, Hezekiah began to rule in the third year of Hoshea b. Elah of Israel; this information is followed by praise for Hezekiah’s piety and prowess in war in vv. 3-8, another parallel chronology of the two kings in v. 9, and finally, in v.10, the information: “In the sixth year of Hezekiah, which was the ninth year of King Hoshea of Israel, Samaria was taken.” V. 13 then immediately introduces the next dramatic moment, namely, Sennacherib’s attack on Judah, which 2 K 13 dates to the fourteenth year of Hezekiah. The ancient readers were hardly troubled by this. When the account was written, more than a hundred years after the destruction of Israel, it was easy to skip a few years. Ahaz was by now perhaps forgotten—he is certainly disliked by the editors—while Hezekiah was famous as the one who had challenged the Assyrians and withstood the siege. Hence perhaps the error in the date. The siege of Jerusalem took place in 701. If this was, indeed, the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign (a fact not likely to have been forgotten), his accession to the throne can be reasonably dated to 716. This means that the great public works, the extension of the realm and the settlements in the Negev and other achievements attributed to Hezekiah may very well have been the accomplishments of Ahaz.

The deuteronomistic historians, however, emphasize the achievements of Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz and of Abi, the daughter of Zechariah (2 K 18:2). To them he is one of the few kings who “did what is right in the sight of the LORD just as his ancestor David had done” (2 K 3ff). The praise is formulaic, with the exception of one detail, which is unique; Hezekiah is said to have “broken in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel [sic] had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.” (2 K 18:4). Since the Nehushtan (“Bronzey”) is explictly linked with “the people of Israel,” chances are that the ancient cult object had arrived in Judah with the migrants from the northern kingdom who may have held on to it, along with other Mosaic traditions.(5) The influence of northerners on the growth and development of the city at this time may be confirmed by an oracle from the Book of Micah, a Judahite prophet from outside of Jerusalem who chides the “chiefs of the House of Israel” who “build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong” (Micah 3:9-10).(6)

The main biblical sources pertaining to the reign of Hezekiah are 2 Kings 18-20 and Isaiah 36-39 (the end of the original book of Isaiah). These books were composed from traditions and sources that saw long periods of transmission, including periods of disruption and displacement, and they show clear signs of editorial intervention. The two versions (in Isaiah and Kings) are so similar as to constitute variants of a single source. There is a second much longer history of the reign of Hezekiah in the Books of Chronicles (2 Chr 29-32), which reflects the religious interests of the Jerusalem priesthood in the age of reconstruction, sometime between the end of the Babylonian exile and the advent of Alexander the Great (the Achaemenid age, c. 539-332). But because of its late date of composition the historical value of the information it conveys is somewhat doubtful.(7)

701                  Assyrian annals that describe Sennacherib’s campaign through “Hatti-land” (Syro-Palestine) include a detailed account of his siege of Jerusalem and the heavy tribute he imposed on Hezekiah of Judah. It seems as if Sennacherib encircled Judah in a mopping up of the disloyals, and there are other signs that Hezekiah was seen as the instigator of several rebellions or that he was trying to establish an empire of his own in those regions that had not yet been integrated into the Assyrian provincial system. A coalition with Egypt is mentioned, and there may have been contacts with the Chaldean enemies of the Assyrians. No wonder that the Assyrians considered this a serious enough threat to their interests to intervene decisively.

According to our sources, the conflict began with what seems to have been a coordinated uprising against the Assyrians that involved the Phoenician coastal city of Sidon as well as the Philistines and Judeans, in other words, the entire line-up of border-states of the Assyrian Empire west of the Euphrates that had not already been integrated into the network of provinces. The petty kingdoms utilized the moment of dynastic transition from Sargon II to Sennacherib (705 BCE) to try and shake off the Assyrian “yoke.”(8) The “Prism of Sennacherib” states that the “officials, patricians, and people of Ekron” deposed their king Padi and delivered him to Jerusalem where he remained imprisoned until the Assyrians forced his release and reinstalled him. The loyal kings, such as Padi, were later rewarded with lands and towns taken from the rebels, including much of the Judahite possessions in the Shephelah. Judah’s regional ambitions were curtailed, the country was reduced to its original territory in the hills, and it was forced to pay heavy tribute.

The siege of Jerusalem is described as follows:

As to Hezekiah the Jew [Ha-za-ki-(i)aú Ia-ú-da-ai], he did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and to the countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered (them) by means of well-stamped (earth-)ramps, and battering-rams brought (thus) near (to the walls) (combined with) the attack by foot soldiers, (using) mines, breeches as well as sapper work. I drove out (of them) 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle beyond counting, and considered (them) booty. Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. I surrounded him with earthwork in order to molest those who were leaving his city’s gate. His towns which I had plundered, I took away from his country and gave them (over) to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Sillibel, king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country, but I still increased the tribute and the katru-presents (due) to me (as his) overlord which I imposed (later) upon him beyond the former tribute, to be delivered annually. Hezekiah himself, whom the terror-inspiring splendor of my lordship had overwhelmed and whose irregular and elite troops which he had brought into Jerusalem, his royal residence, in order to strengthen (it), had deserted him, did send me, later, to Nineveh, my lordly city, together with 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, precious stones, antimony, large cuts of red stone, couches (inlaid) with ivory, nimedu-chairs (inlaid) with ivory, elephant-hides, ebony-wood, boxwood (and) all kinds of valuable treasures, his (own) daughters, concubines, male and female musicians. In order to deliver the tribute and to do obeisance as a slave he sent his (personal) messenger.(9)

The biblical account agrees with the gist of this report. According to 2 K 18:7, Hezekiah “rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him;” according to 2 K 18:13ff, Sennacherib “came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them;” Hezekiah sued for peace and was made to pay a tribute of threehundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. It also says that it had been Hezekiah himself who had overlaid the doors at the temple with gold that he now had to strip so as to be able to pay the king of Assyria.(10) From 2 K 19:29-31 it seems as if the Assyrian intervention was perceived as devastating but not completely hopeless. Jerusalem and its environs remained in the hands of the king: The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward; for from Jerusalem a remnant shall go out and from Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (2 K 19:29-31)

In light of the recent destruction of Samaria, the survival of Jerusalem appeared as nothing short of a miracle. It boosted the standing of those who had counselled against surrender and against trust in an alliance with an unreliable und unstable Egypt. The prophets, among them Isaiah, could argue that YHWH himself had shown that he was able to protect Jerusalem against all enemies, even one as powerful as the king of Assyria. When the Assyrians reasonably break off the siege of an all-too-well prepared Jerusalem and are satisfied with accepting tribute, the event appears too great to have been accomplished by human hands. Gratitude speaks, when it is an angel of the LORD, in other words YHWH himself, who saved the city: “That very night the angel of the LORD set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies.”(11)

The psychological significance of the siege of 701 cannot be emphasized enough. It represents a key moment in Jerusalem’s transformation into the theological-political symbol that it became and has remained ever since. There are many factors to this, the most obvious being the expansion and fortification the city underwent in the run-up to the siege. A second factor is the internal debate on the right course of political action before the siege and the apparent vindication of the trust-in-YHWH-alone-party. A third factor was Hezekiah’s ability to survive the crisis of 701, including the drastic punitive reduction of the country and the heavy tribute imposed on Jerusalem. Similar events in the north lead to the fall of the dynasty of Jehu. In Jerusalem, however, the “House of David” survives and thrives, presumably because of its coalition with the YHWHistic party. This cluster of factors is implied in an oracle that may have been formulated much later but characterizes the attitude of the deuteronomistic historians (and prophetic circles) in general: For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake, and for the sake of my servant David. (2 K 19:34)

To be sure, in order for the city to play the role it did, i.e., in order to withstand the Assyrian siege and hence to save the kingdom from the kind of obliteration suffered by the likes of Samaria, Damascus, and Sidon (on the latter, see Isaiah’s lament over Sidon, Isa 23:2.12), Jerusalem had to have been dramatically transformed, as indeed it was.

Scripture alone provided few clues and hardly prepared the modern excavators of Jerusalem for the discovery that the situation, conventionally referred to as the “Assyrian threat,” was in fact a time of astounding growth and expansion across the Judahite realm but especially in Jerusalem.

Although we saw that it may have been under Ahaz that the city was first expanded, the biblical historians are most likely correct when they remember Hezekiah as the one who decisively propelled the city forward. His name is particularly associated with the addition to the already impressive water works of the city. For the first time since the Middle Bronze Age, hydraulic engineers added a new channel for the “waters of Shiloah” (Isa 8:6, cf. Isa 22:8b-11, 2 K 20:20, Sir 48:17)(12) to accommodate the needs of a growing population, to provide the “garden of the king” on the low lying southern edge of the city with an irrigation pool and the public with convenient access to the city’s main perennial fresh water supply that remained accessible and protected against the outside even during a time of siege. There are other indications that the siege of Jerusalem did not come as a surprise and was well prepared for. We know from numerous royal seals (lmlk) found on storage jars in Jerusalem and in various Judean towns that grain and oil supplies from the royal stores had been distributed to the border forts. Even though the Assyrians succeeded in diminishing the state of Judah, the city of Jerusalem recovered and florished in the century following Hezekiah’s death.

Manasseh (687-642)
The last century of high Judahite Jerusalem, from the time of king Manasseh to the destruction of the city, is a period of dramatic shifts in the regional balance of power. The first half of the century, roughly coinciding with the rule of Manasseh, sees the greatest expansion of the Assyrian Empire, which even successfully installs a new dynasty in Egypt. After 640, the political landscape changes: Assyria collapses and withdraws from the Levant, leaving Egypt and Babylonia to compete for “Hatti-land” [= ever-nari].

The deuteronomistic account of the reign of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah and of Hephzibah (2 K 21:1), could stand under the heading of “guilty.” The complaints about Manasseh are an accumulation of everything any of the kings was ever charged with, except worse. The literary sources or layers of editorial intervention spill across one another in the narrow space of a single chapter, pouring venom on this king. He “did evil in the sight of the LORD, following the abominable practices of the nations that the LORD drove out before the people of Israel” (2 K 21:2); he “rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed” (v. 3); he “erected altars for Baal” and he “made a sacred pole” i.e., an Asherah tree or image (v. 3); he “worshiped all the hosts of heaven, and served them” (v. 3); he “built altars in the house of the LORD” (v. 4) and “altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD” (v. 5); he “made his son pass through fire,” practiced “soothsaying and augury,” and he “dealt with mediums and with wizards” (v. 6). Following this list of charges, a second and a third source carry matters further. First the “sacred pole” or Asherah is picked up again when it says (in v. 7) that Manasseh had it installed “in the house of which the LORD said to David and to his son Solomon, ‘In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever’” (v. 7). In other words, the sin of Manasseh consists not alone in the making of the pole but in placing it in the temple of Solomon. The text then continues in a different direction altogether, sounding the theme of rest in the “land that I gave to their ancestors” under the condition that “they will be careful to do according to all that I have commanded them, and according to all the law that my servant Moses commanded them” (v. 8). To this editor, it is deviance from the Torah of Moses which brought down the state; at this point, however, the discussion seems to have left the particular historical circumstances far behind since Manasseh could not have known a Mosaic Torah that was only discovered by his grandson, King Josiah. The section ends with a sentence that connects this larger theme of the entire historical work rather clumsily with the matter at hand, the evaluation of Manasseh: “But they did not listen; Manasseh misled them to do more evil than the nations had done that the LORD destroyed before the people of Israel” (v. 9).

Some of the “abominable” cultic practices mentioned in verses 2-6 are linked to “the nations that the LORD drove out before the people of Israel” while others (the altars to Baal and Asherah tree or image) are linked to king Ahab of Israel. Between the ages of Ahaz, loyal vassal to the Assyrians that he was, and the devoutly YHWHistic Josiah, who presided over a newly independent state, there was a struggle within the city’s elite that involved not just the cultic practices that are highlighted by the authors/editors of the various layers of deuteronomistic historiography but also a back and forth between vassalage (first to the House of Omri, then to the Syro-Ephraimite coalition, then to Assyria) and the freedom from foreign interference and everything it represented.

Like any sophisticated royal court, Jerusalem’s society seems to have been stratified, diverse, and ideologically divided. There seems to have been a divide between popular religion (represented in household gods that usually came in a male-female pair) and the religion of the palace.(13) The palace or royal household surely imposed its preferences on the officials associated with the royal shrine and it must have attempted to keep the prophetic circles and scribes in check. That these prophets and scribes were powerful institutions in their own right is evident from the fact that they succeeded in articulating their version of the events and to control the narratives that came down to later generations. The priests and prophets were sometimes in coalition with one another and with the landowners and “people of the land” (am ha’arets), sometimes at odds amongst themselves and with the military class that also represented what remained of the outlying areas of Judah, the former border fortresses, and the colonies whose YHWHistic devotion may have exceeded that of the urban and traditionally diverse center. The diversity characteristic of ancient Jerusalem is implied in the stories about king Solomon and his wives, just as the critique of Solomon expresses the objections of a movement that rallied around the exclusive worship of YHWH as the official cultic expression of national independence.

From the perspective of the authors/editors active in the time of Josiah (see below), Manasseh’s reign was bad because he had reintroduced a variety of cultic practices later banished by Josiah. Manasseh, whose name has no theophoric element but instead evokes one of the ancient northern tribes, may have patched up things with the Israelites in the north. The mother of his son and the next king, Amon, came from Jotbah in the Galilee. Neither this princess nor her son bore a YHWHistic name. Earlier, when Hezekiah had named Manasseh, who was born around 699, Judah was still recovering from the heavy losses incurred in 701. After 701, Hezekiah must have begun a process of reconciliation with the empire and set Jerusalem on a path of loyalty to Assyria while seeking to build a bridge between Jerusalem and Samaria, now an Assyrian province. It was this policy shift of his father’s that Manasseh took to its logical conclusion at a time when the power of the Assyrians was at its zenith. Given the much-changed situation in which the next generation found itself, Manasseh’s reign and his policies must have appeared loathsome to the deuteronomists who advocated YHWH-istically motivated independence.(14)

We have two further accounts of the life of Manasseh. One was added to the account in 2 Kings after the destruction of Jerusalem (2 K 21:10-16), the other is found in the post-exilic Book of Chronicles (2 Chr 33:10-17). 2 K 21:10ff surpasses the earlier account in its condemnation of Manasseh, blaming him for no less than the destruction of Jerusalem. The passage is worth quoting in full.

Because King Manasseh of Judah has committed these abominations, has done things more wicked than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has caused Judah also to sin with his idols; therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line for Samaria, and the plummet for the house of Ahab; I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. I will cast off the remnant of my heritage, and give them into the hand of their enemies; they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done what is evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger, since the day their ancestors came out of Egypt, even to this day. (2 K 21:10-15)

The passage is introduced with a phrase that also occurs in Jeremiah 44:4 (a prose section similar in perspective and style to 2 K 10ff), attributing the condemnation of Manasseh to “his (i.e., YHWH’s) servants the prophets.” This anonymous attribution points to the circle of authors responsible for this and similar passages, namely, the prophetic scribes whose input is discernible throughout the deuteronomistic work of history and the Book of Jeremiah.

Another version of Manasseh’s life, found in Chronicles, was composed by authors who were either unfamiliar with the condemnation just cited or dismissed it for certain reasons. It is possible that they considered it foolish to blame any particular king for the destruction that, at their time of writing, was more remote than the task of rebuilding. If the books of Joshua through Kings were composed to serve as a kind of fürstenspiegel that taught princes how to be responsible kings (namely, by making them mindful of the fact that their “chosenness” was contingent on their exclusive loyalty to YHWH), the Books of Chronicles laid the ground for a theocratic society, ruled by priests and Levites, by evaluating the ancient kings on the basis of their personal piety rather than their royal qualities (e.g. prowess in war, pursuit of national independence). One may say that even the notion of the exclusive worship of YHWH has here a completely different meaning since it seems stripped of the undertones of nationalism and independence. Accordingly, for Chronicles, Manasseh is not just not responsible for the destruction of the city, but he becomes the model of the new ideal of piety. This ideal of piety, which was first articulated by the early exilic prophet Ezekiel (see Ez 18), emphasized individual repentance over collective responsibility and simplistic conceptions of righteousness. After recounting the litany of “abominations” from 2 K 21:2-9, Chronicles departs from its vorlage by adding the following story: after having admonished Manasseh and the people in vain, YHWH brings up against them unnamed “commanders of the army of the king of Assyria” who take Manasseh “captive in shackles” and bring him to Babylonia (thus prefiguring the later situation of Jehoiachin). This distress causes Manasseh to repent.(15) “While he was in distress he entreated the favor of the LORD his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. He prayed to him, and God received his entreaty, heard his plea, and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the LORD indeed was God.” (2 Chr 33:10-13). Later generations, for whom repentence and conversion were key moments in the individual’s path from sin and error to forgiveness and redemption, were naturally curious to know what it was Manasseh had prayed, and eventually such a prayer was indeed composed and circulated as the (apocryphal) Prayer of Manasseh (a third century CE text, included in Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate).

In addition to saving King Manasseh’s character, the Chroniclers also found material in their sources(16) that redounded to Manasseh’s credit as a builder. According these records, Manasseh “built an outer wall for the city of David west of Gihon, in the valley, reaching the entrance at the Fish Gate; he carried it around Ophel, and raised it to a very great height,” (2 Chr 33:14) and he “put commanders of the army in all the fortified cities in Judah” (ibid.).(17) Archaelogists have not just confirmed the gist of this report but they exceed it when they speak of a veritable “construction boom” during the time of Manasseh. (18) (This is one of the cases where Chronicles proves to be a more reliable source of information than the deuteronomistic work of history.) Finally, he is even said to have removed all the abominations he himself had introduced “before he humbled himself,” something that is contradicted by the fact that his son, Amon, is said to have continued in his father’s path and that Josiah is supposed to have removed them all again shortly thereafter.

642-640           Manasseh’s son Amon, whose mother was Meshullemeth b. Haruz of Jotbah (2 K 21:19), a Galilean, represented the continuation of the policy of integration with the north, then still under direct Assyrian control. Only two years into Amon’s reign, however, Assyria’s power began to fade. It is not clear why unnamed “servants” (2 K 21:23) conspired against the king and assassinated him. Whatever the causes of this palace rebellion, the same circle (the “people of the land,” presumably the land-owning notables) that had once confirmed Joash (Jehoash) in support of a YHWHistic priestly coup against Athaliah is named again in this context as having taken immediate action against the assassins: The people of the land killed all those who had conspired against King Amon, and the people of the land made his son Josiah king in place of him (2 K 21:24).

Josiah (640-609)
Sixty years after the siege of Jerusalem, as Assyria finally withdraws from the Levant and neither Egypt nor Babylonia has as yet stepped into the vacuum left in its wake, the old local kingdoms of the Levant and Transjordan enter into a competition for control of the regional resources. Among the competitors is the Judahite kingdom of Jerusalem.

King Josiah’s long reign (640-609) is now mostly remembered for the religious reforms this king is said to have instituted. Tutored by YHWHistic priests, prophets, and scribes, the child king’s imagination may have been nourished by stories about his legendary ancestors David and Solomon and the pious deeds of Hezekiah; in the belief that YHWH had chosen Jerusalem as his residence (the legacy of 701), the adult Josiah has the royal shrine repaired; a Book of Torah “found” on this occasion becomes the blueprint for an iconoclastic revolution: Jerusalem is now the only legitimate place of the ritual worship of YHWH. Josiah’s success (or the absence of imperial pressure) sustains the belief that, if the newly united “Israel” serves YHWH and takes possession of the land, YHWH will once again drive out all other nations, as he did once before when Israel first came out of Egypt. And indeed, Josiah rules over a newly independent state, in a Jerusalem that is the unrivalled metropolis of Judah, in full control of its own stream of revenue, populous and efficiently centralized, all of which justifies the judgment of this king expressed by the editors of the deuteronomistic history: Before him there was no king like him, (…) nor did any like him arise after him.

Josiah’s reign ends with his death in battle against Pharaoh Necho (2 K 23:29; cf. 2 Chr 35:20-27). His successors find themselves in a radically altered situation.

If Meshullemeth of Jotbah and her son Amon represented the cultural influence of the Israelite traditions that Manasseh had fostered in Jerusalem, King Josiah and his mother Jedidah bat Adaiah of Bozkath represented the Shephelah, the plains south-west of Jerusalem and east of the fortress of Lachish, which had been destroyed by Sennacherib,(19) and hence a population shaped by the experience of loss, conflict, and a fierce devotion to YHWH.

Similar to King Joash (Jehoash), Josiah was a minor when he ascended the throne (Joash was seven, Josiah eight years old at the beginning of their respective reign), which means that he was a king in name only, at least initially. Joash had been tutored by the priest Jehoiada (2 K 12:2) and is said to have overseen a finance reform that involved the separation of budgets for the maintenance of the temple building and the payment of the priests (2 K 12:4-16).(20) Josiah is described as having made use of these building funds to sponsor a generous reconstruction of the ancient royal shrine (2 K 22:3-7). As to this shrine itself, no trace of it has ever been found. Since in Manasseh’s and Josiah’s time, the upper part of what used to be the Iron Age I City of David (the southeastern hill) was exclusively used for residential buildings, palace and temple were most likely situated in the area of the later Herodian platform, the current Haram ash-Sharif.

622                  The biblical accounts of Josiah’s reign (2 K 22-23 and 2 Chr 34-35) foreground the king’s pious deeds. Josiah is credited with having instituted the most radical YHWHistic reforms undertaken by any of the kings, surpassing even his legendary ancestors David and Solomon and the great Hezekiah in his zeal for the national deity. While earlier kings (esp. Hezekiah) are credited with eliminating some of the trappings of “other” cults that King Solomon himself is said to have introduced to please his “foreign” wives, Josiah’s reforms are wider in scope and include unprecedented elements, including the elimination of “high places,” i.e., YHWHistic shrines outside of Jerusalem. In this sense, Josiah made Jerusalem the city chosen by YHWH. To be sure, this idea meant something different in Josiah’s time than it meant later, after the city’s destruction and over the course of its later history. For Josiah’s contemporaries, it meant a radical disruption of their way of life and an unheard of elimination of the sacredness of traditional places of YHWHistic worship in the interest of a central administration. To make the royal shrine of Jerusalem the only legitimate place of worship was an act of great symbolic importance at a time when the Judahite kingdom was expanding and claiming the entire YHWHistic realm “from Dan to Beersheba,” if not from the river of Egypt to Damascus, as its legitimate inheritance.

According to 2 K 22-23, Josiah’s reforms were motivated by a hitherto unknown “scroll of instructions” (sefer torah) that emerged from the Jerusalem temple in connection with the repairs ordered by the king. The king has this text authenticated by prophetess Huldah and read in public, setting in motion the campaign for reform. The story is either brilliantly invented by the later authors or brilliantly staged by the king and his advisors. In either case, this is the earliest hint we have in biblical historiography of something like the Torah. Based on the content of the reforms, scholars believe that the scroll found in the temple or used to justify Josiah’s reforms included something very much akin to the canonical Book of Deuteronomy, especially chapter 12, the only place in the Pentateuch where it is explicitly commanded that worship of YHWH should be limited to a single location, chosen by YHWH himself. 2 K 22-23 also seems to presuppose familiarity with the curses Deuteronomy heaps on those who failed to follow its laws.

After a campaign to the north that involved the slaughter of the YHWHistic priests of Samaria and the desecration of their altars (2 K 23:20), Josiah returns to Jerusalem and celebrates the first Passover (2 K 23:21-23), which may entail a deliberate change of the calendar as well, indicating that a new age had begun, the age of liberty and the end to (Assyrian) slavery.(21)

Historically speaking, Josiah’s iconoclastic purge coincides with the decline and collapse of the Assyrian empire and its complete withdrawal from the lands west of the Euphrates. Ashurbanipal died in 631 after spending his final years mired in a crisis of succession. At the same time, Egypt is stabilized and fully reunited under Psammetichus I (664-610) who supports Assyria but no longer serves as her vassal. In 626 the Babylonian general Nabopolassar captures Babylon. By 620, Assyria had lost its provinces in “Hatti-land” and elsewhere.

The historical and political dimensions of Josiah’s reforms are clear, at least in outlines. The sudden disappearance of the empire allowed the Jerusalem establishment to consolidate its own authority over Judah and to extend the boundaries of the kingdom in all directions, including the border fortresses in the Shephelah, the Negev, the Arabah, and parts of the northern central highlands. Some of the lists of towns and provinces found in the Book of Joshua seem to reflect this new political reality while others may represent plans to extend the kingdom further.(22) National independence was symbolized by the elimination of all cultic indicators of the earlier dependence on Assyria and of other political alliances. In contrast to the earlier Israelite model, which had placed its YHWHistic sanctuaries in its border cities (Bethel, Dan) and established a secular capital in a new city (Samaria) with no particular religious tradition (and hence open to a cosmopolitan society), Josiah’s unification project combined religious and administrative functions in a single capital. Whether or not this initiative was widely accepted or met with the resistence of the landed priesthood and others whose livelihood would have been affected by the elimination of other sanctuaries, Josiahs reforms, enshrined as they were in the pro-Josian historiography of his and/or later times, became the basic model for the reconstruction after the exile and thus provided an important precedent for future generations.

612                  The Chaldeans and their allies, the Medes, destroy Nineveh, the splendid capital of the Assyrian empire and home to its treasures. An echo of this event is preserved in biblical literature (see Zeph 2:13-15).

609                  Josiah falls in the effort of putting himself in the way of Pharaoh Necho’s military campaign through “Hatti-land,” which may be indirect evidence of Josiah’s own imperial designs. The death of Josiah is reported in two versions. According to 2 K 23:29, Josiah dies at the battle of Megiddo and his corpse is returned to Jerusalem for burial “in his own tomb,” whereas according to the longer version of 2 Chr 35:20-25 Josiah is only wounded at Megiddo but dies in Jerusalem and is buried in the “tombs of his ancestors.”

Necho had recently succeeded his father, Psammetichus I (664-610), under whose competent rule Egypt had been united and emerged from vassalage to a partnership among equals with Assyria. Necho’s campaign of 609 was meant to reclaim the former “land of the retenu” for Egypt, now that Assyria was no more. This ambition was immediately checked by a much stronger force: the Chaldean armies under the command of Nabopolassar. Babylonian dominance of Trans-Euphratene (ever-nari) is ushered in by the defeat of the Egyptians at Carchemish and Hamath.(23) The neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) empire was to last for seventy years, not long enough to establish a new order but long enough to bring to an end the political system of the region that had emerged in a process that had extended over a period of more than fivehundred years.