Abstract

All those who have been occupied with and have written about the story of the ancient Hebrews are not historians by profession… almost without exception, they are all professors of theology.

Professor Giovanni Garbini

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 07 June 2002

Uzziah to the Assyrian Conquest

Two seals have been found of officials of the ruler, ’zyw (Uzziah), a northerner, judging from his name ending in yw. He must have been a northern leader and therefore a king of Samaria, but the only Uzziah in the bible was a long lived ruler of Judah—Uzziah, king of Judah for 50 years, 25 as a regent with his father Amaziah, and 25 in his own right (791-740 BC).

A small slab little more than a foot square in the Israel museum in Jerusalem seems to confirm the king, mentioning the bones of Uzziah, in an Aramaic inscription which said:

To this place have been transferred the bones of Uzziah king of Judah. Let no one open it.

E L Sukenik claims to have found an found it some time in 1931. Epigraphy dates the inscription to between 50 BC and 50 AD, around the time of Jesus, 800 years after Uzziah was supposed to have lived. Other than this there is no extra-biblical evidence that Uzziah, such a long-lived ruler, ever lived at all! Sukenik claims to have found the inscription among others in the Russian Church on the Mount of Olives, where they had supposedly been since the time of Archimandrite Antony (1865-1894), but there is no other evidence of this. Sukenik also speaks of “inscriptions” but only got round to publishing this one. Archimandrite Antony knew no Hebrew and sent notes of Hebrew inscriptions for translation to D Chwolson, whose own records do not mention any Uzziah inscription. The accepted collection of classic Jewish inscriptions has not valued it enough to include it, and both A Vincent as early as 1932, and G Garbini in 1985 have declared the inscription so doubtful that it must be forged. Either Sukenik was responsible or he was a dupe.

Uzziah is another way of writing Azariah, and this biblical Uzziah was also called Azariah. An Azariah seemed to be mentioned by Tiglath-pileser III as leader of a north Syrian coalition of cities (738 BC) in a textual fragment which read “…yau KUR yaudi”. Soggin writes that “the chronology of the period is controversial”, and some now date this inscription to the time of Sennacherib, saying it must refer to Hezekiah. Maybe, but there is cause to be doubtful. The reference to Yaudi here is the name of the northern Aramaean kingdom that biblicists never speak of as too confusing for their flocks. There were two Judahs! Emil Kraeling, author of an history of the Aramaeans, said Azriyau, though he had Yehouah in his name, was ruler of the northern city of Yaudi (Samal) not Judah. Azriyau of Yaudi was a usurper who sought alliances with the “Nineteen districts of Hamath” against Assyria. This rebel was beseiged in his city or in a mountain fortress by the Assyrians and seems to have been killed. Kraeling warns he was not to be confused with his contemporary, Azariah of Yehud (Judah), though plainly only the authority of the bible can explain this assertion. The author of Chronicles adds to the confusion. He has a king Uzziah opposed by a High Priest called, Azariah!

Though the biblical Uzziah reigned for a remarkably long time, he was supposedly confined for much of it in the chamber of death with leprosy, and his sons Jotham and Jehoahaz (Ahaz) acted for him in matters of state. Contemporary with this Uzziah in the eighth century was a Hiram in Tyre, a Rezin in Damascus and a state of Saba (Sheba) in Arabia ruled by Queens. Garbini surmises that whoever this long-lived king was, he has been mythologized by the biblical author as a king living 200 years earlier—Solomon. It left a long gap in the fictional history that never got filled properly but was stopped up with the notion of a leprous king barely mentionable though he ruled for half a century.

The pair of biblicist crooks W F Albright and N Glueck identified a seal found by Glueck at tell el-Keleifeh by the Gulf of Elath as inscribed “Property of Ytam” and deduced it was the property of king Jotham. Honest scholars noted that the palaeography placed it at least 100 years later than the supposed king Jotham.

Tiglath-pileser III founded the new Assyrian empire after 745 BC. Unlike previous kings who depended on booty alone, he based his new empire on a centralised government, taxing provinces. So, whereas before the conquerors came and went only to come again, like bandits, the new idea was to annex conquered places and incorporate them into the taxable provincial system. Tiglath-pileser III made conquered countries into provinces, divided into easily managed and taxed districts, as in Hamath.

H Donner, writing in Israelite and Judaean History, edited by Hayes and Miller, explains that the stages of incorporating a defeated nation like Israel into the empire were:

1. A traditional vassalage treaty—limited soverignty, payment of tribute and yielding of all foreign policy initiatives to the suzerain.
2. Any sign of the breaking of the treaty was considered a rebellion, the ruler was deposed and a puppet (perhaps disenchanted royalty) appointed. His kingdom however was reduced, the annexed portions taken directly into Assyrian administration, and much of anything that remained was parcelled out to loyal vassals of Assyria. Tribute was increased.
3. Any further dissent and the king was deposed and replaced by an Assyrian governor, the country was absorbed into empire, and the ruling elite was deported and replaced by a different ethnic leadership transported in from somewhere else where there had been trouble.
4. The system was loose, and subject to variation depending on many factors, and personal whims.

The neo-Assyrians were unusual in keeping a permanent professional army equipped with chariots and with a cavalry, perhaps learned from the Medes, Persians and Scythians. It also used terror to force submission, and such tactics are depicted in the Jewish scriptures as being those of the Israelites. Cities that did not submit were often sacked and destroyed—their citizens murdered or deported to distant places. Those who remained had to pay large tributes. It is also true that the Assyrians made use of spies, agents and propagandists called “prophets” to sow dissension, demoralisation and terror in advance of the Assyrian armies. Much of the shocking reputation the Assyrians had might have been spread by their own agents spreading fear (Isa 5:26-29).

First Tiglath-pileser had to suppress the powerful kingdom of Van (Urartu, Chaldia) which ruled north and west of Assyria, around Lake Van, and in northern Syria around Urfa. Sarduris was its king. The Chaldians were allied with the small Aramaean states of north Syria but the alliance was defeated at Commagene and 73,000 prisoners were taken.

In 742 BC, Arpad was seiged and fell two years later. The Assyrians thereafter had the whole of Syria at their mercy. The Assyrian king seemed bent on punishing the rebellious Aramaean states. Hamath was defeated and its rulers transported to Armenia, to administer part of the recently conquered Urartu. Nineteen districts of Hamath seem to have been annexed to Assyria. Other kings of small states rushed to offer tribute, including Menahem of Samaria who is mentioned in Assyrian tablets.

Three years later the king was again in punitive mode in Urartu. He devastated the country but the capital city, Van itself, held out. The remaining alliance broke up in mutual recrimination and antagonism. In 738 BC, Assyria had reduced Israel and Syria to vassalage. Damascus, Ammon, Israel, Moab and Philistia were all punished but king Ahaz of Judah supported Assyria.

Ahaz was at this time not the king but, the biblicists say, was the co-regent acting for his father Jotham, who remained king until 732 BC. Ahaz himself never ruled alone, except for the years 732 to 730 BC, because in 729 BC, he made Hezekiah his co-regent! No one seems to wonder at the timid nature of the Judahite kings, many of whom had to have been co-regents of their fathers for peculiarly long times, then appointed their sons co-regents almost as soon as they had the throne themselves. Amaziah (795-767 BC) appointed his mysterious son, Uzziah, co-regent in 791 BC, so the two reigned in tandem for 25 years. Uzziah (766-740 BC) became king in his own right and appointed Jotham co-regent in 750 BC. He was supposed to have been cursed with leprosy, so the latter does not seem outrageous but Amaziah’s weakness seems bizarre. The same is not true of the kings of Israel except Jeroboam II. He was co-regent with his father for 13 of his father’s 15 year reign, but beside him only two other kings were co-regents, and they look much more likely because they became co-regents only towards the end of their father’s reigns. Many scholars puzzle over it but cannot bring themselves to think, “phony!”

Pekah (740-731 BC), who was a usurper in Israel, according to the bible, rewrote history himself, claiming he was king at the same time as Menahem (753-742 BC) and Pekahiah (742-741 BC). Israel was probably factionalized into pro- and anti-Assyrian parties, and different pretenders had arisen to the throne, financed from abroad—the Assyrians or the Allies. This was the time when political dissension was sown in Israel, and Judah might have split off under the pro-Assyrian Ahaz.

The biblical story is that Rezin II of Syria and Pekah of Israel attacked Ahaz for no clear reason but failed to capture Jerusalem in the so-called Syro-Ephraimite war. Menahem of Israel and Rezin of Damascus are both mentioned in Assyrian stelae. In fact, the Allies, Israel and Syria, seem to have tried to punish and depose Ahaz as the first step of defying their Assyrian overlords. The Philistines and Edomites seem to have been part of the alliance, if the bible is to be trusted here.

The bible makes out that Ahaz now appealed to Assyria for assistance, though he seemed to have been an Assyrian puppet anyway, whence the assault on him by the allies. He is supposed to have introduced an Assyrian altar modelled on one seen in Damascus. So, Ahaz appealed to the Assyrians and they punished Syria and Israel for their incursions. Ahaz was indeed a vassal of Tiglath-pileser III who mentions him (Jehoahaz) as paying tribute and being part of the Assyrian army that conquered Syria.

The allies had to attend to the Assyrian punitive expedition, so abandoned the attack on Jerusalem, but Damascus fell after a two year seige in 732 BC, becoming an Assyrian province. Its elite were transported to Kir (2 Kg 16:9). The propaganda (Amos 9:7) was that they were being returned to their true home! While Israel had its rulers deported, it was reduced only to the extent of the Palestinian hills. At the same time Hoshea (731-723 BC) was set up as an Assyrian puppet king in Israel.

Assyrian records say that Pekah was overthrown by the people, so the usurper was usurped, and Hoshea replaced him. The tribute laid upon Hoshea by the Assyrians was enormous, ten talents of gold and a thousand talents of silver. A talent was about 30 kg (66 lbs). The best explanation is that Hoshea was made puppet king not only of Israel, but Aram (Syria, Damascus) as well, but he failed to stay loyal and invited further punishment and annexation.

In 731 BC, Tiglath-pileser III marched against Babylon and became its king. Salmaneser V succeeded Tiglath-pileser III in 727 BC and Sargon succeeded him in 722 BC.

Hoshea acted as a puppet should at first, but seems to have been tempted into rebellion by the change of ruler in Assyria. He refused tribute to the new king, Shalmaneser V, and broke the vassalage treaty by negotiating with Egypt. He allied with the weak twenty fourth dynasty Egyptian king of Sais. Shalmameser responded by invading Hoshea’s domain and put him down and captured Hoshea after several years, showing that he had the resources of more than just a petty kingdom.

Shalmaneser died just as victory was secured, and the population of Israel was deported under Sargon II. So, Sargon completed the subjugation, ended the Samarian monarchy and destroyed the town, deporting the rulers and bringing in foreign ones, admitting Israel to the empire as the province of Samerina (Samaria), the name applying to the whole country not just the principal town about 72o BC. The people brought in seem to have been from Syria, so to a degree the ruling elite of Syria were swapped for the ruling elite of Israel, Sargon, seeming to be saying to the deported rulers: “If you are so keen on allying with each other see whether you like ruling your allies!” The colonists rebuilt the city from 715 BC. All the cities of Samaria seem to have been destroyed suggesting Assyrian anger at Israelite defiance. Ezra (Ezra 4:2,10) says that more foreigners were transported in under Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal.

The city of Samaria was rebuilt and became the seat of the Assyrian governor, as the Assyrians themselves tell us. Samaria became a more prosperous country. It was simply no longer an independent country but had been taken into Assyria as a tax paying province.

The bible makes out that the people who moved in voluntarily adopted the religion of the land, that of Yehouah. The bible also makes out that the people who later moved out to Babylonia, or wherever, remained loyal to Yehouah. People do not change their allegiance to their gods at the drop of a hat, so why did the people moving into Samaria chose to adopt the religion of Yehouah but those who were moved out did not? The power of the “True God” would be the Christian and Jewish answer. The historical answer would have to be that people who were transported were obliged to adopt and defend the religion of the place they were moved to, according to the prescriptions of their conquerors.

A ruling elite would not immediately adopt the religion of the peasants they had to rule, unless they were obliged to. The same would have applied to any Israelite moved elsewhere, which is why the supposed ten northern tribes disappeared. They would not have had the option of retaining their own religion simply because often deported people were ethnically mixed by the conquerors further to weaken them, and make them dependent on the victors. Those coming into Samaria seem to have been a mixed bunch.

The mixed class of rulers had to defend the god they were told to defend, usually the god of the land or city they were deported into, but according to the manner the conquerors laid down. They had to “restore” the religion, and they had the right to because they had to present themselves to the peasants as a former ruling class deported long ago, and being returned by the grace of the victorious king! The Yehouah that the Persian colonists restored to Yehud was not the Yehouah that the earlier Assyrian colonists had restored in Samaria, and neither was the Yehouah of the original Canaanites. That is why the colonists could not accept help from the natives—they were not promoting the same religion.

Twin Statelets—Israel and Judah?

Believers in the bible think Israel and Judah were twin states with the same God and culture. Archaeology belies it. Pottery, architecture, landscape and climate were all substantially different, so the two states were far from identical twins, if they could be called twins at all. Israel was more prosperous and closer to the trade routes to Phœnicia, Syria and Egypt. Judah was poor, off the trade routes, in quite high hills, that no one would willingly climb without a good reason, in those days. The Egyptians planted a few watch towers in the mountains, but otherwise, they too were not interested in the almost empty hill country.

Trading countries are more likely to change because they are subject to invaders coming along the routes and because they were subject to foreign fashions and influences. Judah was conservative out of lack of these influences, and sheer poverty. Judah’s pottery and architecture were more standard whereas those of Israel were more varied and flamboyant. Architecture was meant to impress in places where merchants and potential invaders passed regularly, but there was no need to impress and few people to impress in the hills.

Israel emerged in history, as opposed to biblical history, about 850 BC. Judah did not emerge until after 750 BC. Pottery factories developed in Israel about 850 BC, but in Judah only after 750 BC. Wine and olive production rose rapidly in the eighth century in Israel, but followed only in the seventh in Judah. Trade records on ostraca, and then seals and seal impressions on pottery appear first in Israel, then in Judah.

Ahaz (732-715 BC) was formally recognized as king of Judah. It will have been Ahaz’s reward as a loyal soldier of the Assyrians. Ahaz introduced Assyrian religious practices into Judah, according to the bible (2 Kgs 16:10-16). So, Ahaz and then Hezekiah were set up as Assyrian puppets. Judah was created out of a rib of Israel in the 730s BC, surely from the machinations of Assyrian “prophets”, and took over as the local petty kingdom from 722 BC, apparently an independent rump of the former Israel. It seems likely that Judah had previously, for most of its history, been a part of Israel, and not independent, but with Assyrian encouragement seceded at about the time of the alliance. When Israel became a part of the Assyrian empire as its province of Samerina, Judah was all that remained of an independent Canaan. Judah was always a vassal of Assyria or Babylonia. It was never an independent country until the Maccabees.

Menehem of Israel (753-742 BC) and Ahaz of Judah (730-715 BC) paid tribute to the Assyrian ruler. The bible says Menehem paid a huge bribe to the Assyrians to keep his kingship, suggesting it was strongly threatened. His son, Pekahiah, lasted no time before he was assassinated by Pekah. Hosea was set up as the puppet king of Israel in 731 BC, immediately after the fall of Damascus. Hosea was deposed, according to convention in 722 BC, and Israel ceased to be. This was about the time that Judah was invented. In the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), it is Manasseh of Judah who provides forced labour for the Assyrians.

Israel disappeared from history as an independent country about 720 BC, the same time that Judah appeared, according to external records. Carchemesh followed because the Hittites of Carchemesh had formed an alliance of small states including the weakened Urartu, but after a six year war the allies were defeated and the king of Urartu, Ursa (Rusa), seems to have committed suicide. Judah was the worthless rump of Israel, and never anything other than a puppet of the Assyrians. For that reason, the Babylonians finished Judah off to complete the destruction of Samaria.

Albrecht Alt surmised that Samaria had ruled Judah until the time of Nehemiah, and that was the root of the bad feeling of Jews for Samaritans. The bad feeling probably came with the refusal of the transported “captives” in the fifth century to accept any help from the native people of the Palestinian hills, but James D Purvis says more recent discoveries have not invalidated Alt’s main conclusion. Who, one might ask are the kings of Judah before this time? The answer is that they are mythical, are city chiefs or are displaced characters from the northern state of Yauda.

Judah was all that remained of Israel when the valuable parts of the country were absorbed into Assyria, because Judah was too poor and unimportant for the Assyrians to bother to administer, though some refugees must have moved there from Israel to avoid Assyrian rule. It was left as wild and unadopted grazing for sheep with some encouragement from ateliers in the richer lowlands to grow cash crops of vine and olives. Making and distributing wine and olive oil was then in some ways like the petroleum industry today. It needed sophisticated co-ordination, production and distribution, and provided work for masses of people.

The architecture of cities like Samaria, Megiddo, Jezreel and Hazor have many common features, even to mason’s factory or individual marks in the buildings of Samaria and Megiddo. Towns like these were hilltop palaces built of ashlar stone blocks with a prominent gate, courtyard and place for administration. The ordinary people lived outside this administrative center, the design of which seems to be like that of the cities to the north in Phœnicia. Similar structures have never been found in Judah.

Only with the takeover of Samaria and the spoiling of Lachish by the Assyrians did Jerusalem become important. The bible says nothing much about Lachish even though it was an important town only thirty miles from Jerusalem. Its destruction by the Assyrians, in 701 BC, left an opportunity for Jerusalem to grow from an unimportant small town to replace Lachish as a center for the trade in olives and wine—in short, as the local market town.

The seventh century is always considered a time of religious and cultural revival in the ancient near east with noble monarchs like Assurbanipal, Nebuchadrezzar and Nabonidus collecting together ancient materials. Care is needed however, because the Persians a couple of centuries later surreptitiously enforced cultural and religious unity often attributing it to earlier times through pseudo-histories, psudepigraphs and legal and religious codification. Thus the Deuteronomic law was introduced in fifth century Yehud but an accompanying pseudo-history attributes it to the seventh century reforms of Josiah. So what is said by scholars to have been an example of Israelite religious zeal of the seventh century is a myth written in the fifth.

Soggin, refering to the supposed religious reforms of Hezekiah, says they have “every appearance of being a projection of later attempts on the past in order to give them greater authority”. If this is true, it is even more true of the reforms of Josiah, a few decades later. These reforms are all described with the unmistakeable stylistic stamp of the Deuteronomistic historian—the justification for setting up the temple state of Jerusalem, Yehud, in the Persian period and to restore the worship of Yehouah in the way that the Persians wanted it to be.

Hezekiah and Sennacherib

Hezekiah was king of Judah, of that there is no doubt. He was mentioned by Sargon II and by Sennacherib. Sargon listed Judah as paying tribute alongside Philistia, Edom and Moab. He actually fought three campaigns against Philistia but also called himself the “subduer of the kingdom of Judah”.

It seems Hezekiah was at first a faithful vassal of the Assyrians whom he assisted. An anti-Assyrian alliance of about 720 BC, consisting of Gaza, Hamath and the Samarians, supported by Egypt, seemed not to include Judah. The Assyrians defeated the alliance and imposed harsh reprisals.

Later, though, in 713-711 BC, Hezekiah was in alliance with the Philistines of Ashdod and other cities, Edom, Moab and Babylon against Assyria, again supported by Egypt. The allies lost again, but Hezekiah seems to have stepped back in time to avoid serious reprisals. Sargon defeated Babylon in 710 BC. Merodach-Baladan was chased into Bit Yadin in the marshes and its conquered citizens were transported in chains to Nineveh. Sargon put down the Elamites, then returned to Hamath which had revolted under a king called Yehubihdi or Ilubihdi, an hypocoristic name that shows he worshipped Yehouah, and that Yehouah and El were even then being equated, and that Yehouah was not, as biblicists insist only the god of Israel. Hamath was a country to the north, inland from Phœnicia, and even there Yehouah was an object of worship. Hamath was defeated and 4,300 people were transported.

Sargon was murdered in 705 BC by his troops and Sennacherib succeeded. By 705 BC, Hezekiah is depicted as the leader of an alliance and takes the king of Ekron, who seems to oppose it, as a prisoner. Merodach-Baladan, now pretender to the throne of Babylonia, was not finished. He had also again seceded in Babylon and supported the allies. He sent ambassadors to form alliances, and the bible mentions them in Hezekiah’s Jerusalem. Hezekiah expected to be part of a large confederacy, but Sennacherib was up to the challenge of the allies, cleaned up Babylonia, then came west with a strong punitive force to settle the Egyptians at Elteqeh. Sennacherib wrote after the battle of Elteqeh:

Trusting in Assur, My Lord, I fought with them and overthrew them.

A will, written by Sennacherib, ends with the prayer:

Thine is the kingdom, O Nebo, Our Light.

These show that the Assyrian king regarded his god just as the believers in Yehouah in the scriptures regarded theirs, and even used the same phrases. Having disposed of Lachish by seige, he seiged Jerusalem. Jerusalem was apparently not defeated, but, in both the bible and the Assyrian annals, Hezekiah decided to abandon the alliance and pay tribute for the Assyrians to desist. The tribute recorded in Assyrian archives is 30 talents (a tonne) of gold and 800 talents (24 tonnes) of silver (300 in the bible). Again, this seems a huge charge to place on a small country.

In the story about Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem in 701 BC, the scriptures say that, in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them. And king Hezekiah behaved well in the eyes of the Lord, revolted against the Assyrians and smote the Philistines, but when the Assyrian king is at Lachish, Hezekiah surrendered to the Assyrians and paid tribute to his overlord.

Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish, saying, I have offended; return from me: that which you puttest on me will I bear. And the king of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. And Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of the Lord, and in the treasures of the king’s house. At that time did Hezekiah cut off the gold from the doors of the temple of the Lord, and from the pillars which Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and gave it to the king of Assyria.

2 Kings 18:13-16

But then, the Assyrian king sent his general, Rabshakeh—really the Assyrian High Cup-Bearer ( = Rabshakeh), a ministerial position—to Jerusalem, where, in front of the gates of Jerusalem, he delivered an aggressive speech. Hezekiah, in great distress, turned to the prophet Isaiah who promised the assistance of God against the Assyrians. The Assyrian general returned to his master now about to confront an Egyptian army trying to outflank them. Rabshakeh sent a letter to Hezekiah repeating many of the threats against Judah already delivered in his speech. Hezekiah asked the Lord to help him against the Assyrian army. He obliges by sending His nasty angel to kill 185,000 Assyrian soldiers during the night, forcing Sennacherib to withdraw in dismay. Herodotus records the different story that the army was overcome by the Egyptians because mice ate the cords of their bows. The bible then says Sennacherib was murdered. Biblicists claim the biblical account is contemporaneous even though the death of Sennacherib was twenty years later. It also calls the Egyptian general a pharaoh, Tirhakah (Taharqa), which he did not become for another decade. Knowing the Assyrian minister’s title as Rabshakeh implies Mesopotamian knowledge, and the dead Assyrians is the same number as those killed by Narum-Sin, the Sargonid king, legendary even then.

The narrative in these chapters is not a homogenous description of the events of 701 BC. The Rabshakeh incident is superfluous. Hezekiah had already surrendered and paid his tribute to the king of Assyria. The Assyrian king had already achieved his goal, to stop the rebellion in southwestern Palestine. The modern historian would try to distinguish between the historical and the mythological, looking for historical information in the short description of Sennacherib’s campaign at the beginning of the narrative in 2 Kings 18-19, rather than in the expansion that follows.

In the seige of Jerusalem, Rabshakeh, according to the Jewish scriptures, addressed the besieged Jerusalemites in Hebrew instead of Aramaic, so that the ordinary people watching from the walls could understand him. He was invited to speak in Aramaic, the court and diplomatic language, but it seems the people only understood Hebrew. Aramaic became the international language—“Imperial Aramaic”, but that was in Persian times. Biblicists conclude that Hebrew was such an important language that High Assyrian officials must have known it, though skeptical historians think it as likely as George W Bush being able to address the Iraqis fluently in Arabic.

The expression, “eat faeces and drink urine”, thought to have meant the threat of the consequences of resistance, has been traced to the Egyptian Book of the Dead where it simply means death. Copying the Book of the Dead was an industry in Egypt in Persian times, as Herodotus says, so the source of the expressions in both books could have been Persian. If it appears in the Pyramid Texts, its Egyptian provenance is confirmed. Even so, the literary matrix of the story could have been Egypt in Ptolemaic times when the Egyptian rulers favoured the Jerusalem priesthood.

The Rabshakeh (2 Kg 18:22) knew that Hezekiah had started a religious reform, but thought he had done the one remarkable thing that he had not done—removed the altars and high places. Josiah only did it, in the bible, a century later.

Archaeologists have found Sennacherib’s royal annals of the campaign. It opened with a diversion to Phœnicia, to Sidon, to clear obstacles behind the front line and to safeguard the retreat. In Palestine, the “Judaean” Hezekiah had interfered with loyal Assyrian vassals including Padi, the king of Ekron, who Hezekiah held prisoner. Hezekiah and his allies had also approached the king of Egypt. The Egyptian army had arrived and prepared for battle at Elteqeh. Sennacherib conquered the cities of Elteqeh and Timnah, and and occupied Ekron. Hezekiah had to set Padi of Ekron free and he was reinstalled as an Assyrian vassal. Hezekiah did not yield any further but Sennacherib devastated his country, destroyed 46 fortified cities and trapped Hezekiah in Jerusalem. The devastated parts of Hezekiah’s kingdom were handed over to the Philistines. Hezekiah paid a heavy tribute, delivered by his envoys to the Assyrian king in Nineveh. In his own words…

I drew nigh to Ekron and I slew the governors and princes that had transgressed, and I hung upon poles, round about the city, their dead bodies. The people of the city who had done wickedly and had committed offences, I counted as spoil, but those who had not done these things and who were not taken in inquity, I pardoned. I brought their king Padi forth from Jerusalem and I stablished him upon the throne of dominion over them, and I laid tribute upon him.

I then beseiged Hezekiah of Judah, who had not submitted to my yoke, and I captured forty six of his strong cities and fortresses, and innumerable small cities which were round about them, with the battering rams and the assault of engines, and the attack of foot soldiers, and by mines and breaches. I brought out therefrom two hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty people, both small and great, male and female, and horses, and mules, and asses, and camels, and oxen, and innumerable sheep I counted as spoil. Himself, like a caged bird, I shut up within Jerusalem, his royal city. I threw up mounds against him, and I took vengeance upon any man who came forth from the city.

His cities, which I had captured, I took from him and gave to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, and Padi, king of Ekron, and Silli-bel, king of Gaza, and I reduced his land. I added to their former yearly tribute, and increased the gifts which they paid unto me. The fear of the majesty of my sovereignty overwhelmed Hezekiah, and the Urbi and his trusty warriors, whom he had brought into his royal city of Jerusalem to protect it, deserted. And he despatched after me his messenger to my royal city Nineveh to pay tribute and to make submission with thirty talents of gold, eight hundred talents of silver, precious stones, eye-paint, … ivory couches and thrones, hides and tusks, precious woods, and divers objects, a heavy treasure, together with his daughters, and the women of his palace, and male and female musicians.

The biblical narrative and Sennacherib’s annals are two reflexions of the campaign of Sennacherib that ended when Hezekiah gave in and paid the tribute the Assyrians demanded. The two versions agree that Hezekiah rebelled against the Assyrians, Sennacherib attacked his country and destroyed many cities, at the end Hezekiah paid a tribute, but Jerusalem remained in his hand unharmed. 2 Kings is correct that the Assyrians did not conquer Jerusalem. Hezekiah did not willingly “centralize” the cult at Jerusalem, the Assyrians did it for him by destroying the other cult centers of Israel, leaving only that at Jerusalem. Differences are chronological details such as when and where Hezekiah sent his tribute and how big it was.

Only the siege of Jerusalem in the bible is historical, and the rest is a romance written not before the fifth century—when Aramaic became the Persian lingua Franca—and possibly not until the third century when the Greek Egyptian kings commissioned the Jewish scriptures in Greek. Besides the appearance of an Egyptian army in Palestine at this time, nothing else is historical about the Rabshakeh incident. The author of 2 Kings had proper history to work from but invented the Rabshakeh incident to show the God of Heaven saving Jerusalem. The biblical narrative that follows the payment of the tribute is simply propaganda. After the paying of Hezekiah’s tribute, an event that the Persian scribes had found in the annals of Sennacherib’s campaign, the rest is added to introduce the God of Heaven propaganda that the Persians wanted to be accepted.

The word used in 2 Kings 18 and translated as “Hebrew” is actually “Yehudit”. It implies that the country was a well established Yehud where the people were Yehudim and they spoke Yehudit. None of this is likely to have been true until Yehud was a temple state, and built up a national pride that reflected itself in the national language that the author could depict an Assyrian government minister as knowing.

The letter of Sennacherib in 2 Kings 19:10-13 includes a list of nations destroyed by the Assyrians, but it includes Haran that had never been destroyed by the Assyrians in about 600 years, since it was last captured by Shalmaneser I in the thirteenth century BC. It was an Assyrian province by 814 BC, was never attacked during the lifetime of the neo-Assyrian empire, and was evidently a city favoured by the Assyrians for its strategic position on the road to the West, and for its cult of the god Sin whom they also favoured. It makes the letter look suspicious.

The list of conquered nations repeats 2 Kings 18:34 implying that the fate of Judah would be the same as that of the other cities, and Samaria. Moreover some of them are the names of the people deported into Samaria from their defeated cities, as we may assume (2 Kg 17:24). Lair was a known city between the lower Zab and Diyala. All seem to be cities frome these middle and higher reaches of the Euphrates and its tributaries, though none of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah seem to have been major centers or countries, and would probably not have been listed had the author not needed them for his purpose, and lacked anything else.

The city of Haran was attacked shortly after this period described in the scriptures, namely by the Medes and the Babylonians attacking Assyria in 610 BC. An author writing some time after this will remember this battle for Haran rather than any earlier one. It offers the possibility that the seige of Jerusalem described as in the time of Sennacherib is really the seige by the Babylonians retrojected into the earlier period. No reader would have known the difference by the time this was being written. Since 1 Kings 11:11-13, 32-36, 38-39 speak of part of the kingdom being taken away from the wicked kings’ sons, it must have been written after the fall of Samaria, which can hardly have survived the fall of the more powerful city of Damascus in 732 BC for too long. About this same time Judah begins to appear in history.

After the withdrawal of Sennacherib from Jerusalem the scriptures say nothing about the next ninety years.

Manasseh to the Babylonian Conquest

The Assyrians reached the maximum extent of their empire under Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) who subdued Egypt, and Assurbanipal (Greek, Sardanapalus, 669-627 BC) who collected the remarkable library found by the nineteenth century Assyriologists. Assurbanipal was a civilized and wise king, but Assyria was spent by centuries of warfare just as the Greeks were later, and could only decline. In 655 BC, Psamtik liberated Egypt. A few years later, Babylon rebelled and had to be subdued about 650 BC. Assyrian cultural hegemony was soon to pass to the Medes and the Persians.

Manasseh in the bible was a long lived wicked king, but in the Assyrian annals, he was a loyal vassal. Assyrian records of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal both mention tribute by Manasseh. He even travelled to Nineveh to deliver his tribute in person to the Assyrian monarch, and appears with others who did the same on an Assyrian list. They also show that the countries Judah, Moab and Edom now were paying tiny tributes, showing that earlier huge ones mentioned for Judah were for more than the small country itself, or had been so great that the earlier tribute had impoverished them. Manasseh’s was a minimal kingdom—effectively Jerusalem—even though he might have had more to administer as an Assyrian governor. The land, though, was devastated, and some cities were deserted. The Assyrian empire was at its greatest extent, and Egypt was subjugated as far south as Thebes.

Josiah (639-609 BC) was the next king of note in Judah. The Assyrians were in rapid decline and could not cope with all their problems. Egypt revolted in 655 BC, Babylon in 650 BC, Babylon again about 625 BC, the Medes attacked Nineveh about 625 BC, Scythians raided often and, finally, Nineveh fell in 612 BC. Suddenly, Josiah is a king of a large kingdom, like Solomon’s, according to 2 Kings 22-23. What had been Assyrian provinces are suddenly part of Judah! H Spieckermann thinks he could not have had the manpower for it. South of Judah in Arad, however, is evidence of Greek occupation!

The supposed scroll found in Josiah’s time is described with a definite article. It is “the” book not merely “a” book. Why were the ancient and revered books of Moses not “the” books already at this time? This shows that the book found was the first book of law of the Jews. The story is nevertheless a pseudo-historical myth. No such book could have been found, and there were no circumstances that could have provoked it being forged.

Josiah’s reform was absolute. No syncretism or compromise with Canaanitish cults was allowed and the only sanctuary was Jerusalem, in the scriptures. At Arad in the Negeb, Yohanan Aharoni excavated a temple said to be to Yehouah that functioned from the tenth to the seventh centuries, when the cult paraphernalia were buried with apparently some reverence. Josiah was supposed to have been responsible for closing it, but why? The excuse is supposed to have been centralization in Jerusalem but it simply illustrates that these “scholars” can find any excuse for anything that suits them. It is not science, and if it is art, then it is rarely honest.

Any such reform would have seemed capricious and unjustified to the majority of people who worshipped Canaanite gods. Reforms or restorations had to be subtle, or done on the basis that no one could have known otherwise. Thus a complete reform like Josiah’s could be done after a lifetime’s interval because no one could have known what went before a lifetime ago, but in a shorter interval, reforms had to be more subtle and justified to the people by clear morives. Why should Josiah have introduced radical reforms and courted such unpopularity?

What shows the myth is false is that despite the supposed zeal for the reforms they took “considerably longer than the sources would have us believe,” as Soggin puts it. He means no reforms happened at all! The temple at Elephantine in Egypt remained operating for two more centuries until after 400 BC, and other sanctuaries obviously continued to operate too. These are disconcerting discoveries “given the principles expounded in the reform”. The conclusion of many scholars is that the whole affair is a pious fraud. It was! But it was a pious fraud from 200 years later, and one so successful that Jews and Christians base their religion on it still. F Foresti showed convincingly that any demand for centralization of the cult could not have occurred before the exile, and indeed could only have been conceived in a foreign land where the reforms were already practiced.

Many deliberately broken figurines found at Ophel in Jerusalem are attributed to Josiah’s reforms—or Hezekiah’s earlier ones according to Kenyon who excavated them—but they could simply be votive offerings, or the opposite, some manner of cursing. They were deposited in a small cave next to a sanctuary. Only those who have to relate what they find to some biblical fiction come up with specially pleaded unlikely answers when elsewhere they would have found a more general and more convincing one.

The Pharaoh, Necho, sought to uphold the rump of Assyria which remained centred on Haran in Syria, and sent a force to help the Assyrian king, though the Jewish scriptures say to fight with him (2 Kg 23:29). Josiah supposedly got in the way and was killed at Megiddo leaving Judah now an Egyptian vassal.

Josiah had several sons and the authors of Chronicles and Kings seem quite confused about them. The eldest son was Jehohanan, or was it Jehoahaz? Who followed Josiah? Was it Jehoahaz (2 Kg 23:30; 2 Chr 36:1), Shallum (1 Chr 3:15; Jeremiah) or Jehoiakin (3 Ezra 1:32)? Whoever it was, he was soon deposed and an Eliakim was appointed, but he changed his name to Jehoiakim. Despite this apparent devotion to Yehouah, he was a tyrant.

Jehohanan was younger than the second son, Jehoiakim, but the chapters of 3 Ezra that repeat Chronicles say the first son was Jehoiachin, and he was the one exiled to Egypt and whom the Egyptians replaced by his brother, Jehoiakim! Jeremiah disagrees with all of this, saying that the successor of Josiah was a son called Shallum. Anyway, Pharaoh Necho put Jehoiakim on the throne but, until then, he had been called Eliakim. He reigned for eleven years, presumably as an Egyptian puppet, but even so paid homage to Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Babylon. In 605 BC, Nebuchadrezzar defeated Necho at Carchemish, and Jehoiakim switched his allegiance. The country was divided into pro-Egyptian and pro-Babylonian factions, and prophets were propagandists for one faction or another. Jeremiah spoke for the pro-Babylonian, anti-Egyptian lobby. Then Jehoaikim fought some wars against his new overlord but still died in his bed. 2 Chronicles, however, said he was deported to Babylonia, but first he retrieved a brother from Egypt. This brother was yet another one, because he was called Zarhi (Zarios), unless he was Jehoahaz by another name!, this being from 3 Ezra again. Necho invaded Asia again in 601 BC, and Jehoiakim again switched his allegiance. Nebuchadrezzar was annoyed and seized Jerusalem, in this version killing the king (2 Kg 24:8-17). Josephus says that Jehoiakim was killed by Nebuchadrezzar in Jerusalem.

The son of Jehoiakim was another Jehoiachin, who ruled for three months in 598 before being sent to Babylon with the whole royal household by Nebuchadrezzar. Babylonian records identify a Yaukinu, king of Judah, and was in captivity there effectively under house arrest for 32 years. Exiled royalty were not literally imprisoned in Babylon. They were treated honourably as courtiers, the court being where they could not do harm because they were under close scrutiny. Evil-merodach released him, but he seems not to have returned to Judah. Jehoiachin was a father several times in exile, one of his sons also being called Jehoiachin, and also mentioned in the Babylonian chronicles. All of these extra-biblical sources always called Jehoiachin the king of Judah, even though he remained in exile in the land of his conquerors. Since the actual rulers, the Babylonians, called Jehoiachin the king of Judah, that is what he must have been, and no one else! The biblical Zedekiah (Mattaniah) must therefore have been a governor.

Seals have been found inscribed with, “Eliakim, minister of Jehoiachin”. As Jehoiachin at most ruled in Jerusalem for only three months, the seals most likely refer to ministers acting for the exiled king in Babylon. Thus, Zedekiah was perhaps the governor who was the chief of the substantive government of several ministers, nominally acting for Jehoiachin, but in practice for the Babylonian king. Moreover, if this Eliakim on the seal is the son of Josiah who became Jehoiakim, then the 3 Ezra story looks to be the right one.

Babylonia and Persia

The Lachish Letters are a collection of ostraca with messages apparently written by defenders of the city at some time when it was under attack. The “scholars” say they show that Yehouah was essentially the exclusive god of the soldiers’ families. All of them have the name Yehouah in them in hypocoristic form. Not one contains the name of Baal or El. Yet, as we saw above, plenty of biblical idolators seem to have preferred to be known by names in Yehouah even when the biblical story was that they were worshippers of Baal. Athaliah, for example. Not that the scholars are likely to be wrong here, but it shows how they can call heads or tails and still claim they are right. God’s truth!

The scholars say these ostraca date to the fall of Judah, and the defenders were being seiged by the Babylonians. Perhaps they are right, but Palestinian dating has been distorted by the machinations of the W F Albright school of mendacity which has effectively eliminated the Persian period by dating all Persian strata as late Assyrian. Inadequate consideration has been given to these letters being from Persian times, and inadequate consideration has been given to honestly dating the layers excavated at Lachish. Egypt had a major uprising in the middle of the fifth century, and, shortly after, the Persian general, Megabyxos rebelled in the same area because his promise to Greek mercenaries fighting for the Egyptians had been flouted by the king’s wife. The destruction from these two rebellions must have been considerable and plain enough to see if not to identify easily, but no one can find it because all destruction is either by Nebuchadrezzar or by Joshua.

The Lachish letters are mainly dated by the similarity of their language and the names mentioned to Jeremiah, the biblical prophet who was supposed to have been a contemporary. The explicit mention in the letters of the absence of signals from Azekah, eleven miles north of Lachish is also taken to tie in with Jeremiah’s account of the attack (Jer 34:7). “Jeremiah” might, however, have been writing pseudepigraphy, not history, to show that the same fate awaited the Jews as happened when Nebuchadrezzar wiped out the city, so the content of his book is contemporary, but not with the Babylonian conquest, with the Persian punitive expedition.

Biblicists think, because of their preconceptions, that Jews adopted Babylonian names, and some later swapped back to Jewish names. When Judahites were deported to Babylon, they dropped “Yahu” from their names in favour of “El”. On one seal, a woman called Yehoyishma, taken to signify that she was Jewish, says she is the daughter of Samassarusur, a man with a Babylonian name. For biblicists this exemplifies the Jew given a Babylonian name by his exiled father but returning to a Jewish name for his daughter.

One wonders why the Jewish man given the Babylonian name could not change his own name. They freely changed “Yeho” to “El” when they went to Babylon, so why not change “Samas” to “Yeho” and translate the name into Hebrew? The simpler explanation is that Babylonians were converting to a new sect of Yehouah. It was probably seen as a novel form of worshipping Ea, the Babylonian Oceanus, one of the Babylonian major gods. The Persians saw Yehouah as the equivalent of Ahuramazda and promoted the sect as a non-Persian form of their own religion.

Cunieform tablets from Nippur are records of the large Babylonian bank called Murashu. Scholars says that among them are contracts pertaining to Jews living in 28 districts of the region. How do they know that these people are Jews? How else but that they have Jewish names. Soggin confirms that the clients of the Murashu bank in Persian times with Yehouah in their hypocoristic name are assumed to have been exiled Jews. If so, in little more than a century, large numbers of the people supposedly deported from Judah had become extremely rich.

Whatever these “Jews” were, they borrowed money at the same rate as other customers, so were not discriminated against in money lending. Several have been identified as senior members of society, and one seems to have been a partner or senior executive in Murashu itself. Another was a government civil servant. Yet another had a military fiefdom obliging him to render military service, or find someone who would.

These people were not slaves or captives in any sense demanded by the bible. The bank records are from the fifth century—in the Persian period at the very time that ther Persians set up the Jewish temple state. It was in the century after they had been taken into captivity by the Babylonians as slaves. Ezra 2:65 says that the Jews who returned owned slaves of both sexes, supposedly only 70 years after they were carried off in chains. These returning Jews in the biblical story cannot have been the Judahites who were taken into captivity. Either these people were not the same as those deported, or those deported can never have been captives. There is no doubt that Jehoiachin and his family were not free, although they were not kept in a dungeon, as their ample rations in the Babylonian annals show us. Zedekiah, on the other hand, the scriptures say was blinded and his family apparently killed.

So, it is hard to imagine that those deported from Judah were allowed to do as they pleased, and particularly make fortunes in only a few generations. If they were free, then why did they have to wait for Cyrus to allow them to return? Deportation only makes sense if those deported are given onerous duties that fully occupied their attention to stop them from plotting. The records of Murashu and Sons show that Yehouah was a highly respected god. Since he appears to have been the Canaanite version of the Babylonian god, Ea, he possibly appealed to Mesopotamians too as an exotic version of their old god.

Casiphia (Ezra 8:17) is called “the place” Casiphia, “place” being “meqom” in Hebrew. It is yet another of those mistranslations meant to hide the true story from the gullible believers, because “meqom” means a “holy place,” a “shrine” or “sanctuary,” not just “a place”. The plain conclusion from the passage is that Ezra is visiting a shrine—presumably Jewish!—to recruit people for the task ahead of building a temple state.

There is a notable relationship between forms of “exilic” worship and waters. In Psalms 137, there is weeping besides the waters—a mourning rite. Ezekiel had his visions of God, like Zoroaster, beside a river, the Khabur (Ezek 1:1-3:15), suggesting he was participating in some sort of rite or cleansing by it. According to Walter Zimmerli, Jews in the Greek and Roman diasporas preferred to build their place of prayer by water. This is confirmed in Acts 16:12-13. Ezekiel in his description of the temple specifies water flowing from the altar. All of these are Zoroastrian habits, water being one of their pure elements.

Psammetichus I (Psamtik, 662-610 BC) used foreign mercenaries to garrison his border stations, a policy that his successors continued. Canaanites were among those hired by the Egyptian army to man such stations. The Elephantine Papyri date from the century from 495 to 399 BC. The Elephantine station might have existed for up to 100 years before the earliest of these papyri, so it could have been set up as a consequence of Psamtik’s policy. The mixture of God’s worshipped at the Elephantine temple has been explained by a proponderance of Israelites in the garrison, and by syncretism, but B Porten, who has carefully examined all the evidence says that such an idea “dissipates on close inspection”. The Canaanites before the Persian period therefore worshipped a pantheon in which Yehouah was important but not alone!

Ephraim Stern has noted that in the Persian period, Palestine was divided into two regions as culturally distinct as two different countries. The hill country of Judah and Samaria along with Transjordan was one part, cuturally Canaanite with Mesopotamian and Egyptian influences, and the Mediterranean coast and Galilee was the other, culturally Phœnician and Greek. In the Persian period, the coastal area, and perhaps Galilee, were administered from Phœnicia, while the temple state was modelled on Babylonian lines.

Stern thinks the Persians had little cultural effect, perhaps because the Persian strata have been misdated, but plainly Persia affected the government, the military, economic life especially trade, seals, coinage and taxation, and last and least recognized, religion. Yehud itself was a tiny state, as the range of Yehud seal impressions prove. They are found from Jericho to Gezer, east and west, and from Tel en-Nasbeh to Beth Zur, north and south, little more than 30 miles in each direction. Nehemiah 11:23-35 exaggerates the size of the state greatly.

This all suggests the biblical story of a “United Monarchy” is an idealization of the truth that Samaria preceded Judah and was suppressed in its favour. The Persians sent in colonists who had no regard for the natives whether Judaeans or Samarians, and the antagonism that ever followed began. Judah and Jerusalem had to be made the center of devotion of the whole country in the invented histories, and the people who were Israelites had to be identified with the later Jews of Yehud. Thus the Jews had three names: Jews, Israelites from the former name, and Hebrews as the inhabitants of Abarnahara, the name sticking with them and not others because the temple priesthood guarded the holy scripts which were in that language, a dialect of Phœnician.

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