Judaism
Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 2.1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
Abstract
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.
