The Oxford History of the Biblical World

by Coogan, Michael D.

  Toward the end of Manasseh’s long reign, in the sixth decade of the seventh century, Assyria became entangled in an uninterrupted series of wars that put to a severe test its hankering for imperialism. Ashurbanipal had to face his rebellious brother in Babylon and that city’s Elamite allies, as well as the ever-restless Arab tribes in the south and west. Egypt, under Psammetichus I (664–610 BCE), aided by Greek mercenaries, freed itself from Assyrian vassalage without encountering miliary reprisal, and may have come to an agreement on the management of imperial interests in Syria. This would account for the tradition, reported by Herodotus, of a twenty-nine-year siege of Ashdod by Psammetichus. At the same time, Assyria faced increasing threats on its northern border as the nomadic Cimmerians and Scythians pushed westward toward Syria. There is, however, evidence for Assyrian military activity in Transjordan and on the Phoenician coast as far south as Acco during this decade; Samaria once again became home to a group of deportees. The Assyrians had not quite yet withdrawn to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. But from a modern vantage point, the sudden interruption of cuneiform documentation after 639 does read like a sign that victorious Assyria had come upon bad times.

  Manasseh died in 642 BCE, and his son and successor Amon (641–640) reigned just two years before being assassinated by his courtiers. There is no way of knowing just what prompted this mutiny, and equally strong cases can be made for either foreign or internal affairs. Judah did not lack for political tensions and intrigues. The uprising was soon put down by “the people of land,” that influential segment of the population of Judah, mostly the wealthy, who appeared in times of dynastic crisis to protect the succession rights of the house of David. In the present instance, this conservative grouping of landowners and merchants nominated Amon’s son Josiah, who was only eight years old when he ascended the throne, and during the new king’s minority the “people of the land” continued to manage the affairs of state.

  Samaria as an Assyrian Province

  The Israelite polity came to its end with the conquest of Samaria by Sargon II of Assyria in 720 BCE. After some two hundred years of the independent monarchy established by Jeroboam I, tens of thousands of Israelites found themselves exiled to distant regions of the Assyrian empire—to Gozan in northern Syria, to Halah farther east, even to the distant Iranian frontier. Sargon speaks of deporting 27,290 persons from Samaria and enlisting up to 200 skilled charioteers as a separate unit in his royal corps. The presence of only occasional stray references to individual Samarians in later Assyrian documents seems to confirm the view that within a few generations these exiles lost their national and ethnic identity in Assyria’s melting pot. True, prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel held out hope that both houses of Jacob, Judah and Israel, would take part in the promised restoration. But tradition has done right in dubbing the Israelite exiles in Assyria “the ten lost tribes.”

  As for the conquered territories, an Assyrian prism inscription has Sargon boasting that he “restored the city of Samaria and settled it more densely than before, and brought there people from the lands of my conquest. I placed my eunuch over them as governor and counted them as Assyrians.” The resettlement of the city proceeded in many stages, continuing well into the seventh century; people arrived from as far away as Babylonia and the city of Susa in Persia, as well as from relatively nearby Hamath in Syria. Under Sargon’s regional economic reorganization, nomadic Arab tribesmen moved into the province, where they probably continued to serve as a link in the overland trade. Thus the ethnic admixture of the population to be found in Samaria mirrored that to be found in many areas of the empire. For the Israelites who remained in the land—some modern estimates consider their number to have been considerable—and for the newcomers resettled in the province the Assyrians called Samerina established by Sargon in the hill country of Ephraim, life reorganized itself around the model dictated by the conqueror. An Assyrian governor oversaw the collection of tax and tribute payments, and experts trained the new Assyrians in proper conduct, “to revere god and king.”

  Were it not for religious developments among the residents of Samerina reported by the editor of the book of Kings, there would be little to include in a history of Samaria—or, for that matter, of the other provinces Assyria created out of the former kingdom of Israel—for lack of written sources. Only fragments of the commemorative stelae proclaiming Assyrian victories, which were erected in Samaria and Ashdod, have been recovered; a more substantial piece of a monument left in the Sharon coastal plain by Esarhaddon awaits publication. The names of two governors of Samerina and of a governor of the province of Megiddo are known, as they served as year eponyms in the Assyrian system of calendric reckoning. These officials oversaw an administration that operated on models imported from the homeland. Documentary evidence from Samaria and Gezer shows that commercial transactions were drawn up following cuneiform legal tradition. The Assyrian presence has also left its mark in the archaeological record. Public buildings copied Assyrian architectural design, and the imported ceramics known as “Assyrian palace ware” recovered at a number of sites in Israel and in Philistia indicate the good life enjoyed by provincial officials.

  The required reverence of god and king, a civic duty of all Assyrian citizens, did not abrogate the worship of other, non-Assyrian divinities, which the Samarians continued uninterruptedly. But of more than passing interest to the biblical historians was the development in Samaria of what they viewed as an aberrant form of Israelite worship. According to 2 Kings 17.25–33, soon after their arrival the settlers in Samaria suffered repeated lion attacks, which were interpreted as punishment by the local god for failure to worship him properly. For want of a local priest—all of whom had apparently been exiled—a priest of the God of Israel was repatriated by imperial order to Bethel in order to instruct and lead the provincials in the correct forms of worship. But the newcomers erred in their belief. Although they served the God of Israel, at the same time they continued to serve the deities they had worshiped in their former homelands, creating improper, even dangerous, religious mingling. Such is the biblical account, which later history shows to be flawed.

  Toward the end of the seventh century BCE, all traces of the non-Israelite forms of worship imported by the foreign settlers seem to have disappeared from Samaria. One report, in 2 Kings 23.15–20, notes that the reform measures carried out by King Josiah in Samaria (see below) were focused on the worship of the God of Israel at Bethel, an ancient Israelite sacred site. A second report, a survey of the century-long Assyrian rule by a Chronicler living in the Persian period, tells of the Israelites living in the north as having been welcomed to take part in the festivities in Jerusalem marking the Temple rededication (2 Chron. 34.9, 33; 35.18). Neither of these reports acknowledges the presence of foreign rituals in Samaria; even the foreigners themselves have disappeared from the record. Considered from a critical point of view, these sometimes polemical biblical descriptions suggest that within three to four generations of their arrival in Samaria the foreign settlers were on their way to being absorbed by those Israelites who had escaped deportation and still lived in the land. Assimilating Israelite customs, the foreigners became virtually indistinguishable from the autochthonous population. And by the mid-sixth century, the residents of Samaria had developed into a community of faithful who worshiped the God of Israel and who pressed to participate in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem alongside the Judeans who had returned from Babylon. These Samarians must have been scrupulous enough in their religious practice, for some of them married into the families of the high priesthood in Jerusalem. But that development is best left for the next chapter.

  King Josiah and the Great Reform in Judah

  King Josiah (639–609 BCE) is one of the heroes of the editor of the book of Kings; he is depicted as a second David, who displayed loyalty to God as no other king had done before or afterward. Though he ruled at a time of major changes in the political map of the Near East, the biblical record speaks
only tangentially of Josiah’s position in the international arena; the focus is on his religious reforms and the renewal of the covenant between Judah and its God. Extrabiblical documentation, mostly from Babylonia, is not much more informative on affairs in distant Judah.

  Even before the death of Ashurbanipal in 627 BCE, dispute had broken out over the succession to the Assyrian throne pitting against one another several rival brothers and their supporters in the army. Babylonia seized the occasion of the king’s passing, and under the leadership of the Chaldean Nabopolassar, rebelled and achieved independence. The Babylonian Chronicle records several failed Assyrian attempts to contain the loss. Within a decade, the once mighty empire had to be propped up by Egyptian aid, as the forces of Babylonia, now allied with the powerful Median army under Cyaxeres, carried the battles into the Assyrian heartland. In 614, the ancient religious capital Ashur fell, and in 612 the imperial capital Nineveh was overrun, its magnificent palaces and temples sacked and set ablaze in an act of fury and revenge. The Hellenistic historian Berossus adds a dramatic detail: Sin-shar-ishkun, the penultimate Assyrian king, “dismayed at this attack, burned himself together with his palace.” The Israelite prophet Nahum caught the mood of many who rejoiced over the empire’s collapse when he intoned:

  Your shepherds are asleep,

  O king of Assyria;

  your nobles slumber.

  Your people are scattered on the mountains

  with no one to gather them.

  There is no assuaging your hurt,

  your wound is mortal.

  All who hear the news about you

  clap their hands over you.

  For who has ever escaped

  your endless cruelty?

  (Nahum 3.18–19)

  Though some of the army managed to escape to Haran in Syria and tried to regroup under Ashur-uballit, the last Assyrian monarch, Assyria effectively ceased to exist.

  Given this picture of imperial dissolution, one wonders whether any of the territory of the Assyrian provinces in Israel was formally transferred to Josiah, as may have been the case with the Philistine city-states on the coast given over to Egyptian governance. Many historians have seen Josiah as reestablishing Israelite rule over most parts of territory of the former northern kingdom of Israel, though the extension of his rule beyond Judah cannot readily be established. Josiah did carry his reform measures into Bethel and the other cities of the province of Samerina at about the same time that Assyria was fighting for its life, but this need not have meant the formal annexation of Samerina to Judah. Often cited as relevant in this regard are discoveries at a site on the Mediterranean coast, Mesad Hashavyahu, just south of Yavneh. In this small fortress of some 6 dunams (1.5 acres), local as well as imported Greek pottery was excavated; a small number of ostraca in Hebrew were also recovered. One of these, a letter of fourteen lines, illuminates the administration of justice in everyday life: a complaint by the corvée worker Hoshayahu is submitted to his commander, in which he claims to have been wronged by his work supervisor, his cloak confiscated. While the ceramic styles and the Hebrew inscriptions fit the period of Josiah, drawing conclusions from them as to Josiah’s control of the vital coast road and his engaging of Greek mercenaries in Judah’s army is unwarranted. After all, the fate of Judah was dependent on Egypt’s determination to assert its authority over the western kingdoms freed from Assyrian control, and Psammetichus was bent on just that.

  It is more likely that an arrangement prevailed whereby the dominant Psammetichus, who himself employed Greek soldiers, permitted Josiah a sphere of influence in nonstrategic areas, while retaining overall authority for himself. This might well have included the frontier fortress of Arad in the eastern Negeb, where documents record the issue of rations to Kittiyim, a Hebrew term for Greeks. Throughout, the Egyptian army enjoyed unhampered movement on its way north to prop up the tottering Assyria until Josiah’s final year.

  During this turbulent period Josiah’s home-front reputation was made. Jeremiah praised him as the dispenser of “justice and righteousness… [who] judged the cause of the poor and the needy” (Jer. 22.15–16), but it is the reform of Judah’s worship that is most often associated with the king’s name. Just from the amount of space given to the report of Josiah’s reform activities in the book of Kings, one learns that in official circles Josiah was touted as the ideal Davidic king. What began as a routine royal duty, the repair of the Temple building, turned into a major milestone in Judah’s history. One of the duties and prerogatives of ancient Near Eastern monarchs was the upkeep of temples and the maintenance of worship that took place in them, through gifts and dedications, notably after military victories. Inscriptions from as early as the third millennium BCE record such royal benefaction and voice the hope that reciprocal divine blessing will be showered upon the donor and his offspring. Josiah’s initiative vis-à-vis the Temple of Jerusalem falls within the category of periodic repair and remodeling. But unlike the instances where the expenses were covered by royal donation, the present work was underwritten by public contributions specially earmarked for the purpose. This procedure was not new; King Jehoash (early eighth century BCE) is already credited with having instituted a regulation by which the repair funds were to be collected separately from the priestly revenues, then checked and distributed by a joint committee of two, the king’s scribe and the high priest (2 Kings 12.7–17).

  What distinguishes Josiah’s enterprise is the reported discovery during the repair work in the Temple of a “book of law [Hebrew tôrâ],” which stimulated the movement for religious reform. Our sources depict Josiah as deeply moved by the message of the “book of law,” when it was read to him, that violators of Israel’s covenant with God would be severely punished. After due consultation and encouragement from the prophetess Huldah, he convoked a kingdomwide assembly to renew the covenant between Judah and God based on the “law.” This commitment in hand, Josiah ordered a thoroughgoing purge of all non-Israelite forms of worship—the residue of centuries-long accommodation to foreign influence. Everything associated with these rituals was removed and burned, and the priests who attended them banned. And, like Hezekiah in his day, Josiah outlawed worship at the local shrines and high places, redirecting all ritual to the newly cleansed Temple; the priests who had served at the rural sites were accommodated in Jerusalem, though they were not granted equal status at the altar as the “book of law” stipulated (see Deut. 18.6–8).

  Josiah also moved against the sites of worship in Samaria where, to his mind, aberrant Israelite ritual was practiced; of particular note is his dismantling the high place at Bethel constructed by Jeroboam at the time of the founding of the northern kingdom of Israel, a symbolic act of reprisal against the long-defunct rebel monarchy. To mark the completion of this year-long activity, the Passover was celebrated in Jerusalem as it had not been celebrated for generations.

  A major difficulty in evaluating the foregoing description of the reform, which is based solely on biblical narrative, is the identity of the “law book” that stirred Josiah to action. The discovery of a law book in the Temple is not implausible, for as dwellings of the gods temples often became the repository of documents of state as well as of religious interest, their divine residents often being called on to defend and protect the agreements deposited with them. In the present instance, many identify the “book of law” with the biblical book of Deuteronomy or a significant part of it. The demand for centralization of worship at a single site and its purification from all foreign forms pervades Deuteronomic law. Deuteronomy 28’s threats of frightening punishments for nonobservance of the law would surely spur a pious king to action. Furthermore, it is thought that Deuteronomy is not, as the book itself claims to be, a work of Mosaic origin, which supposedly had been secreted away during the dark years of Manasseh’s rule. Rather, it was the ideological platform of the Josianic reform movement. Indeed, Deuteronomy is marked by a specific phraseology and rhetorical style in promoting a number of teach
ings, which distinguish it from the other books ascribed to Moses. It is hard to claim that Deuteronomy, as a pseudepigraph, was a wholly new creation of the late seventh century. Because it seems to include materials from an older age, the book of Deuteronomy might conceivably have been created by the reformers in anticipation of its “discovery.” It thus represents the first stage in the process of collection and canonization of Israelite law and tradition, which would culminate several centuries later under the direction of Ezra the scribe in the completed Torah that we know today. For certain, ascribing legal and sermonic material to Moses lent the reform program the justification needed to win vigorous royal support and public acceptance. King Josiah, with priests and prophets at his side, rallied the people of Judah behind the call for a renewal of the covenant, at a time when the kingdom was emerging from long years of Assyrian subjugation.

  These days of glory on the home front did not stand him well on his day of reckoning, for Josiah met a sorrowful end. A single laconic sentence tells of his meeting at Megiddo the Egyptian pharaoh Neco II (610–595 BCE), who was rushing north with aid for Assyria, and of Josiah’s being killed there (2 Kings 23.29). The circumstances behind this tragic encounter can in the main be reconstructed. The retreat of the Assyrians from Nineveh to Haran in 612 was followed by their ouster from that city two years later, despite continued Egyptian support, and for the next few years it was Egypt that thwarted the advance of Babylonia into the former Assyrian holdings in the west. These continuing Assyrian losses, as well as the death of the aged Psammetichus during the summer of 610, may have been interpreted by Josiah as a chance to advance Judean independence. At the same time, he may have reckoned that the future lay with Babylonia, and so sought to check further Egyptian moves. The modus vivendi that had marked Judah-Egypt relations for several decades became an open question now that the untried Neco sat on the throne.