Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  A close reading confirms that, despite these triumphs, Hezekiah’s capital wasn’t taken (although other sources suggest that this was because he had to return to Assyria to deal with an attempted coup). There’s no mention of an Israelite victory, though – nor of any angelic intervention. Otherwise, much of Sennacherib’s account rings true.

  Assyria seems for the most part to have been content to take the tribute of its subject states. Sennacherib would have seen no need to plant his banner on the battlements of Jerusalem, or to stay in occupation of the conquered country as long as its Jewish rulers paid their tax.

  The Assyrian Empire

  The city-state of Assur stood on the western side of the River Tigris in the northern part of what is now Iraq. The rich and fertile floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates formed the area we now know as Mesopotamia – the name coming from a Greek phrase meaning ‘between the rivers’. Mesopotamia had long since been a crucial ‘cradle of civilization’: great states like those of Sumer and Babylon had sprung up in the Delta region to the south. (Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, hailed from Ur, a Sumerian city.)

  By about 1350 BCE, however, the northern part of Mesopotamia was under the control of Assur – the Assyrian Empire had emerged, built by ferocious warrior-kings like Shalmaneser I. Expanding out of the river valleys into the hill-country of Anatolia, he had broken the power of the Hittites there. That first Assyrian Empire had faltered, in the final decades of the first millennium – a ‘Dark Age’ of chaos and imperial collapse and chaos across the Middle East and Mediterranean – but its fortunes were restored by the conquering kings of the tenth century BCE. Ashurnasirpal II (883–59 BCE) built a splendid new imperial capital at Nineveh, while his son and successor Shalmaneser III (859–24 BCE) invaded Israel, exacting tribute from King Jehu. By the time Sennacherib was on the throne (he reigned from 705 to 681 BCE), Assyria was the dominant power in the Middle East.

  Seated in splendour, as befits a conqueror, Sennacherib receives the reports of his generals after his successful siege of Lachish, in Judah, 701 BCE. He hadn’t taken Jerusalem, but hadn’t needed to: the whole kingdom was effectively under his control.

  A moment’s cordiality in what was ultimately to be a stormy history: King Shalmaneser III (right) greets a Babylonian ruler. In the ninth century BCE, the balance of power lay firmly with the Assyrians; soon, however, their positions were to be reversed.

  Assyrian Fall, Babylonian Rise

  By the end of the seventh century BCE, however, Assyrian power was waning. Babylon was in the ascendant now. Established almost a millennium before in 1894 BCE, it had been one of a number of southern city-states jostling for prominence in Mesopotamia. It had even briefly had an empire under King Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE. It had quickly been eclipsed under his successors, though, and in thrall to Assyrian power for centuries thereafter. But at the end of the seventh century BCE it was resurgent. Ashurbanipal of Assyria had died some time around 627 BCE, and none of his successors seemed quite equal to the task of leading.

  ‘Assisted by bloody succession wars within the Assyrian elite, Nabopolassar expanded his territories northward’.

  King Nabopolassar, who had come to the throne of Babylon soon after Ashurbanipal’s death in 625 BCE, didn’t just throw off the yoke but he smashed Assyrian power altogether. Assisted by bloody succession wars within the Assyrian elite, Nabopolassar expanded his territories northward. Around 612 BCE, he laid siege to Nineveh with an enormous army. After three months the city fell – and with it Assyrian power.

  The Glory of Babylon

  Nebuchadnezzar’s capital was already legendary in its magnificence, with its gigantic ziggurats (Mesopotamian terraced pyramids) and its majestic walls. Imposing as these fortifications were, they were dwarfed by the splendour of the Ishtar gate, named in honour of the ancient Semitic goddess of love, war, fertility and sex, its blue-tiled turrets adorned with lions, bulls and dragons. Further sculptures lined the processional way that ran beneath.

  A conflagration – and lamentations: the face of the ancient world was seemingly changed when (around 612 BCE) Nineveh fell to Nabopolassar’s Babylonian siege; in reality, though, Assyrian power had been waning for some time.

  ‘The thickness of the wall is thirty-two feet’, wrote the Greek traveller Strabo (albeit some centuries later): two four-horse chariots could pass each other on the walkway along its top.

  Dedicated to the fertility god, Marduk, the Etemenanki Ziggurat is believed to have stood over 90m (295ft) tall in the city’s heyday. It rose up in seven tiers, with a little temple at the top.

  The world had never seen the like of Babylon – its power, its wealth and the glory that it blazoned forth with incredible constructions like its ‘Hanging Gardens’, its ziggurats, its temples and its magnificent Ishtar Gate.

  Here too could apparently be found the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ – although what this wonder actually comprised is a matter of speculation. What they were perhaps hardly matters: suffice it to say that Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon was by general acknowledgement the most spectacular city the world had ever seen.

  King Josiah overreached himself in his plans to reunite the Jewish kingdoms – and his bid to outfox the Pharaoh Necho II. His death at Megiddo (605 BCE) put an end to his manoeuvrings – and put little Judah firmly in its place.

  Josiah’s Gamble

  All around the region, watching rulers saw an opportunity to step into the power vacuum that Assyria’s collapse appeared to have opened up. Judah had been growing in strength and confidence since the accession of King Josiah in 641 BCE: his fanatical drive to reestablish Yahweh’s cult had brought his whole kingdom together in an energizing cause. But he overreached himself when, in the wake of Assyria’s fall, he sought to re-create Solomon’s United Kingdom of Judah and Israel.

  In 605 BCE, knowing that Necho II was marching his army eastward to offer his Assyrian ally assistance against the Babylonians, Josiah resolved to prevent them from getting through. His idea was that he would intercept the Egyptians as they crossed a narrow pass outside the city of Megiddo, southeast of Haifa: in those rugged uplands, the Jews should have the advantage of surprise.

  In the event, Josiah’s plan worked to the extent that he was able to get his army into position, but the advancing Egyptians simply swept his forces aside. If the biblical account (2 Chronicles 35, 23) is to be believed, Josiah was killed by an archer.

  THE JUSTICE OF JUDITH

  ANGRY AT ISRAEL’S rebellious spirit, King Nebuchadnezzar called his general Holofernes to him: he ordered him to take a vast army and subjugate the country once and for all. So Holofernes set out and, marching upon the kingdom, quickly started making inroads on its territory: Israel’s military force was reeling, its menfolk truly cowed.

  But a beautiful young widow named Judith was not quite so easily intimidated. She felt frustrated at her people’s passivity – and their lack of faith in God. Deciding to take action, she set forth with her waiting-woman and sought out the enemy camp. She wanted, she told the guards at the gate, to see their General Holofernes. She could give him tips on how to take her country, without further losses on his side. Hearing her words – and, more to the point, seeing her surpassing beauty – they took her to see Holofernes in his tent. Delighted to have such an appealing guest, he dined with her, drank and flirted; she flattered his attentions and encouraged his expectations.

  As the night grew late, his attendants left discreetly so as not to breach their master’s privacy. Lulled to sleepiness, Holofernes nodded, at which point Judith grabbed his sword: seizing his head by the hair, she swung hard and severed his neck completely. With her waiting-woman’s help, she stuffed Holofernes’ head in a bag and they both fled.

  They took their trophy to the Israelite camp to show it to the soldiers, so they could see that their enemy might be vanquished – and by the wiles of woman.

  One of the more peculiar not-quite-biblical texts that proliferated in O
ld Testament times, the Book of Judith stands out for the unsettling power of its story. Excluded from the King James and other Protestant Bibles (although it’s always made it into Catholic versions), it is believed to have been written relatively late, long after the events it purports to describe.

  Although the invading king is referred to as Nebuchadnezzar, he is also described as an Assyrian ruler. Holofernes’ army, indeed, sets out from Nineveh. In the end, most scholars have concluded that Nebuchadnezzar is more a generic oppressor of Jewish custom and culture. And his general Holofernes is, all agree, a most unfortunate man.

  Mankind – or manhood – is arguably the ‘real’ victim in one of those ancient texts that seems positively to cry out for modern Freudian interpretation. Judith in her deadly eroticism sums up all that is most alluring – and most dangerous – in womankind. In that strange symbolic logic by which decapitation seems no more than a metaphor for the (somehow scarier) menace of castration, the story’s climactic moment is not Holofernes’ beheading but something ‘worse’.

  As for the power vacuum, that never really came about. Granted, marching on to Mesopotamia the Pharaoh was defeated by Nabopolassar’s Babylonians at Carchemish. But Josiah was no longer there to take advantage. Nor was his son and successor, Jehoahaz, able to follow through, since he was deposed by Necho on his homeward journey. He was replaced by his younger and more tractable brother, Jehoiakim. Egypt was now the real power in Palestine.

  A Reckless Throw

  If he had an overlord in the Pharaoh, Jehoiakim reasoned, he surely had a powerful ally as well. When Nabopolassar’s son Nebuchadnezzar, having vanquished Assyria, demanded the tribute Judah had hitherto paid to Nineveh, Jehoiakim was emboldened to refuse.

  In 597 BCE, Babylonian forces took Jerusalem after a three-month siege. Leading members of Judah’s elite were taken off to the conquerors’ capital to live in exile (2 Kings 24, 14):

  And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths.

  What amounted to large-scale hostage-taking seems to have been fairly common practice at the time: groups of important administrators had been taken back to Nineveh by the Assyrians. These earlier experiences, however, don’t seem to have seared themselves on to the Jewish consciousness in quite the same way as this ‘Babylonian Captivity’.

  Nebuchadnezzar left a client prince, Zedekiah, in charge of Judah. But the spirit of rebellion was to prove infectious. In 588 BCE, it was Zedekiah’s turn to rise up in revolt. This time Nebuchadnezzar showed no mercy. The following year his armies attacked in overwhelming force: they ravaged Judah and razed Jerusalem – and its temple – to the ground. ‘The city was broken up,’ reports the Second Book of Kings (25, 4), ‘And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes.’ And that grisly sight was to be the last the king beheld. For the Babylonians promptly ‘put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried him to Babylon’ (25, 7).

  Judith draws a cloth cover over the decapitated corpse of Holofernes. The fascination of her story lies in its juxtaposition of ‘ladylike’ comportment and ‘feminine’ charm and more rough-and-ready fears – of castration and of death.

  Zedekiah’s sons are slaughtered by the troops of Nebuchadnezzar II. A client king who rebelled against his overlord, Zedekiah could expect no clemency from the Babylonians, who blinded him and bore him off in chains.

  Another wave of deportations tore the heart out of the kingdom: only the poorest and least powerful remained.

  Beautiful Harlots

  ‘How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people,’ opens the biblical book of The Lamentations of Jeremiah (Lamentations 1, 1). Like a widow, ‘she weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks.’ But it isn’t long before the emphasis is shifting; the unfortunate widow being blamed for misfortunes that it now seems she’s brought upon herself because, apparently, ‘Jerusalem hath grievously sinned’. She has cheapened herself, says the prophet, by her sluttishness (1, 8):

  All that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness … Her filthiness is in her skirts.

  So beloved was Jerusalem to the Old Testament prophets, it appears, that its attractions could only adequately be evoked in the imagery of feminine beauty. Unfortunately, its fall was seen in feminine terms as well. While it’s obviously assumed that God’s is an equal-opportunities anger, moved as much by the wrongdoing of Jewish men, it was the idea of the fallen woman that gripped the imagination.

  Ezekiel described his beloved city as a beautiful but unworthy woman. The ‘Babylonian Captivity’ gave the Jews everything from a newly-distinct identity to a rich literature of exile and of longing.

  Ezekiel, one of the exiles, was poetic in his denunciations of his people. The city of Jerusalem, in his vision, had been beloved of God as a beautiful woman might be of a man. He had showered her with gifts, he said (Ezekiel 16, 10):

  I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers’ skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk. I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck. And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head.

  But she had proven unworthy, unfaithful in her ‘abominations’ and her ‘whoredoms’ (16, 22). A ‘harlot’ (16, 35), she had betrayed her husband, giving her gifts to all who asked. ‘Thus saith the Lord God’ (said Ezekiel):

  JUDAISM: MADE IN MESOPOTAMIA

  THE EXPERIENCE OF exile in Babylon was at once a culture shock and a source of sadness, but it was in many ways to be the making of the Jews. Here, transported to a foreign land, they had no alternative but to reinterpret their religion as a creed, a set of traditions and beliefs, rather than a local – and highly place-specific – cult. Instead of Solomon’s Temple, they had now to make do with a generic place-of-worship, a synagogue. Paradoxically, though, this solemnified the act of prayer. The synagogue might never be able to match the sanctity of the Temple in Jerusalem – but this just made the community of worshippers more crucial.

  Laws on food and hygiene, once perhaps little more than a code of guidance for the super-scrupulous, became a daily reminder of a Jew’s identity. That identity was being internalized, installed in the psychology of the individual Jew and in his or her community feeling: the Prophet Ezekiel began to talk of a Jerusalem that was more an image, an emblem than an actual home. (To this day, accordingly, Jews offer the wistful prayer ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ – although of course they can be there the next day by simply getting on a plane.)

  As enduring as its legacy has been, the Babylonian Captivity was quite short. In 539 BCE, Babylon was conquered by the Persians, whose emperor Cyrus II (‘the Great’) authorized the Jews to return to their homes. Not only that, but he offered his help in the reconstruction of the Temple. Even so, the decades of exile had altered the Jews, and their religion, irrevocably: had they not been compelled to spend this time in exile, much of what we understand as Judaism would never have evolved; the Jews might have been a nation just like any other.

  Another bloody battle: for the Jews, though, the Fall of Babylon brought redemption. Cyrus the Great of Persia didn’t simply free them from their old oppressors, he rebuilt the Temple of Jerusalem on their behalf.

  Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them (16, 36).

  This same story was to be acted out almost exactly in the Book of Hosea, in which the prophet married Gomer, ‘a wife of whoredoms’ (Hosea 1, 2). He did so on the Lord’s instructions – seemingly so that the resulting story of disappointment, pain and anger could serve as a metaphor for God’s disillusion with Israel in a time when they were once more unfaithfully flirting with the beliefs and pra
ctices of pagan worship (4, 12):

  The spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God. They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms …

  History gives us no reason to think that Nebuchadnezzar II died any way other than peacefully and in his Babylonian bed. As far as the Bible is concerned, however, he ended his days in the wilderness in insane animal-hood.

  Pride and Punishment

  Babylon’s prosperity was too exorbitant, its pride too overreaching, not to be brought low. The arrogance of Nebuchadnezzar outran his many great achievements. One day, as he was walking through his palace, exulting at the great wealth and splendour that he saw around him, he asked aloud ‘Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?’ (Daniel 4, 30). Even as the word was in his mouth, a voice from heaven challenged him: