Kingdom of Judah

When Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, Judah survived, and the survival shaped its religion. A southern kingdom that had been the smaller and poorer of the two was left holding the temple, the Davidic dynasty and the claim to represent the whole people, and refugees from the north appear to have arrived with their own traditions. Lester Grabbe's survey sets out how much of the biblical material takes its present form in the century or so after this, when Judah was a vassal of Assyria and then of Egypt and Babylon. The theology that developed under those conditions is recognisable in the prophetic books.

Some voices held that Jerusalem could not fall because God was in it, an idea reinforced when Sennacherib's siege in 701 was lifted without the city being taken; others, Jeremiah most sharply, insisted that no building guaranteed anything and that the covenant carried obligations the kingdom was failing. That argument was not settled by debate. It was settled in 587 or 586 BCE when Babylon took the city, burned the temple and deported the leadership, and the tradition that came through the exile was the one that had said this could happen. That is an unusual outcome. A national catastrophe normally discredits the religion attached to the nation, and in Judah it did the opposite, because a party within the tradition had predicted it.

Judaism takes its name from this kingdom, and so does the word Jew, which is a considerable inheritance for a small state that lasted about three and a half centuries. Two other things came from it. The first is a chronology: the reigns of the kings of Judah give the Hebrew Bible its dating framework, and the synchronisms with Assyrian and Babylonian records are what allow biblical events to be tied to an absolute calendar at all. The second is the text itself, since much of the editing that produced the Hebrew Bible is generally placed in the last decades of the kingdom and in the exile that followed it.

Mark Smith's work on the religion of the period complicates the picture in a way the atlas records rather than smooths over. The evidence, inscriptional as well as biblical, indicates that the worship of Yahweh in Judah coexisted for a long time with other deities and with practices the biblical writers condemn, and that the exclusive worship the finished text presents as original was in fact the position of one party which eventually prevailed. That is not a modern attack on the tradition. It is largely what the prophetic books themselves complain about, read as description rather than as polemic.