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Learn about the history of the Jewish people, the community who wrote the Bible, from the destruction of their kingdoms, Israel and Judah, to the deportation of some of the people to Babylon, and then to the eventual restoration of the Jews in their homeland under the Persians.
Welcome to the 3rd episode in an arc on the history of the Jewish people, the ancient community who wrote the Bible. The last two episodes have been pretty dense with information, so let’s do a quick recap of where we’ve been so far historically.
And, that catches us up. Today, we are going to talk about the fate of the people of the two kingdoms after they are conquered, starting with those in the north, Israel, and then those in the south, Judah.
Last time, we mentioned that the Assyrians came to power in Mesopotamia, expanded to become a great empire, and in 720 BC, destroyed the relatively tiny northern kingdom of Israel, which had a capital city called Samaria. Assyria was notably a brutal, iron-fisted empire, and one of the ways they controlled their subjects, the peoples they conquered, was to deport them away from their homelands and to replace them with new populations imported from other parts of the empire. It’s hard to maintain an identity when you don’t have a home, and when you are forcibly mixed with other populations.
So, this is what happens to the northern Israelites. Many of them are made to move east, to Mesopotamia, and their home territory in northern Canaan is forced to welcome new populations. This is simplified, but we might talk of the northern Israelites from this point on as falling into three groups.
The first group included those who were left in place by their Assyrian conquerors, those who were NOT deported. As I mentioned, the primary city of the Kingdom of Israel had been Samaria, and those who stayed in the land are the ancestors of a group of semi-Jews called Samaritans. If you know Harry Potter, you might think of the Samaritans as the “muggles” of Judaism by the time we get to the New Testament. More on them later.
The second group of Israelite people fled south when the Assyrians conquered their land, and “south” meant to the Kingdom of Judah and the city of Jerusalem where their cousins lived. So, some northerners became refugees in the south and took their writings and priests with them when they were forced to flee.
The final group of Israelites were the deportees. They ended up, most likely, in northern Mesopotamia where they were forced to resettle and assimilate. The short version of the deportees’ story is that they are never heard from again as a formal people group, and their disappearance from history becomes the stuff of legends about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I won’t go into this bit of trivia because it would require a long, hard-to-follow detour, but there were actually only six deported tribes, not ten.
But, these lost tribes became the subject of wild speculations, with varied populations around the globe identified as the potential descendents of the lost tribes of Israel. Imaginative Christian missionaries often thought they had found the lost tribes in places as disparate as New Zealand, Japan, East Africa, and North America. The idea that American Indians are descendants of the ancient Israelites found particular purchase among the Mormons, in fact. Modern genetics have been helpful to debunk such speculation.
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Okay, so the northern Kingdom of Israel is gone, so let’s turn our attention to the southern kingdom of Judah. Ultimately, Judah is the much more important of the two for the history of the Bible and, ultimately, for the history of Judeo-Christianity more generally.
As mentioned in the last episode, Assyria, after destroying Israel, also threatens the existence of Judah and, in 701 BC, following a failed siege of Jerusalem, Assyria forces Judah to become a vassal state, a tributary. But, Judah does hang on to some of its independence for a while longer. Major religious reforms in Judah coincided with the arrival of refugees from the conquest of Israel to the north. The importance of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem is strongly reasserted, and worship is centralized.
In 626, a new empire in Mesopotamia, Babylon, becomes very powerful and conquers Assyria. So, with their Assyrian overlords gone, the vassal kingdom of Judah is left in a bit of limbo. Babylon and Egypt start to vie for influence over Judah, and the final kings of Judah are caught in a tug of war between these two powers, trying to figure out to whom they might most strategically offer their allegiance. Ultimately, it is Babylon who wins out. In 597, the Babylonians capture Jerusalem and install a puppet king over Judah who rebels about ten years later, and in 587 BC, Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon responds by wiping out Judah conclusively. Jerusalem is destroyed, and the temple of Yahweh is razed to the ground.
Like their Israelite brethren to the north a century earlier, many of the Judahites, especially the elites, are deported by their conquerors, forced to resettle in Mesopotamia. Other Judahites flee as refugees and end up settling in Egypt. The dispersal of the Hebrew people to other lands after their kingdoms were destroyed is the start of what is known as the diaspora, the Jews who make new lives for themselves in lands far away from their homeland of Canaan.
And this is probably a good moment to mention that the group of people we, at first, called the Hebrews when they lived as tribes, and then referred to as Israelites when they became dominant in Canaan and founded two kingdoms, we can now, at this point in history, start to think of as Jews. Jew is an English word, but it derives from Judean, someone from the land of Judah. So, while the northern tribes more or less disappear from the story, it is from the southern Hebrews who have just been scattered from Judah and exiled to Babylon that we continue the trajectory of the biblical story, and they are now properly thought of Jews.
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The Babylonian Exile is an extremely important, truly defining event of Jewish history. There is before the exile and there is after the exile. But, It turns out the Jews won’t live in exile for very long. Only about two generations after the conquest of Judah, the Babylonians, who had booted the Assyrians, are themselves booted by a new empire, the Persians, centered in what is now Iran. The Persians take over Babylon in the year 539 BC, roughly 50 years after most of the Jews had been exiled from their homeland. And, the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, has a very different governing style compared to either theAssyrians or the Babylonians. While those earlier empires had forcibly deported large populations and assimilated them far from their homelands in order to subjugate them, Cyrus and the Persians preferred a much more humane approach, allowing peoples to live in their familiar homelands and practice their familiar religions as long as they paid fealty and tribute to the Persian emperor.
This is important to our story because Cyrus almost immediately permits the Jews in Bablyon to go back to Canaan and to rebuild their culture in and around Jerusalem. So, in a series of resettlement waves, Jews migrate from Babylon back to the new Persian province of Judea, located where the Kingdom of Judah had been in southern Canaan. Not all Jews moved back. Many stayed in Mesopotamia and became the ancestors of the Babylonian Jews. And, as we mentioned, many Jews had gone to Egypt. So, while the homeland is re-established under the Persians, the Jews are never fully re-centered there.
The attempt to rebuild Jerusalem is seemingly a fledgeling enterprise that takes many many decades and that doesn’t get off to a great start. A Temple of Yahweh is re-built in Jerusalem to replace the one that had been destroyed by the Babylonians, and this inaugurates what is known to historians and religious scholars as Second-Temple Judaism, this new temple being the second temple and the religion of Yahweh during the monarchies being First-Temple Judaism.
During the 400s BC you get two significant figures that are worth mentioning here who were instrumental in re-establishing the Jews in Judea. After trying to get off the ground with muted success for a few generations, you get Nehemiah and Ezra, each of whom has a Bible book named after him. The accounts of these two and what historians can reconstruct are a bit confused, but they were likely contemporaries who had been commissioned by the Persian Emperor in the mid-400s to help better organize the Jews in and around Jerusalem who had returned from exile.
Ezra and Nehemiah continue work on the temple, rebuilding housing and the city walls and so forth. Nehemiah was apparently in the role of governor, the political leader who owed fealty to the Persian Emperor, and Ezra, really importantly for our story about the text of the Bible, was a priest and a prominent scribe. Ezra helped re-establish the credibility of the priesthood, re-centered worship on the temple, and recommitted the Jews to Torah law. Ezra also forbid Jews to marry foreigners, so there was an ethnocentrism to his reforms. There was no Jewish king at this time, merely local governors. Their emperor was the Persian Emperor.
Persia continues to rule Judah as part of an empire that stretched from Turkey and North Africa all the way to India. It's a relatively benign time in Jewish history, and the Persian Period continues until the 330s BC, so about 200 years in total.
A note regarding religion from this time: We now have a Jewish religion that is genuinely monotheistic. Remember that during the monarchies, the worship of Yahweh was monolatrous-–there may be other gods in other lands and of other peoples, but in Israel, you are only supposed to worship one god, and that’s Yahweh. During second-temple Judaism, they no longer believe in the existence of any other gods. For Jews, Yahweh is the only God there is from this time forward. We’ll talk more about the religion of Second Temple Judaism in the next episode.
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And let’s wrap up this episode by reminding ourselves that this is a podcast about the Bible, so we need to spend a moment talking about the biblical texts that related to the period of history in which the Jews were exiled in Babylon and then returned to Judea to sort of start over again. From the exile through the Persian period, we get quite a lot of writing taking place and a lot of editing.
We left off last week with 22 of the 39 Old Testament books being written all or in part prior to the Babylonian exile. Let’s start by identifying a few of those books from last week that deserve an asterisk.
Isaiah was started before the exile, but it was added to during and perhaps even after the exile. Scholars often will refer to I, II, and sometimes III Isaiah to designate various parts of the book that were written at different times. By the Persian period, we have its final form.
Jeremiah was also likely started before the Babylonian exile and then finished during the exile.
Dating of Obadiah is difficult. It may have been written before or during the exile.
The song collection of Psalms keeps on getting added to during this time, and wisdom keeps getting added to the book of Proverbs.
And, we mentioned last week that the source material that became Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—the books of the Torah or Pentateuch if you are familiar with those terms—had been written during the period of the Israelite monarchies. Leviticus is heavily debated among scholars, some believing that it was written late in the monarchical period mabe around the year 700 BC and others, perhaps the majority, believing it was written during Babylonian Exile or the Persian period after the return from exile, more like around 550 to 450 BC. In any case, the first five books of the Bible take their final shape during the Persian period, and we will talk much more about that process in a future arc of episodes.
Now, let’s identify some new Bible books written during and after the exile that we didn’t mention last week.
Ezekiel and Lamentations were likely written during the Babylonian exile.
Most of the remaining Old Testament prophets we haven’t yet mentioned were written during the Persian period after the exile, and these include Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Joel is a prophetic book that offers extremely little context and is very hard to date. It may be older, but it is certainly possible that it comes from the Persian period, too.
Jonah is another book that is grouped among the prophets, but as a type of literature it more closely resembles other Old Testament and apocryphal stories. Jonah is written at this time, and so is Ruth, and so is Job. Job is another particularly hard book to pin down by date, and it may have much more ancient roots, but the final version we have is from the Persian period.
Finally, the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are from the Persian period, too, and they share an author who sort of re-tells the history of the Jewish people from the vantage point of those who have returned from exile and want to understand themselves as a continuation and preservation of the earlier Israelites. Indeed, Ezra himself may have written these books.
So, dating to the period of the monarchs, between about 850 and 687 BC, and the period of the Babylonian exile and Persian restoration, down to the 330s BC, we have mentioned 36 of the 39 Old Testament books. Only three books come from a later period, and we will fit them into the story next time.
I hope you are enjoying this history and getting something out of it. We will talk more about a fascinating episode in Jewish history next week and an event that occurred in 332 BC that continues to shape the world to this very day in the 21st century.
Less thumping, more understanding. See you next time.
