Kingdom of Judah

The smaller and longer-lived of the two Israelite kingdoms, and the one whose destruction produced the text that outlasted it. Judah broke from the northern kingdom of Israel after Solomon's death, keeping Jerusalem, the temple and the Davidic dynasty - one family on one throne for more than three centuries, which is unusual anywhere in the ancient Near East. It survived by paying. When Assyria destroyed Israel in 722 and deported its population, Judah became a tributary and lasted. Hezekiah's revolt brought Sennacherib's army in 701, which took forty-six towns and besieged Jerusalem without capturing it - an episode recorded from both sides, in the Hebrew Bible and on an Assyrian prism. Josiah's reform in the 620s centralised worship on the temple and is bound up with the formation of the biblical text. The end came from Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem in 597, deported the king Jehoiachin and the elite, and installed Zedekiah, who rebelled anyway. In 586 the city was destroyed, the temple burned, Zedekiah's sons were killed in front of him and he was blinded. The exile that followed produced a religion that could be practised without a temple or a territory, which is why the kingdom's disappearance is one of the most consequential in history. What is known of it comes from three kinds of evidence that do not always agree. The biblical books of Kings and Chronicles give a continuous royal narrative written with a theological argument; Assyrian and Babylonian records name its kings from the outside; and excavation supplies the rest, including the Siloam tunnel inscription cut by Hezekiah's engineers, hundreds of storage jars stamped for the king, and the ostraca from Lachish written as the Babylonian army closed in. Ration tablets from Babylon list Jehoiachin and his sons receiving oil, which is the only external confirmation that a deported king of Judah was kept alive at the Babylonian court.

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