The Oxford History of the Biblical World (60 page)

On balance, vassal obedience, which was based on economic submission to imperial goals, had its rewards. The archaeological record contains signs that during the seventh century
BCE
the Judean countryside recovered under the watchful eye of the Assyrian army. Throughout the territory of the Philistine kingdoms to the west and south of Judah, in areas that had at one time been Judean, fortresses and structures were built following Mesopotamian architectural design; some of their brick walls—as much as 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) thick—still stand as evidence of Assyria’s investment in this vital border zone. In the excavated rooms at several sites, imported Assyrian palace ware points to the luxurious lifestyle of the area’s residents. Particularly striking is the example of Ekron on Judah’s western border, which had been taken by force during Sennacherib’s campaign. Excavation at Tel Miqne, the site of ancient Ekron, has shown that the city developed into the region’s largest center for olive oil production (the annual yield is estimated at more than a thousand tons) and its domestic residential quarters mirror the city’s prosperity. The local religion at Ekron flourished as shown by a recently discovered royal inscription, the first of its kind from a Philistine city, that commemorates the dedication of a shrine to a hitherto unknown goddess by Ikausa son of Padi, king of Ekron. (Padi had been reinstalled by Sennacherib when hostilities ended in 701.) Manasseh, too, was able, no doubt with imperial license, to rebuild Judah’s defenses and reconstruct Jerusalem’s walls and gates.

The written record complements this picture of growth and resurgence with its own point of view. Especially among the upper class, Judeans adopted foreign customs wholesale. Outlandish dress became fashionable in Jerusalem, as did such alien folkways as “leaping over [the Temple?] threshold” in Philistine manner (Zeph. 1.4–5, 8–9). Merchants from Judah plied the routes to Mesopotamia, where the unit weight of Judah, the shekel, was recognized currency in those distant markets; luxury items, along with the profits of this trade, accompanied them on the journey home. Considering the multifarious daily contact with the Assyrian administration and the mixed populations settled throughout the land, it would have been surprising indeed had Judahite culture not absorbed some of the signs of the dominant Assyro-Aramean culture. At Gezer, for example, business transactions were conducted according to standard Assyrian legal practice, as is made clear by the cuneiform sale document of a parcel of land: the owner of the field in question, an Israelite named Netanyahu, impressed his personal seal decorated with typical Mesopotamian lunar symbolism.

King Manasseh seems to have been taken up by this new cultural wave, which
found its most glaring expression in the introduction of unorthodox forms of worship at the national shrine:

He erected altars for Baal, made a sacred pole, as King Ahab of Israel had done, worshiped all the host of heaven, and served them. He built altars in the house of the L
ORD
…. The carved image of Asherah that he had made he set in the house. (2 Kings 21.3–7)

More than anything else, this royal sponsorship of what from the perspective of the biblical historians was idolatry determined Manasseh’s negative reputation. Some modern commentators have constructed a case partially in Manasseh’s defense, justifying the king’s acts by invoking the supposed Assyrian policy of requiring subject peoples to adopt the official religion of the empire. According to this view, whether it be the introduction of a new altar in the Temple courtyard by King Ahaz, Manasseh’s grandfather, or Manasseh’s stationing of sculptured images in the Temple itself, the kings of Judah were in reality following Assyrian dictate.
Cuius regio eius religio:
a region follows its ruler’s religion.

But this exculpatory argument does not survive close examination. Assyrian imperialism was noncoercive in religious matters; vassal kings were not required to worship the imperial god Ashur, and local religions suffered no interference. In fact, Assyria’s kings often made public display of their respect for non-Assyrian gods by acknowledging their divinity, and on occasion by offering sacrifice to them. As for the kingdom of Judah, despite its checkered history of relations with Assyria, it remained a vassal state for over a century, free to pursue its native religion.

Manasseh’s acts, then, are best understood as representative of the climate of cultural assimilation that swept over many areas of the Near East in the wake of the Assyrian conquest. While the restoration of local sanctuaries throughout Judah may have stemmed from a conservative reaction to the reforms of Hezekiah and his failed political policies, the foreign rituals reportedly introduced during the reign of Manasseh were voluntary adoptions. They were of mixed origin: Baal and Asherah were of Canaanite-Phoenician affinity, whereas the veneration of astral deities and the dedication of horses and chariots to the sun-god had links to Assyro-Aramean practice. Possibly Judah’s sorry state throughout most of Manasseh’s reign engendered a disenchantment with native Israelite traditions, which in turn abetted the assimilation of foreign ways. Yet this is not to imply that all Judeans subscribed to the king’s innovations. Though there is a distinct lack of prophetic composition from this period, the brutal silencing of the opposition—“Manasseh shed very much innocent blood” (2 Kings 21.16)—teaches otherwise.

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.

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 (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.