Jewish History - Monarchy and Divided Kingdom (c. 1000-587 BCE) (3a of 20 sessions)

the last class we talked a little bit about the origins of the jewish people and we spent more time on what we don't know about the origins of the jewish people we have versions of stories about abraham and isaac and jacob uh the 12 tribes as the sons of jacob israel who go down into egypt and become a great nation there and then in exodus under moses wandering the desert for 40 years and ultimately a conquest of the land of israel but there are a lot of reasons to think that those sources are not 100 percent believable in the version of the story we've always been told so if we've deconstructed that version of the story we have to try to reconstruct the real beginning as best we can decipher it or as close as we can get to what really happened as we discussed in our previous couple of classes history is more of an art than a science sometimes it's reconstructing from the spaces of what we find into what we don't know and making our best guesses and having probabilities but not the kind of certainty that the bible thumb will have by simply pulling out the text and saying this is absolutely what happened we're not going to have an absolutely what happened well we're going to have a most likely scenario and so what you do find sometimes even in liberal jewish sources are attempts to save parts of this history so there is a context for a semitic people called the hixos sweeping into egypt conquering setting themselves up as pharaohs and then being overthrown by a native egyptian rebellion sounds a bit like a pharaoh or rose who did not know joseph and then it is plausible that some of those semitic tribes that were there including the hixos and other peoples were imprisoned or enslaved for a period of time and it's also plausible that some slaves might have managed to escape from there after all it's a very rare people that gives its origins in slavery usually you want to claim noble origins for your people right not slaves who wants to start out at the bottom um so there is a possibility that something like that did in fact happen but that's a very different story than the exodus story of 600 000 men doing the math around 2 million people wandering in the desert for 40 years with a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud and all the wonders and miracles that are described in the torah text and then a lightning conquest under joshua that seems to have not left a strong record in the archaeological layers you know you'd think there'd be a massive burning layer over everything for all of joshua's conquests and there are burnings here and burnings there but some of the most important places don't have evidence of a massive conquest like that so this is the difference i sometimes say between proving the possibility of an exodus versus confirming the reality of the exodus you hear the difference and exodus is some slaves escaping at some point the exodus is the traditional story and if we don't believe the exodus as described in the passover haggadah as described in the book of exodus then we have to try and reconstruct some other history as best we can to explain the evidence that we find we talked last time about the possibility even the plausibility that that early settlement in the hill country which is on the north uh i'm sorry in the upper regions of the land of canaan or the land of israel we would say today where you have the coastal plain that's about sea level and then the hills rise up before the drop off for the dead sea rift valley in that hill country we can imagine a canaanite people emerging distinguishing themselves from the coastal plain people and creating a new identity for themselves they may have derived their chief god yahweh or yudhis from one of the canaanite gods and we saw a picture last week of the canaanite god yave with his consort asharah and obvious genitalia which again would be an anathema to later generations of jewish thought but may have well been plausible in the context of the proto-canaanite israel split that's taking place in the beginnings of jewish history again we don't have dates we don't have names we don't have places it's more of a trend that we're seeing in the archaeological record well so we've gone through and cut out abraham cut out isaac cut out jacob cut out joseph cut out all the tribes cut out moses cut out josh okay when does it start when can we start counting the history and the period we're talking about today is called the monarchy period this is a period of israelite kings and it's generally dated from around 1000 bce to around 586 bce the beginning is the founding of some kind of monarchy under king saul or king david we'll talk more about those characters and the end of the period is the destruction of jerusalem under the babylonian conquest in 586 bce that leads to the exile of the judean elite from jerusalem and the destruction of that temple in jerusalem so those are our bookends here we've got the founding of the monarchy at some point around 1000 bce and you've got the destruction of jerusalem at the end of that period around 586 bce so a period of about 400 years now the story of saul and david is described in the books of samuel and the book of kings you have saul who's chosen as a king because the israelite tribes want someone to unite them and lead them in battle like other peoples have make us a king like other nations have they asked samuel samuel is a little nonplussed by this because as the preeminent prophet he used to be in charge now the king is in charge but it doesn't go so well for saul after all saul is a really interesting character he's sort of a manic depressive because there are times he's ecstatically joyful and there are times he's unable to move in his bed and needs a young harp player named david to come in and entertain him and enliven his spirits he goes from confident to paranoid when david becomes more popular ultimately saul and his son jonathan are killed in battle with the philistines when david sits out on the sideline and david ultimately becomes the king of the united kingdom of all the tribes in one basically comfortable kingdom although if you read the story of david he has rebellions too his sons rebel against him one of his sons is killed in a revolt against him by his own best general he commits adultery and steals a wife from one of his soldiers there's all kinds of very colorful colorful stories about king david that are described in the book of samuel part one and two but in the end david dies as everyone does and he hands over the kingdom to his younger son solomon and david reigns for 40 years not 39 years not 41 years 40 years maybe you know again a significant number makes us a little suspicious about how accurately historical this is and solomon also reigns for 40 years solomon actually builds this temple in jerusalem and is the head of a golden age of this united monarchy in the descriptions of the golden age of solomon's kingdom you get a borders described of the kingdom that match what abraham is promised in genesis for the promised land all the way from the euphrates river to the nile river on one end to the other now the united monarchy doesn't last for long because solomon and david are both from a southern tribe the tribe of judah and the northern tribes begin to feel like they're being taken advantage of by these southern tribes and so they object and they ask for a remission of taxes and solomon's son rehoboam who has been raised in the palace and is a very privileged child makes a very poor political decision and instead of remitting the taxes promises to double and triple them and that leads ultimately to a split between the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom and so i wanted to share with you uh a text that describes this split in very uh telling ways so jeroboam is the leader of the rebellion who says we're not going to stay under the heel of the northern of the southern kingdom we're the northern kingdom we deserve our own territory but after making this split he worries the kingdom may return to the house of david the bait david if these people still go up to offer sacrifices at the house of yava in jerusalem the heart will turn back to their master king rehoboam of judah they will king me and kill me and go back to him how can they be offering sacrifices in jerusalem if we have our own kingdom up here the border control is going to be a mess so the king took council and he made notice what he made two golden calves remember a story about a golden calf somewhere remember how it didn't end so well for those people who made the golden calf it was a rebellion against moses right and so perhaps the moses rebellion story is actually projected back into the days of moses and reflecting the tension between the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom of israel and judah because of the choice of the golden calf he said to the people you've been going up to jerusalem long enough this is your god who brought you up from the land of egypt this is almost a direct quote from what's said in uh the book i believe of numbers with the making of the golden calf he said one up in bethel in the north and one up in dan in the south he's proved to be a cause of guilt because they went to worship the one at dawn he made called places appointed priests from the ranks of people who were not from the levites so he was choosing other people to be priests and the levites are jealous of their prerogatives he put at bethel the priests of shrines he had appointed the sacrifice of the cavs he made and he established a festival on the 15th day of the eighth month remember the 15th day of a jewish month is always a full moon an auspicious time in imitation of the festival in judah he established one at bethel but in a different month from the original months and on the 15th day of the eighth month he ascends the altar that he made in uh in bethel so here is an attempt to break away from the southern kingdom and find a way to be independent in some way now once the kingdoms have split i'm going to go back to sharing that screen but look at a different tab here because it describes in a nice way the split of the kingdom you notice here now here's the new map with the two kingdoms the northern kingdom of israel and the southern kingdom of judah their capital samaria in the north and jerusalem in the south but you see the other nations around them you've got the philistine states still there in gaza and ashkelon and ashdod those major cities you have the phoenician or canaanite city-states in the north acre and tire in sidon and biblos you've got the kingdom of aram damascus in the northeast to the straight east on the east side of the river jordan you've got ammon and moav and in the south you have other tribes including the the edom and all of these by the way have origin stories in biblical narratives remember amon and moab come from the children of incest with lot and his daughters now again that's not what the ammonites and moabites thought but it's how the israelites describe them because they're political rivals and fighting over territory now when you have these two kingdoms so close together sharing some common ancestry there's going to be rivalries between the two and in fact the narrative in the book of kings describes both sets and it will say this one was raining for this many years and in the middle of his reign this one started raining in the other part and it's sort of like a soap opera where it switches back and forth between uh between the kingdoms here you have an example of this timeline where you have i'll zoom in a little bit hopefully you can see that so you have jeroboam the first in rehoboam but then rehoboam dies and someone else takes over and then during assa's reign who reigns for a long time uh basha in the northern kingdom takes over and notice by the way those little red marks those are skulls and crossbones those are people who get killed all right now something else you'll notice is any color that some variety of blue be it a light blue or a dark blue is from the line of king david on the left and the green ones are uh a different line and so you notice the line of king david lasts just about the entire period of this divided monarchy from the split around let's say 920 bce after solomon dies all the way down to 586 when they're destroyed by the babylonians but on the northern kingdom of israel you get a lot of kings showing up and a lot of them getting killed by the next person you know as happens in monarchic systems and there are multiple houses that are ruling so there's no one consistent uh ruling house in the north it's a much more fractious kingdom and you'll notice their line cuts off a lot earlier because the northern kingdom is ultimately destroyed by the ascendant assyrian empire around the year 722 bce now the versions we have in the books of kings that describe both of these sets of kings are very judgmental it's what's called the deuteronomic history that's giving a judgment on whether they were good kings or bad kings now they're not being rated on being good kings or bad kings by the gross domestic product or by the balance of trade with the other peoples you know they weren't lamenting the trade deficit with egypt at this time they're judged as good or bad based on whether they do what yava the god wants them to do so obviously the writers of the history have an editorial editorial agenda where they want to judge the kings as good or bad based on their religious practices we'll talk more about the yavistic deuteronomic history and its judgment um a little bit uh later in the class next week our next class session which is not next week we'll be talking more about yavis in the end the babylonian empire uh destroys them um and they they lose out in the inevitable push and pull of the ancient near east and you'll recall the map we looked at last time which is the map of the fertile crescent and the two major areas that are most fertile in the fertile crescent are the land between the waters or mesopotamia which is where the assyrian and babylonian empires are based and the lands of the nile delta which is where egypt is based now the israelites during this divided monarchy period actually have sort of a golden window to be successful because the egyptians are destabilized by the invasions of the sea peoples which we talked about a little bit last time and the mesopotamian territory was invaded from the east by a people called the gutians and they destabilized the the mesopotamian empires for a period of time and so it created a window in between those two major empires for the hebrew kingdoms to grow develop and become stable but as things get reorganized in first mesopotamia and then later in egypt that window closes and israel now is found it finds itself pinched between the two larger empires and it's torn because it says it wants to be independent under the kingship of yava but it has to be a client state of one or the other and um that's not a comfortable place to be and we'll see that they get pinched between both of those in the end the babylonians coming from mesopotamia are ascendant they conquer the land of israel they take the last king of judah whose name is zedekiah captive and they actually this is sort of a deviously cruel and brilliant maneuver they take the king and they kill all of his sons in front of him and then they blind him but this is how they maintain control because you can't establish a new king the old king is still alive he's just totally powerless and there's no future line of kings because they've killed all of his sons and heirs and this is in a kingdom remember the southern kingdom of judah had david david david all the way down all descended from the house of david so the israelites go the israelites in the north have been gone from the assyrian period of 722 and their conquest and now the southern kingdom of judah destroyed by the babylonians is sent into exile and will they survive or not well we'll have to stay tuned and check back when they return from exile and see how that works so that's more or less the biblical narrative of what happens um you have the kings you have this monarchy you have the davidic monarchy well how much of this is true well we have to understand that the deuteronomic history is an editorialized history so it seems to assume that judah following david following solomon was largely doing the right things vis-a-vis these are good kings that are following his commands and you'll see in the introductory essay i talk a little bit more about the deuteronomic history where it judges the kings based on their obedience to yahweh and all geopolitical events are a function of their obedience to yahweh so a king that lasts a long time you would think would be a good king who was good for yavi too of course the reality of the dates are totally off because hezekiah is a good king but he almost gets the kingdom destroyed under the assyrian invasion manasseh after hezekiah makes accommodation with the king with the assyrian empire and is thought to be a terrible king because he does all these terrible things of worshiping all these other gods and manasseh rules for 55 years and then the next king josiah is a good king he cleans up the temple he goes back to worshiping the one god and he's killed by the egyptians so it seems like history is sort of working against the message of the deuteronomic historian here even in the events recorded in this history you see there's a difference between hindsight and history you know hindsight is looking backward in judging things history is trying to say what actually happened without getting into the judgment business and because our primary source in the book of kings and the book of samuel has this deuteronomic perspective based on again the ideology of the book of deuteronomy from the torah it's hard to take every story on face value i mean was david good with his slingshot was he good at playing the harp could he write the psalms like again we can't know any of that um and it's part of the house of david's propaganda to make him look good and make saul look bad do we know if saul was actually manic manic depressive who knows again we only get the david side of the story um again we'll talk more about this dynamic of yavism and prophets and the kings and jewish religious evolution during this period next time we're more focused here on sort of the geopolitical side of the kings and the material culture found in the ground in the end of course we know that history is not based on whether you're good or bad to yava history is based on geopolitical events and dynamics you know if mesopotamia is doing well then you're not going to have a lot of space if mesopotamia is having problems then you have space to be successful one of the other challenges we have is that the events are limited because the authors of the book of kings had access to sources that we don't but in a number of these chapters it will say and the rest of what solomon did is it not recorded in the book of the deeds of solomon or the rest of this king's reign is recorded in the book of the kings of judah and we go oh because we don't have that book anymore we can't turn to that there was a book evidently that they were drawing from but we don't have it and so we only get a partial version of the story and it's too bad i mean there's even confusion about jerusalem you know jerusalem is on the border line between the north and the southern kingdom it's chosen almost as a compromise location so remember how washington dc was chosen as a compromise between the north and the south in the founding of the american republic in the 1780s well jerusalem was chosen as a central ground too possibly as a compromise location but it's not clear that jerusalem was unoccupied at the time it was chosen it could have been occupied by other people who were living there at the time but it depends on which version you read if you read the book of joshua they conquered jerusalem and wiped out the jebusites if you read the book of judges the jebusites are still in jerusalem if you read parts of the book of kings when david shows up there's still people living in jerusalem that aren't israelites and hebrews so it's hard to tell which jerusalem are you talking about here when you're deciding the history of the city and when it becomes the so-called city of david now i've presented the challenges to the history for you but there are actually some positives from this period because we do actually have real archaeological evidence that confirms elements of the bible again it doesn't prove david was good with a slingshot or a harp but it might prove that there was some kind of david because we actually have a name in a monument so this is from a steely or monument that was found at tel don in 1993. it was dated to around the 800s bce written by haddad who was part of the northern aramean kingdom and it's written in aramaic which is a related language to hebrew but it's written in what's called a paleo-hebrew script so it'd be very hard for us to read khadad who was the king of this kingdom went in front of the god of this kingdom um and i departed from the seven blanks of my kingdom and i slew the king who harnessed thousand riots and again we don't know all the words because you see that the text is broken here we and there's marks and dashes and pits and we just have to make our best guess sometimes that's why we've got a lot of brackets here but at a certain point it becomes very clear what's going on someone was killed the king of israel and also killed someone yahoo son of so-and-so of the house of david and the part that's in white in the uh monument here is where it actually says bait david you can almost see there's two sort of triangles here that would be the two d's well referring to a house of david in the 800's suggests that maybe there was a david who started some kind of important house a century or two before it's at least plausible there's at least some confirmation that whatever was called the house of david and this period was significant enough to note when you're conquering a territory so this is one piece that leads us to believe that there may well have been a david he might have been a hillside bumpkin king but maybe he was something more in fact there's been a lot of debates about that in the last 10 years or so because later excavations in jerusalem have begun to uncover what some call monumental architecture now monumental architecture means big scale not just a hut and a fire pit and a privy i mean privies are great to discover in the ancient world by the way because you can tell what they ate you could when they had garbage they throw in the privy and archaeologists love finding old toilets but in this case having a monumental architecture that's dated back to this time period of 900 bce or a thousand bce would suggest that this house of david was more significant than just a hill country bumpkin as some scholars suggested if he did in fact have monumental architecture then maybe it was in fact a significant kingdom along the lines as described in the biblical text now you can imagine there's academic arguments back and forth very intensely about this question but it is interesting to say that having a reference to bait devi the house of david from this period suggests there may be some validity to some david at some point in this era now another example is the first depiction of a hebrew king that appears in archaeology he's a king from the omri dynasty which was a major dynasty in the north of israel in fact it's sort of funny the biblical story gives short shrift in the book of kings to the northern kingdom they pay less attention to it and more attention to the south but the northern kingdom might well have been the bigger and more impressive kingdom based on archaeological records and ruins more monumental architecture is found in the north than in the south in this period and here's one example here's a picture of the first israelite king to be depicted his name is yehu he is the son of king omri who was the founding of that omri dynasty now if you have trouble telling which one is yehu it's the guy who's bowing down with his tush in the air not the most flattering picture for the first depiction of a hebrew king in fact it's the assyrians who are making him pay tribute and you can tell it's an assyrian king by the way because the assyrians cut their beard square you can see a square cut on the beard that's a sign of an assyrian monument and the writing at the top is in a kind of writing called cuneiform which is done with a read stylus to make the flat line or the triangle shape and it took us a long time to learn how to read it but eventually we do know how to read cuneiform writing into syrian writing and so we were able to decipher this inscription and know who this king was here's a description again of the king bowing to the assyrian emperor shalmaneser paying tribute to him because that's how you survive in a rough neighborhood and the text says i receive the tribute of son of omri so again a reference to the name omri which is the same name that appears in the hebrew bible with a list of some of the gifts that he received in tribute not particularly flattering but it does suggest some historical validity for the story of omri as a king of a territory that was run into by the assyrian empire one other piece of archaeological evidence to highlight for today is an inscription that was found in a tunnel under jerusalem called the siloam tunnel which is a tunnel that connects a a river and a pool into the city and they found this inscription in the tunnel written in writing that was dated back to the 700s bce based on the letter shape and vocabulary that was used and it describes the story of the tunnel there were axes going in both directions and when there were three qubits left to cut they would call out to each other through the rock and they would aim towards each other so the two people carving would meet up at the right point and when they met at the right point the water flowed from the source all the way into the city and the um the ground was 100 cubits over the height of the story stone cutters and there's an account given during the reign of king hezekiah that describes how he was besieged by the assyrians and of course when you're under siege you need water and it describes all the other events in hezekiah's reign all his exploits and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought the water into the city are recorded in the annals of the kings of judah oh again wouldn't that be nice to have the annals of the kings of judah but we don't have it but we do have this inscription describing the digging of a tunnel to get water dated to the same time period that hezekiah supposedly reigned and we have other in confirmation for this as well one of the sources i included in the course packet is a play i wrote for a middle school class but it draws on the biblical account of the siege of hezekiah under the assyrians and the assyrian account that describes the siege of the israelites the judeans under hezekiah and it says i imprisoned hezekiah his kyahu it says in the assyrian record like a bird in a cage so he was in fact besieged and we have a burn layer on cities that the bible says were destroyed that dates to the same time period now the assyrian account presents it as a great victory the judean account presents it as a great defeat for the assyrians so again you're going to have to parse it between them in fact the um jewish account has a very one of my favorite unintentionally funny lines in the bible where it says uh the assyrians came and besieged the city and then god let loose an angel upon the assyrians and when they woke up in the morning they were all dead like that particular phrasing when they woke up in the morning they were all dead um that probably didn't happen either but the assyrians didn't conquer the city it says even in the assyrian record that they besieged him but didn't capture him he was a bird in a cage so who knows maybe maybe there is was some plague that hit and the assyrians withdrew they didn't destroy jerusalem and uh and hezekiah and his line went on for another few generations and we even have examples in a later generation now we're talking in the 600s bce of king josiah who reforms the cult of yava and gets rid of idols and fertility goddesses again we'll talk more about this next time but we have an archaeological trove of broken idols that dates back to the same time period as josiah's reform again provides some plausibility that if they were reforming the cult and getting rid of fertility goddesses and here we have a garbage dump of intentionally broken fertility goddesses dating to the same time period then maybe there's some plausibility there too you know in the end um we're sort of captive to the archaeological record and the biblical story and so we can say the biblical story is set in a plausible way during the book of samuel and certainly the books of kings and we have some confirming records in the archaeology that confirms some names confirmed some places again make it a plausible version of the story maybe not in every exact detail but in enough detail that it seems to be a plausible historical account up to a point okay is that enough qualification for you so this is our dilemma in looking at the monarchy period now some scholars would say there's so much unknown in that narrative between the hezekiah tunnel inscription and the trove of broken idols who's to know what happened in between that's a fair point so they might date the history later they might not date until after the return from exile there are even a few scholars who are what are called minimalists who wouldn't even date any recordable jewish history until the hellenistic period when you have hellenistic sources talking about judeans living in this time and this place around jerusalem so we'll have to you know leave it at that in terms of the scholarly debate they're still going at it and i don't think they'll ever stop that's part of how they stay in business um but uh i think it's plausible to say that there's enough evidence for this first temple period as it's called um to say that at least some accounts some basis of the bible accounts is historical whether it was written later and it edited and claimed to be hebrew and it wasn't that's the minimalist claim or whether it's all true that's a maximalist claim that this is basically a court account of the version of what happened edited by some priests later you know we'll have to pursue the truth in between and live with the maybe i don't know of uh real academic history

Channel: IISHJvid

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Keywords: Secular Humanistic Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, Adam Chalom, Biblical Archaeology

Id: FWpcwUm2TyQ

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020