Part 6: The Southern Kingdom (722-587)

Judea is rarely mentioned outside the Bible prior to the fall of the North to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. This suggests its sparse populace and development didn’t attract the attention of the neighboring powers.

But with the fall of the North, the South explodes onto the biblical scene. For one thing, there was a huge influx of refugees who started streaming into the south and settling the lands. For another, several books of the Bible give a careful outline of the actions of the Southern kings during these 150 years.

According to these biblical accounts, almost all of these kings got it wrong – they were bad leaders and bad worshipers who led the people astray. The lengths of their reigns, however, actually suggest the opposite – that they were not only effective, but popular, and they oversaw periods of stability and affluence in the region. So what’s the deal with this discrepancy?!?

The answer to this question can be seen if you look at the only two kings the biblical writers actually liked during those 150 years – and those were Hezekiah and Josiah. These two kids had one very important thing in common, and that is that they were centralizers: they tore down rural and regional temples and altars of Ba’al, who is depicted as a bull on many ancient Israelite artifacts; they centralized worship to the YHVH god at the Temple in Jerusalem; and they purged the Temple of the many sculptures and altars to Ba’al and the feminine goddess Asherah that were inside the Temple.

As my teacher explained it, Hezekiah and Josiah were the “Stalinesque” kings of the day, who centralized their power contrary to what were clearly the normative religious practices of the people. We know YHVH, Ba’al and Asherah worship (as opposed to YHVH worship exclusively) normative because the moment these two kings left power, the temples and altars and figurines to these other gods reappeared. “The brevity and scarcity of the periods of ‘reform’ under Hezekiah and Josiah show us that heterodoxy was much more common than orthodoxy,” our teacher explained.

The attitudes of these Southern kings toward the limited polytheism of the people is detailed quite clearly in the Bible, and they are reinforced by the archaeological record. There is evidence of destruction at the major cultic sites outside Jerusalem during the periods of Hezekiah and Josiah, and there is evidence that these sites were rebuilt in the periods after their reigns.

It’s fascinating isn’t it? The one thing Judaism is most famous for is that it was the foundation of monotheism in the Western world. We are now up to the year 587 BCE, and what we see is that the “Judaism” of the day was still not actually monotheistic! It will become monotheistic to be sure – but these roots don’t originate anywhere close to the period of Abraham and Sarah, the mythic progenitors of Judaism and monotheism. That duo ostensibly lived back in Part 1 of this series, at the settling of the central highlands in Canaan in the 13th century.

So, to summarize early Israelite religion up until this point:

From 10th-6th century BCE, the majority of Israelite worship took place outside Jerusalem at temples and altars around the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Asherah, a female goddess; Ba’al, a young storm God depicted as a bull; and YHVH, depicted as a “box” (aka the desert tabernacle) were worshipped by the people. There was a cult of the dead, and practice of divination was widespread. The profusion of small household cultic objects suggests worship was largely a home-based practice fully integrated into people’s daily lives. (At right: Ba'al with raised arm, 14th-12th century BCE, found at Ras Shamra.)

The “orthodox” religion of the era was limited polytheism. When kings like Hezekiah and Josiah came along and tried to institute monotheistic “reforms,” they were the minority opinion, and their reforms did not last. In effect, they were the elite trying to impose their beliefs on their subjects, and patterns in other cultures suggest their efforts probably involved some amount of violence (though the biblical texts don’t tell us that).

Monotheism would become a learned and taught ideology after the Babylonian exile. It did not come about as a “given truth,” as the biblical writers would have us believe. The biblical writers came from the South, and represented the minority pro-monotheism, pro-YHVH, pro-Temple elite. At the end of the day, their views would become the majority views, and the ideological propaganda they waged on the pages of the Bible would completely transform the course of Jewish theology and history.