Saturday, November 3, 2012

Israel's Decline and Fall

II Kings 1-17

    The second half of the book of Kings starts off with more or less a continuation of the rivalries between Israel and Judah as well as their surrounding neighbors. Rather than rewrite it all here I found a great site that has many informative links about the events in this book of the Bible as well as the characters within.
http://www.vtaide.com/gleanings/Kings-of-Israel/kings.html
     This will also be helpful to come back and reference in the future when we get into the books of the prophets that were written during the reigns of these kings and will give us a more in depth look at some of them.
     I want to break at this point in Kings because it deals with the end of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. We have the records here in this book of the Bible as one version of events that took place over a thousand years ago. There is indication that the events that were put in this version of the story were filtered through the lens of the Deuteronomical Historian who quotes his sources as being from various other Royal records.
      The books of Genesis through Kings were completed roughly around 500-300 B.C.E. By this time Israel had been gone for a couple hundred years, lost to Assyrians, and Judah had been conquered by the Babylonians. The events that happened before were written in different records as well as kept through oral tradition. There are a few things that make the events in the Book a little more real in regards to history.
       There is a story in chapter 3 concerning the king of Moab, Mesha, who revolts against Israel and sacrifices his son to his god and this turns the tide and he is victorious. In 1868 a stone stele was discovered that dated back to the 800s B.C.E. and was a record of King Mesha regarding his victory over the Kings of Israel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha_Stele. This stele confirms that the Moab King sacrificed his son to the god Chemosh and this he credits for his victory over Israel.
      Also, the story of the siege of Lachish when the Assyrians took control of the lands of the Philistines and many towns close to Judah, II Kings 18:13-14, is also recorded by the Assyrians themselves. The Taylor Prism, a recording of King Sennacherib of Assyria, gives us a slightly different version of these events but still indicates a similar fate for Judah. With their lands being eaten away by the superpower of the ancient world it was a choice between being conquered or keeping the land, but live under the authority of Assyria. Hezekiah, chose to be a vassal and keep the lands of Judah. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_and_Sennacherib_Prisms King Hezekiah is mentioned in this stele by name. This shows that he did indeed exist, although it is not as flattering a mention as the one in 2 Kings 18:5-8.
      Unfortunately, the kingdom of Israel to the north was not so lucky. King Jehu had pretty much alienated himself from the surrounding peoples by outlawing their gods and killing their prophets. Later kings did no better to make peace with the neighbors and by the mid 700s Assyria invaded Samaria and kicked out most of the people and put in their own countrymen in hopes that the two would mix. This was how the Assyrians destroyed a culture and assimilated it into itself. This is where the animosity for the Samaritans in Roman Israel originated. These events are recorded also on a stone record of King Sargon II of Assyria, http://suite101.com/article/cuneiform-writing-from-the-palace-of-sargon-ii-a181523.
       Eventually, Assyria comes in and wipes out the kingdom and refugees from the land scatter to the winds, just as the prophets warned, but some head south with warnings of the fate that could befall Judah if they don’t shape up, too.

Here’s a site with some great little pieces I found in my snooping.

http://www.bible-history.com/assyria_archaeology/archaeology_of_ancient_assyria_archaeological_discoveries.html

No comments:

Post a Comment