where we left off in the biblical narrative the northern kingdom of israel
has been destroyed and a significant number of its population most likely males leadership level
involved in the military perhaps some crafts have been taken off to exile in assyria there
still remains the southern kingdom known as judah that will retain some degree of self-governance
between the years that it is invaded by king sanakrib in the year 701 before the common era
until it will be invaded by nebuchadnezzar in the year 586. so let's turn now to the south
and try to understand what happened to judah in these crucial years between the assyrian invasion
and later the babylonian invasion so the king that is responsible for invading judah at this point
is sanakriv he ruled from the year 705 to the year 681 and 701 is the key year for his invasion
of judah the invasion is actually recorded not only in the bible in the book of kings but also
in the monumental records of the assyrians a number of prisms such as this one shown here
the jerusalem prism that specifically mentions the siege of jerusalem but jerusalem itself
was not destroyed that is not a fate uh that was met by lachish a nearby major city in israel that
was completely devastated by sanchez and here you can see in assyrian records a series of
jews who were taken captive in laksh and brought before the king to show their obeisance
just giving you a sense of what it must have been like to have been conquered by sanchez at the time
judah prepares for the onslaught under king his kiyahu hezekiah by creating
a number of defenses which ultimately would not be successful but fascinatingly constructing a
new or perhaps improved secure water supply because jerusalem is on a mountaintop it has some
natural defenses based on the geography but it's also at a loss in the case of a siege which was
something that happened to jerusalem on multiple times throughout its millennial history and so
king who creates a new water diversion aqueduct it may have been a renovation of an earlier one but
it was found in the 19th century these salom tunnels that allowed the inhabitants of jerusalem
to last a little longer in these terrible sieges that would occur at any rate this is the status
of jerusalem invaded and dominated by sanchez but not necessarily destroyed outright as we saw
in the northern kingdom the kingdom of judah retains a level of self-government
and owes vassalage to sanchez meaning paying tribute and taxes and some humiliating rituals
as well but nevertheless judah manages to retain some kind of political independence at least at
some level between the year 701 and 586 when the babylonians would destroy it this is a golden age
for prophecy in judah there's a tremendous number of prophets who are active at the time and whose
sayings and teachings were recorded in the hebrew bible two of the most famous are isaiah ishayahu
in hebrew who is shown here in this remarkable ceiling painting by tiapolo that shows a famous
scene at the right the beginning of the book of isaiah where an angel burns isaiah's mouth
because he speaks poorly of his compatriots and this is kind of like an interesting dynamic
that happens among the prophets some of them are like royal prophets that speak directly to kings
and appear to be somehow associated with the court of kings to put them on the straight and
narrow and others seem to be like just you know popular wandering teachers who
inform the population of uh their wrongdoings and of their uh their need to repent and so on there
are a huge number of barely named prophets in the bible and the allusion to much larger groups who
have no name whatsoever prophecy seems to have been some kind of like moral enterprise that uh
was very very common in judah isaiah is among the most famous of them also note in this interesting
painting that he's holding open uh codex an early book highly unlikely you would have a book in this
form more likely it would be a scroll but also unlikely is it the author's attempt to perhaps
draw paleo hebrew characters that is the earliest hebrew alphabet that we have from this period it's
actually gibberish those are not letters at all other artists such as raphael shown here portrayed
isaiah more accurately at least in terms of his hebrew literacy uh this particular painting which
has greek on the top and a very christological kind of reference and some uh carefully placed um
you know little white blocks with titles in them and uh you can see he's holding up a scroll which
actually has in hebrew a passage from the book of isaiah it is slightly strangely written like the
spaces between the words are are not well defined and if you look at the first word there it says
which means open up but the final letter is written just a little bit wrong it looks
a little bit like a race which is a nonsense word but nevertheless at least there's a much
greater attempt here i'm quite fascinated with who exactly wrote this hebrew was it someone
imitating a hebrew script was it someone who was personally knowledgeable a scribe
i don't know but at any rate you can see that there are more attempts to to make a more uh
you know greater fidelity to the hebrew original also prophets like jeremiah
who uh prophesized for several decades at the very end of the period that we're describing today and
uh it's kind of like alternating between speaking to kings and speaking to the broader population
not an especially well-liked man because you know these prophets are bringing along
messages of doom and at the same time demanding that everyone repent everyone give up their false
idols and of course there there's quite a bit of idolatry going on in israel at the time with very
limited success and after all jeremiah was doomed to witness the babylonian exile itself which we're
going to discuss in in the next video so this is a period of tremendous activity of the prophets
giving us biblical texts of phenomenal power and resonance it is possible that the the
texts themselves were not at all written down in this period um that is the let's say the
eighth century and the seventh century before the common era the uh the early 6th century but they
were memorized and later actually codified into the texts we have in the later persian
period that we'll speak about a little while by the students and the schools of these prophets
as they strove to solidify the teachings of their predecessors you see this especially because
some of the books isaiah and jeremiah in particular seem disjointed and out of sync with
uh historical political elements and many recent readers have suggested that perhaps they were kind
of composed like greatest hits of jeremiah rather than composing them in a chronological sequence
to fit with the national political issues of the day rearranging the book actually makes it
much easier to understand jeremiah's life in a biographic form which is absolutely fascinating
it is also worthy of note that you see that the prophets in judah played a national role in the
sense that they spoke to major geopolitical events and at the same time they're very much focused on
on the ground basic morality and decency and conduct and wrote about that or spoke about that
in very very sharp terms powerful readings for the contemporary era had a phenomenal impact on the
development of jewish thought over the millennia one of the persons who was most deeply affected
perhaps is one of the last kings of judah known as josiah or in hebrew yoshiyahu a fascinating
backstory he was you know kind of secluded as a child became king at a very young age and very
sincere kind of individual and at one point he was moved to renovate the grounds of the temple
and they found this is described in the book of kings 2 chapter 22 they found in the temple a book
some commentators think it was the full torah which is kind of strange given like what was it
doing until now others say it was just the fifth book of deuteronomy which is also called mishnah
torah the repetition of the torah because it goes back and kind of summarizes many of the main
ethical precepts or mitzvot commandments of the earlier four books but josiah says okay let's hear
what does the book say and the book is opened uh according to the rabbinic's teachings to a passage
that is one of the most horrible set of curses in the entire torah the tokaka which describes how
the jews will be punished for their idolatry and so on and josiah realizing how far they
have strayed from the teachings of the torah he tears his cloak in in mourning right this is a
basic mourning ritual and he institutes a wide ranging series of reforms in judah to
try and get it on the straight and narrow this is also something we see in the biblical text that
you know especially in the book of kings as opposed to the book of chronicles
there's like sort of like a an epitaph for every king this was a good king he did what god wanted
this was a bad king he strayed from the word of god back and forth is kind of oscillation and
tends to be more black and white although some of the kings are decidedly mixed in their approaches
but king yoshiyahu is clearly one of the good ones bringing the jews back towards the
the old time faith of judaism as it were he also was a very successful military leader and as you
can see uh he took advantage of some of the major tensions between assyria and egypt and actually
struck out to the north and expanded the territory of judah into the region of israel
unfortunately he died in these battles and judah could not hold on to this territory now i want
to just turn to one last thing from this period that i find absolutely fascinating you know i
have given you a fairly standard traditional treatment of the ancient history of the jews
and i have qualified that from time to time in the light of contemporary scholarship that sort
of tries to thread the needle between maximalists who basically take the bible exactly at its word
for specific historic events and that the bible strives for historicity meaning it strives to
describe in factual terms that we understand today rather than let's say poetic terms or um or other
deviations from what we might consider the chronological record and on the other hand
the minimalists who say hey the archaeological record is so thin how can you even assume that
any of this happened you know we saw earlier that you know the golden era of the united monarchy
of saul david and solomon leaves hardly a trace in the archaeological record you know you have the
tel dan steely which is 150 years later you have the the house of david existed but what exactly
was that so many historians have opted to consider everything before the omrides in the 9th century
basically fiction and it's a kind in my humble opinion it's a little bit of an intellectual
hubris to say that simply because they have not found any evidence other than the biblical text
to prove that x y or z happened i'm going to assume it's not true that is uh you know
it's not a mathematically conservative position it is an overreach and denying the value of the bible
as a historical source so what why i'm saying this to you now is because occasionally you is because
occasionally archaeologists discover a tiny little thread that connects us to the past in such a
powerful way that hammers home the idea that oh my gosh this actually happened this is real and
every single discovery makes a huge difference have a look at this one this is fantastic this is
a parking lot in jerusalem or former parking lot jerusalem and as you can imagine in the holy city
there is tremendous amount of archaeological work going on and so this parking lot was discovered to
actually be set on top of a major archaeological site so in 2019 a dig at this site discovered an
amazing thing this bulla which is essentially a kind of a stamp that would be used on clay says it
belongs to natan melech servant of the king very interesting and if you look at the second book of
kings chapter 23 11 we see that king yoshiyahu had a servant who was named once in the bible
named natan malach so it's exactly the right name found in exactly the right place and helps
us confirm the validity of the bible as a historical source fascinating i love when we
find things like this at any rate the story will not end well at the end of this lecture because
the babylonian empire is going to take over from assyria and they are going to invade
israel as well this invasion occurs at the beginning of the 6th century before the common era
and that's when we have the next great exile of the jews this time primarily from judah to babylon
and that's where we'll pick up the story in the next video thank you very much for watching you