let us resume our discussion of the history of the jews in israel by looking at the
period of the divided kingdom and i'd like to begin by going to another gedank experiment
another thought experiment that really comes from an old joke the joke goes like this you know this
time of year i'm recording in late october uh it's still dark early in the morning so the joke goes
that reuven comes out of his house one day and he sees down the street is his neighbor shimon
who's rooting around in the gutter and he goes up and he says to him shimon
what are you doing and schuman says i'm looking for my car keys and ruvain says but
you live down the block why are you looking over here and he and shimon points to the
lamppost and he says well i'm looking over here because the light is much better over here
so obviously it's silly if you're looking for car keys you have to look near where your car
is parked but the dunk experiment is we we're kind of like very interested in the earliest periods of
jewish history looking at the the sources uh that are discussed in the torah in genesis and exodus
and so on and um they're really hard to find but that's because the light over there is very dark
however when we move down the street a little bit and we're under the light suddenly we see so much
more material that's really what happens in the period we're going to discuss today
there's so much more archaeological evidence that confirms the narrative of the biblical text albeit
hundreds of years after the events described in genesis and exodus that we're tempted to say that
maybe we'll find the information we're looking for the analogy breaks down however because
you know you probably would find some things in the gutter you might find let's say for example
a receipt from the bakery that fell out of your pocket when you walk into your house and the
rain washed it down to the gutter you might find uh you know a loose sock that matches
another one that belongs to one of your toddlers that's upstairs in the drying machine right now
you might find all kinds of connections from what's in the gutter down your street
to what happens by your car you won't find your keys directly there but they might lead you back
to where the keys are we'll just have to wait as the archaeological uh evidence is uncovered
literally as historians and archaeologists go to work in the land of israel but at any rate
let's look at some of this stuff that we can find now under the bright lights now dr kitchen points
out very clearly that this is such a strong period compared to what we've been talking about earlier
there are 14 kings of israel the northern kingdom and nine of them are mentioned in
documentation from outside jewish sources that's an incredible number nine out of fourteen and that
lends a tremendous amount of credibility to the at least general scope of the biblical narrative
and we'll look at a couple of examples of that but let's go into the historical period itself so
solomon uh as king as we discussed in the last lecture you know expands the
and consolidates his control over the land of israel uh building on the conquests of his father
king david and cementing it really with a lot of statesman craft by you know engaging in diplomatic
relations with a lot of the kingdoms surrounding the land of israel uh he also centralizes
ritual worship by building a massive glorious temple in jerusalem however what that means is
inevitably taxes there's a great tax burden that is placed on the jewish people as a whole
and they resent the huge taxation under the wise leadership of king solomon there was just
you know scattered gump grumblings but once solomon passes away and it goes to his son
there is a tremendous amount of resentment that's built up over the heavy tax burden
is really of two minds uh he on the one hand you know wants to react to the uh popular pressure
but at the same time he wants to maintain the fairly lavish lifestyle that he is accustomed
to and prodded by unfortunately as the text mentions younger inexperienced members rather than
the steady guiding hand of his older ministers that served under his father rehab in a very
dismissive manner insists on pushing ahead with his heavy tax burden that the northern kingdom in
particular is loaf to accept there is a very fascinating and powerful passage and by the
way i want to reinforce that i'm just going to be skimming over the tops of the historical record as
we find in the bible it is so important that you actually go back to the text and read the primary
documents themselves because they are fantastic and if you have a sense that you know it's going
to be dry or boring i just want to refer to you to one specific passage with rehab it's shown here
in this wall painting in basil that's done by the great hans holbein you see that rehab here
is portrayed with uh holding out his little finger and this is in reference to one highly
dismissive and disrespectful remark that rehab makes regarding his father in which he says that
uh rakhavam says that his own little finger his pinky is thicker than anything his father could
bring to bear meaning to dismissively compare himself with his father the great king solomon
and of course this act of hubris and vulgarity really sends him down the rabbit hole which will
ultimately result in civil war but i just wanted to point this one out because it's one of those
passages that shows you that the biblical text is really you know it's quite racy and it has a lot
of very powerful information in it that you don't get with sanitized translations quite often uh
well let's not go any further down that scope but let's go back to where we left off
so under your rav ben navat the uh kingdom of israel which is to the north of jerusalem
splits away from what becomes the kingdom of judah in the south yoruba bennavat by the way
receives a very very bad press in the rest of jewish tradition he's considered one of the
greatest sinners because he introduced that divisiveness in jewish politics of the time
here's a map that shows you the relative locations of the kingdom of judah and the kingdom of israel
the capital of the kingdom of judah is of course jerusalem the kingdom of israel is in samaria or
shamron in subsequent lectures we'll speak much more about what happened to the people in the
kingdom of israel they are the so-called 10-loss tribes more about that in a few lectures but it's
interesting to note that it seems that they have a consciousness they retain a consciousness of
being one people albeit separated politically and although they will fight a civil war and they will
have ongoing conflict over the next century and a half they'll also recognize the centrality of
the value of worship in jerusalem they will also occasionally marry each other the royalty
of israel and judah will still intermarry and although they have a lot of conflict it seems to
be really a family conflict but more on that later the civil war that erupts when your raven bennavat
breaks away with the northern tribes is taken advantage of by egypt and king shishak enters
the the region and he makes essentially this parade up the land of israel conquering cities
as he goes and bringing israel firmly within its larger sphere of influence although israel
still maintains its its identity israel and judah that is maintain their identity as uh independent
principalities but nevertheless falling within the geopolitical orbit of egypt this we've seen this
in a couple of previous lectures because he left behind um you know these topographical lists of
the various places he conquered what's interesting for our point is that when he gets to the north to
megiddo uh the site of a place known in english is armageddon it's actually a place in israel megiddo
uh he left behind a steely that is kind of like a shishak was here steely that although it's badly
damaged it still retains its cartouche the uh sort of nameplate of uh shishak also pronounced
shoshank by the way that um that indicates that he did in fact make his way through northern israel
one of the most fascinating archaeological finds from the 9th century however that corroborates
much of the biblical text is this amazing find the so-called mesha steli also known as the moabite
stone it was discovered in dibon which was in the kingdom of moab which is today of course jordan
and it records from the moabite perspective the results of a very prolonged conflict between the
kingdom of israel and the moabites and in fact this is confirmed in the book of kings
there's a lot of discussion of various military engagements they had which the jews frequently
lost and here you have this interesting passage that's taken directly from the moabite stone
in which mesha the author of the text son of hemos god of course being the name of their god
complains about how badly he was treated in particular by the son of umri which is one of the
jewish kings and the omirai dynasty was actually one of the most important in the northern kingdoms
especially in terms of its military activity throughout the region and he talks in this steely
about how he beat back the invading jews and therefore he deserved to create this particular
monument it's a fascinating stone so much more to say about it but in this brief series we just want
to quickly look at it the omri dynasty mentioned in the moabite stone is uh one of the most well
documented of the northern kingdom's dynasties now during this period when there is a separation
between the kingdom of judah and the kingdom of israel we have recorded in the bible some
of those fascinating passages from two northern prophets in particular elijah and elisha the
the the great miraculous activities of these prophets are among the most dramatic passages
in the bible including a personal favorite of mine the resuscitation of the son of the
shunamite woman shown here in this remarkable 19th century painting by jan slaughters
where the mother is reunited with her son who has returned from death a fascinating passage
definitely uh worth reading however we're our task here is to approach the prophets
as historical sources and i want to comment on two specific aspects of the prophetic works as being
especially valuable let us recall that the text that is called by the jews the tanakh the hebrew
scriptures is made up of three distinct sections which which have very very distinct hermeneutic
rules applied to them as well the first five books are known as the torah per se although that term
torah is also used in a much larger sense meaning any kind of religious teaching that pertains to
the general values of judaism we'll talk about that more when we get to the rabbinic tradition in
greater detail but there's the first five books of moses which have a very high threshold of sanctity
within jewish theology they are considered to be dictated by god to moses some interesting
discussion about what about the passages in which moses describes his own death but not for us here
we're looking primarily at the history from the book of joshua on there's a large section
called the niviem or prophets which is a mixture of materials sometimes much more historical data
sometimes much more kind of ethical teachings and then finally you have the section called
ketuvim or writings which include things that really don't fit into either category like
psalms for example or prophets the the song of songs uh the book of esther fit in there and so on
and uh these second two sections nach or naveem and katuvium the the prophets and the writings
are considered to have a lower degree of sanctity to the first five books of moses uh they are
clearly written by human beings and recognized so not dictated by god but perhaps inspired by
god the commentators were out different approaches to you know what they actually mean what's their
so to speak uh nuclear weight in terms of uh understanding you know the task of judaism
but from a historical perspective some of the prophetic works like kings and chronicles in
particular seem to take upon themselves the um the task of pro preserving the historical record much
more so than other documents such as for example isaiah or jeremiah which have tremendous amounts
of historical information but seem to be much more focused on delivering the uh prophetic message of
repentance and uh you know drawing closer to god in kings and chronicles there's even some
so to speak kind of footnoting where from time to time the author of those texts by the way the book
of kings is normally attributed in the rabbinic tradition to jeremiah himself which fits at least
with the time period that we have it's it seems reasonable that it was written in the 6th century
the the book of kings and chronicles will refer to earlier texts such as the annals of the kings
of judah the annals of the kings of israel which implies that they've done research in terms of the
the record books of the dynasties they tend to be really focused on the
leadership of the kingdom of judah and the king of israel and they say a tremendous amount
about the individual activities of this king or that king often applying a very strict moral
and religious judgment to their activity as well fascinating other prophets however uh do not spend
quite as much time talking about you know palace intrigue and wars and things like that but spent
a lot more time you know exclaiming a an ethical and religious message and so approaching these
texts one has to kind of tease out the historical information from some of the later prophets and at
the same time understand the uh the overwhelming religious goal of the more historically oriented
prophets in many cases they offer us tempting tantalizing historical data um and and that's
often confirmed by the archaeological record for example uh there is the uh horrendous queen
jezebel or izevel in hebrew and the archaeological record has found this remarkable cartouche here
which is uh very uh appropriate to have been owned by a phoenician woman it has the same
kind of symbols and things like that whose name was isevo now it's it's possible that it belonged
to queen jezebel herself it is very large and very expensive compared to similar types of these
artifacts but we have no real proof that this is specifically belong to queen izebel and not to
some other izebo but nevertheless fascinating materials that generally point us along the
same kind of direction as the biblical text offers so returning to the historical narrative
what happens in the northern kingdom is basically they come under the sphere of influence of the
assyrians you'll recall that israel is locked between two major geopolitical powers to the south
is the kingdom of egypt or the egyptian empire and to the north is at this point the assyrian empire
later the babylonian empire that it overlaps and israel being of the northern part of the dual
monarchy israel feels the threat of assyria more powerfully the assyrian empire expands the 9th
century and begins to impact the northern part of the land of israel and place the local kings
in a state of vassalage this vassalage begins in the year 853 and we see for example with king yehu
who is shown here showing obeisance to king shamanesser this is from the black obelisk
of shamanism that we discussed and i think the third lecture or so of this series uh and the
the northern kings of israel are heavily burdened by additional tribute and taxes that come
from the north uh eventually as we shall discuss a few lectures from now the assyrians will simply
say well that's it for their independence it's too much of a hassle they're too rebellious
and uh the assyrians will come and take over the northern section uh take over the kingdom
of israel and that's when we talk about the lost ten tribes um we'll return to that but for the
next couple of lectures i'd like to take a break from the sort of political narrative of history
and i'd like to look at the daily life in biblical history we're going to look at the the economic
uh the social and the familial and the ritual life of jews for a few lectures and then we'll return
to a discussion of israel under assyria thank you very much for watching