The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah | Tel Aviv 360

Jeremiah was not one of the popular figures in Jerusalem on the eve of the Temple’s destruction. The ideology he held was contrary to that of many of the ministers and public leaders who championed the rebellion in Babylon and believed in the divine protection over the city, the temple and the dynasty of the House of David who were chosen by God and were given the eternal promise. This was also th...

From the biblical historiographer’s point of view, Josiah was the greatest of the kings who reigned in Judah. The reform carried out in his time in the spirit of Deuteronomy, during which the cult in Judah was purified and concentrated in Jerusalem, is the measure by which, looking back, all the other kings in Judah were judged. The days of his reign can be dated to the years 640-609 BCE. However,...

This chapter deals with the most untold story about one of the kings of Judah. King Manasseh reigned longer than any of the other kings of Judah, he was the son of Hezekiah and the grandfather of Josiah, and during his long reign Judah recovered from the severe blow inflicted on it by Sennacherib’s campaign. Judah was integrated into the Assyrian Empire which was at the height of its power and str...

Sennacherib’s campaign against the Kingdom of Judah, held in 701 BCE, was the most dramatic and significant event in the history of the Kingdom of Judah until the Babylonian destruction that came 115 years later. It left in its wake clear and well-dated layers of destruction, and resulted in severe damage to Judah, the exile of many residents, the destruction of the economy, and the lowlands’ sepa...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part E. The Untold Story about the Kingdom of Judah in the Days of the Biblical Historiographers The accidental and exciting discovery of a temple that existed and operated throughout the days of the First Temple, at a distance of only seven kilometers from Jerusalem, allows a unique and one-time glimpse, at least for now, of the way in which...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part E. The Untold Story about the Kingdom of Judah in the Days of the Biblical Historiographers In the century in which Judah was under Assyrian rule (from 732 to slightly after 630 BCE) it is possible to notice a considerable increase in the importance of the areas surrounding Jerusalem to the north, west and south, which became more centra...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part E. The Untold Story about the Kingdom of Judah in the Days of the Biblical King Ahaz came to power at the time when the Syro-Ephraimite alliance was formed, and it can be assumed that Rezin, King of Damascus, and Pekah, King of Israel, attacked Judah immediately upon his ascension to the throne, in order to take advantage of the fact tha...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part E. The Untold Story about the Kingdom of Judah in the Days of the Biblical Historiographers This chapter deals with the untold story of the history of the kingdom of Judah in the days of the authors of the Biblical history, with the aim of examining why they ignored the strict Assyrian rule in Judah from the time of the enslavement to As...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part D: Part Four: The Untold Story of the History of the Kingdom of Israel The account of the history of the Kingdom of Israel in the last generation of its existence, starting from the short reign of Zechariah, the son of Jeroboam II (746 BCE) until the destruction of the Kingdom (722 BCE), is a short, dry and focused account, which tells m...

The Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah Oded Lipschits Part D: Part Four: The Untold Story of the History of the Kingdom of Israel Jeroboam II was one of the greatest kings who reigned in Israel, and during his time the kingdom reached, for the last time in its history, the peak of its expansion and wealth, and this just a single generation before its rapid collapse, destruction and exile. During...

Joash the king of Israel was marked in the eyes of the Judean scribes, because he was the only one of the kings of Israel who captured the king of Judah on the battlefield, who conquered a city in Judah and destroyed parts of the wall of Jerusalem. Despite the information the historiographer had about Joash’s successes, as someone who was close to the prophet Elisha, as someone in whose days Israe...

The description of the major low point in Israel’s history during the reigns of Jehu and his son Joahaz was interwoven with the set of stories about the prophet Elisha, and few of the long chapters taken from the prophetic stories refer to the geopolitical reality that existed in Israel during this period of time. It seems that apart from the basic information that the biblical historiographers ha...

The dramatic events of the year 842 BCE had tremendous consequences for Damascus, Israel and Judah, as they were also the beginning of a new and different era: in Damascus, Hazael had ascended to the throne in a rebellion against Hadadezer, in Israel Jehu ascended to the throne, and destroyed the Omride Dynasty in a violent rebellion, which also included the elimination of many members of the Jeru...

At the beginning of the ninth century BCE, the Kingdom of Israel first appeared on the stage of history. Even without the biblical description of the days of the Omride kings, we could reconstruct the history of this dynasty and its greatness and power, since the archaeological findings and inscriptions found from that time period indicate a sharp change that took place in the kingdom’s urban cult...

In this chapter of the podcast, I examine the stories about the first kings of Israel and the royal houses that rose and fell in Israel before the establishment of the Omride Dynasty in the early ninth century BCE: the house of Jeroboam, the house of Baasha and King Zimri, who reigned over Israel for only a few days until he was murdered by Omri, who founded a dynasty that succeeded for the first...

The editorial framework of the Book of Kings is based on synchronisms – the matching of time periods between the reigns of the kings of Israel and the reigns of the kings of Judah. Synchronizing the history of the kings is done using opening formulae and closing formulae for each king. Through this synchronicity and the use of the opening and closing formulae, the descriptions of the history of th...

In this chapter of the podcast, I argue that the main reason why the people sought to appoint Saul as king was omitted from the Biblical description in the book of Samuel, and the short text that was omitted was preserved in a scroll discovered in a cave in Qumran, near the Dead Sea. In order to substantiate this claim, I give a brief introduction to the composition and content of the Book of Samu...

Chapter 4 in the Book of Judges describes the miraculous victory of Deborah, Barak and Yael over Jabin, the king of Canaan, and Sisera, the commander of his army at Harosheth Haggoyim (חֲרֹ֥שֶׁת־הַגּוֹיִֽם; Harosheth of the Nations). This story is special not only in its content and because of the female characters who play a lead role in it, but also because it is followed, in Chapter 5, by the S...

This chapter examines the process of “Judaization” applied to the Israeli book of the Saviors and its transformation into a Deuteronomistic Judean text, which could be integrated into the general historiographical system. This, as a background for examining the original information contained in this book and the question of what the Jerusalemite historiographers knew about the early history of the...

Towards the end of the eighth century BCE, Judah was at the peak of its development as a mature and developed kingdom. It was based on a fairly dense hierarchy of settlements, which was spread throughout all parts of the kingdom, and included farms, villages, secondary settlements and central towns. The lowlands were the most populated and fertile region of the kingdom, and Lachish served as the s...

Azekah’s power and wealth, the strong fortifications from the Middle Bronze Age, the extent of the city’s borders in the Late Bronze Age and the wealth of finds that were discovered, the strategic location and the control of the main roads connecting the hill country in the east and the coastal area in the west, together with the rich agricultural potential of the Elah Valley, all of these allowed...

Part C: The Untold Stories of the Lowlands and its HistoryIn this chapter I argue that the “Elah Valley Clan” lived and existed on its land for 1100 years, starting from the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age I, around 1800 BCE, until the destruction by Sennacherib, King of Assyria in 701 BCE. For most of this long period, this tribe was active in the geopolitical space of the local lowlands citie...

Part C: The Untold Stories of the Lowlands and its HistoryAt the end of the 7th century BCE, after the Assyrian withdrawal from the area west of the Euphrates, Judah established its renewed hold on the lowlands, which became an integral part of the kingdom’s territories, and an important component of its economy. In the light of this reality, the history of the lowlands was described since the day...

Part B: The Untold Stories of Ancient Jerusalem Over the centuries of Judah’s existence, the temple in Jerusalem gradually became the focus of the people’s life. However, it is doubtful whether the Jerusalem historiographers had reliable written sources of information about the past of the temple and its history. It was easy for them to describe its construction, since the temple built by Solomon...

Part B: The Untold Stories of Ancient Jerusalem The military campaign conducted by Shishak in the Land of Israel is the earliest historical event described in the Hebrew Bible (1 Kings 14: 25-28; 2 Chronicles 12: 2-12), and which is also explicitly mentioned in an extra-biblical source: the list of the places conquered during the campaign was engraved on one of the walls at the entrance to the Tem...