The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (44 page)

Josiah did not stop at Bethel, and the purge continued farther north:

And all the shrines also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which kings of Israel had made, provoking the L
ORD
to anger, Josiah removed; he did to them according to all that he had done at Bethel. And he slew all the priests of the high places who were there, upon the altars, and burned the bones of men upon them. Then he returned to Jerusalem. (
2
K
INGS
23
:19–20)

Even as he battled idolatry, Josiah instituted national religious celebrations:

And the king commanded all the people, “Keep the passover to the L
ORD
your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant.” For no such passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah; but in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this passsover was kept to the L
ORD
in Jerusalem. (
2
K
INGS
23
:21–23)

In retrospect, the biblical description of the religious reform of Josiah in 2 Kings 23 is not a simple record of events. It is a carefully crafted narrative that contains allusions to all the great personalities and events of Israel’s history. Josiah is implicitly compared to Moses, the great liberator and leader of the first Passover. He is also modeled after Joshua and David the great conquerors—and he follows the example of Solomon, the patron of
the Temple in Jerusalem. The story of Josiah’s reformation also redresses the evils of the past. The sins of the northern kingdom are also called to mind as Josiah succeeds in destroying Jeroboam’s altar at Bethel, the cult center of the kingdom of Israel, which had competed with Jerusalem for so long. Samaria is there, with its high places, and the bitter memories of its destruction are evoked. The entire history of Israel had now reached a turning point. After centuries of wrongdoing, Josiah had arisen to overturn the sins of the past and lead the people of Israel to redemption through a proper observance of the Law.

The discovery of the book of the Law was an event of paramount significance to the subsequent history of the people of Israel. It was regarded as the definitive law code given by God to Moses at Sinai, whose observance would ensure the survival of the people of Israel.

As early as the eighteenth century, biblical scholars noted the clear similarities between the description of the book of the Law found in the Temple and the book of Deuteronomy. The specific and direct parallels between the contents of Deuteronomy and the ideas expressed in the biblical account of Josiah’s reform clearly suggest that both shared the same ideology. Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch that asserts it contains the “words of the covenant” that all Israel must follow (29:9). It is the only book that prohibits sacrifice outside “the place which the Lord your God will choose” (12:5), while the other books of the Pentateuch repeatedly refer, without objection, to worship at altars set up throughout the land. Deuteronomy is the only book to describe the national Passover sacrifice in a national shrine (16:1–8). And while it is evident that there are later additions included in the present text of the book of Deuteronomy, its main outlines are precisely those that are observed by Josiah in 622
BCE
in Jerusalem
for the first time.

The very fact that a written law code suddenly appeared at this time meshes well with the archaeological record of the spread of literacy in Judah. Although the prophet Hosea and King Hezekiah were associated with ideas that are similar to those contained in Deuteronomy, the report of the appearance of a definitive written text and its public reading by the
king accords with the evidence for the sudden, dramatic spread of literacy in seventh-century Judah. The discovery of hundreds of personal signet seals and seal impressions inscribed in Hebrew from this era attests to the extensive use of writing and written documents. As we have mentioned, such relatively widespread evidence of literacy is an important indication that Judah reached the level of a fully developed state in this period. It hardly had the capability of producing extensive biblical texts before.

In addition, scholars have pointed out that the literary form of the covenant between YHWH and the people of Israel in Deuteronomy is strikingly similar to that of early seventh-century Assyrian vassal treaties that outline the rights and obligations of a subject people to their sovereign (in this case, Israel and YHWH). Furthermore, as the biblical historian Moshe Weinfeld has suggested, Deuteronomy shows similarities to early Greek literature, in expressions of ideology within programmatic speeches, in the genre of blessing and cursing, and in the ceremonies for the foundation of new settlements. To sum up, there is little doubt that an original version of Deuteronomy is the book of the Law mentioned in 2 Kings. Rather than being an old book that was suddenly discovered, it seems safe to conclude that it was written in the seventh century
BCE
, just before or during Josiah’s reign.

In order to understand why the book of Deuteronomy took the form it did—and why it had such obvious emotional power—we need first to look at the international scene of the last decades in the history of Judah. A review of the historical and archaeological sources will show how major changes in the balance of power throughout the entire region were central factors in the shaping of biblical history.

By the time the eight-year-old prince Josiah ascended to the throne of Judah in 639
BCE
, Egypt was experiencing a great political renaissance in which images of its remote past—and of the great conquering founders—were used as powerful symbols to enhance Egyptian power and prestige throughout the region. Starting in 656
BCE
, Psammetichus I, the founder of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, had thrown off the imperial overlordship of the Assyrian empire and later expanded his rule over much of the area in
the Levant that the great pharaoh Ramesses II had controlled in the thirteenth century
BCE
.

The key to this Egyptian renaissance was, first of all, the sudden and precipitous decline of Assyria in the closing decades of the seventh century
BCE
. The precise date and cause of the collapse of Assyrian power, after more than a hundred years of unquestioned world dominance, are still debated by scholars. Yet Assyrian power clearly began to decline near the end of the reign of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (669–627
BCE
), due to the pressure of the mounted nomadic Scythian tribes on the northern borders of the empire and from continuous conflicts with the subject peoples of Babylonia and Elam on the east. After the death of Ashurbanipal, Assyrian rule was further challenged by a revolt in Babylonia in 626 and by the eruption of a civil war in Assyria itself three years later, in 623
BCE
.

Egypt was an immediate beneficiary of Assyrian weakness. Pharaoh Psammetichus I, founder of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, ruling from the Nile Delta city of Sais, succeeded in uniting the local Egyptian aristocracy under his leadership. During his reign from 664 to 610
BCE
, the Assyrian forces withdrew from Egypt and left much of the Levant to be controlled by the Egyptians. The Greek historian Herodotus, who is an important source for the events of this period, recounts (in a story embellished with many legendary details) how Psammetichus marched north and laid a twenty-nine-year-long siege to the city of Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast. Whatever the truth of that report, archaeological finds at sites along the coastal plain indeed seem to indicate a growing Egyptian influence in the late seventh century. In addition, Psammetichus boasts in a contemporary inscription that he controlled the Mediterranean coast as far north as Phoenicia.

The Assyrians’ retreat from their former possessions in the coastal plain and in the territory of the former northern kingdom of Israel appears to have been peaceful. It is even possible that Egypt and Assyria reached some sort of an understanding, according to which Egypt inherited the Assyrian provinces to the west of the Euphrates in exchange for a commitment to provide Assyria with military support. In any case, the five-centuries-long Egyptian dream to reestablish their Canaanite empire was fulfilled. The Egyptians regained control of agricultural wealth and international routes
of trade in the rich lowlands. Yet as in the time of the great conquering pharaohs of the New Kingdom, the relatively isolated inhabitants of the highlands—now organized as the kingdom of Judah—were relatively unimportant to the Egyptians. And so, at least in the beginning, they were largely left to themselves.

The withdrawal of the Assyrians from the northern regions of the land of Israel created a situation that must have seemed, in Judahite eyes, like a long-expected miracle. A century of Assyrian domination had come to an end; Egypt was interested mainly in the coast; and the wicked northern kingdom of Israel was no more. The path seemed open for a final fulfillment of Judahite ambitions. Finally it seemed possible for Judah to expand to the north, take over the territories of the vanquished northern kingdom in the highlands, centralize the Israelite cult and establish a great, Pan-Israelite state.

Such an ambitious plan would require active and powerful propaganda. The book of Deuteronomy established the unity of the people of Israel and the centrality of their national cult place, but it was the Deuteronomistic History and parts of the Pentateuch that would create an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams. This is presumably the reason why the authors and editors of the Deuteronomistic History and parts of the Pentateuch gathered and reworked the most precious traditions of the people of Israel: to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.

Embellishing and elaborating the stories contained in the first four books of the Torah, they wove together regional variations of the stories of the patriarchs, placing the adventures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in a world strangely reminiscent of the seventh century
BCE
and emphasizing the dominance of Judah over all Israel. They fashioned a great national epic of liberation for all the tribes of Israel, against a great and dominating pharaoh, whose realm was uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psammetichus.

In the Deuteronomistic History, they created a single epic of the conquest of Canaan, with the scenes of the fiercest battles—in the Jordan valley,
the area of Bethel, the Shephelah foothills, and the centers of former Israelite (and lately Assyrian) administration in the north—precisely where their new conquest of Canaan would have to be waged. The powerful and prosperous northern kingdom, in whose shadow Judah had lived for more than two centuries, was condemned as an historical aberration—a sinful breakaway from the true Israelite heritage. The only rightful rulers of all Israelite territories were kings from the lineage of David, especially the pious Josiah. Bethel, the great cult center of the northern kingdom, which Josiah took over, was strongly condemned. “Canaanites,” that is, all non-Israelite inhabitants, were also disparaged, with a strict prohibition against intermarriage of Israelites with foreign women, which, according to the Deuteronomistic History and the Pentateuch, would only lure the people into idolatry. Both those policies were probably related to the practical challenge of expanding into parts of the Land of Israel where large numbers of non-Israelites had been settled by the Assyrians, especially the southern regions of the former northern kingdom, around Bethel.

It is impossible to know if earlier versions of the history of Israel were composed in the time of Hezekiah or by dissident factions during the long reign of Manasseh, or if the great epic was composed entirely during Josiah’s reign. Yet it is clear that many of the characters described in the Deuteronomistic History—such as the pious Joshua, David, and Hezekiah and the apostate Ahaz and Manasseh—are portrayed as mirror images, positive and negative, of Josiah. The Deuteronomistic History was not history writing in the modern sense. It was a composition simultaneously ideological and theological.

In the seventh century
BCE
, for the first time in the history of ancient Israel, there was a popular audience for such works. Judah had become a highly centralized state in which literacy was spreading from the capital and the main towns to the countryside. It was a process that had apparently started in the eighth century, but reached a culmination only in the time of Josiah. Writing joined preaching as a medium for advancing a set of quite revolutionary political, religious, and social ideas. Despite its tales of apostasy and the disloyalty of Israel and its monarchs, despite its cycles of sin, retribution, and redemption, with all its calamities of the past, the Bible offers a profoundly optimistic history. It promised its readers and listeners they would be participants in the story’s happy ending—when their own
King Josiah would purge Israel from the abominations of its neighbors, redeem its sins, institute general observance of the true laws of YHWH, and take the first steps to make the legendary kingdom of David a reality.

Josiah’s were clearly messianic times. The Deuteronomistic camp was winning and the atmosphere in Jerusalem must have been one of exceptional exhilaration. But the lesson of the transition from the righteous Hezekiah to the sinful Manasseh had not been forgotten. Josiah’s reformers surely faced opposition. So the time would also have been one for education and social reform. In that connection, it is important to note that the book of Deuteronomy contains ethical laws and provisions for social welfare that have no parallel anywhere else in the Bible. Deuteronomy calls for the protection of the individual, for the defense of what we would call today human rights and human dignity. Its laws offer an unprecedented concern for the weak and helpless within Judahite society: