The Kingdom That Was Not Destroyed in 722

When Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, Judah survived, and the survival shaped its religion. A southern kingdom that had been the smaller and poorer of the two was left holding the temple, the Davidic dynasty and the claim to represent the whole people, and refugees from the north appear to have arrived with their own traditions. Lester Grabbe's survey sets out how much of the biblical material takes its present form in the century or so after this, when Judah was a vassal of Assyria and then of Egypt and Babylon. The theology that developed under those conditions is recognisable in the prophetic books.

Some voices held that Jerusalem could not fall because God was in it, an idea reinforced when Sennacherib's siege in 701 was lifted without the city being taken; others, Jeremiah most sharply, insisted that no building guaranteed anything and that the covenant carried obligations the kingdom was failing. That argument was not settled by debate. It was settled in 587 or 586 BCE when Babylon took the city, burned the temple and deported the leadership, and the tradition that came through the exile was the one that had said this could happen. That is an unusual outcome. A national catastrophe normally discredits the religion attached to the nation, and in Judah it did the opposite, because a party within the tradition had predicted it.