What the Kingdom Left Behind

Judaism takes its name from this kingdom, and so does the word Jew, which is a considerable inheritance for a small state that lasted about three and a half centuries. Two other things came from it. The first is a chronology: the reigns of the kings of Judah give the Hebrew Bible its dating framework, and the synchronisms with Assyrian and Babylonian records are what allow biblical events to be tied to an absolute calendar at all. The second is the text itself, since much of the editing that produced the Hebrew Bible is generally placed in the last decades of the kingdom and in the exile that followed it.

Mark Smith's work on the religion of the period complicates the picture in a way the atlas records rather than smooths over. The evidence, inscriptional as well as biblical, indicates that the worship of Yahweh in Judah coexisted for a long time with other deities and with practices the biblical writers condemn, and that the exclusive worship the finished text presents as original was in fact the position of one party which eventually prevailed. That is not a modern attack on the tradition. It is largely what the prophetic books themselves complain about, read as description rather than as polemic.