The Babylonian Captivity

(00:02) our topic tonight is the Babylonian captivity and we're talking about the original Babylonian C captivity so the Exiles from the kingdom of Judah that had been destroyed taken into Exile in the actual city of Babylon as opposed to um the Babylonian captivity of uh you know the metaphorical Babylonian captivity of the papacy when the um popes of Rome are in Exile in ainon France and are under control of the French Court in many in many ways uh so this is the literal Babylonian captivity as opposed to later metaphorical uh

(00:49) Echoes of that when we um think of like these major moments in the develop vment of judeo-christianity we divide them into the first temple period the second temple period And then after the destruction of the second temple uh the development of Rabin Judaism which is the main line uh of Judaism that exists today um we identified uh the Samaritans as one of the uh groups that emerged after the destruction of the first temple and as a separate group essentially when um second temple Judaism begins then of course sects within

(01:44) second temple Judaism like the Sadducees the Essen and the Pharisees and ultimately the Jesus movement and how that movement in turn becomes Christianity anyway one of those key moments in transformation is that destruction of the first temple and the period in between the first temple and the second temple which is the Babylonian captivity this is the beginning of Judaism being experienced in diaspora so as opposed to Judaism that is centered around Jerusalem living in the land now uh the leadership is in Exile in Babylon and then there's

(02:34) another other group of Exiles uh that are existing in Egypt and this transforms um how the uh religion had been uh lived and changes it in very important marked ways although it in no sense is um achieved at this stage anything like what we now think of as modern rabic Judaism or Christianity for that matter it is a a very very different um identity still but some of the key building blocks are put in place uh as we'll see so the 137th Psalm is written by a Juda poet U perhaps living in Exile in the city of Babylon after the destruction of

(03:25) the first temple after the destruction of Jerusalem so one of the poetic names for Jerusalem is Zion which is um the name of one of its Hills and so poetically it that name then gets referred to the whole city so this poet wrote one of the more famous Psalms that evokes this whole topic that we're exploring tonight the Babylonian captivity and so he says by the Rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion on the Willows there we hung up our Harps for there our captors asked us for

(04:07) songs our tormentors asked us for mer saying sing us one of the songs of Zion how could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign Land If I forget you oh Jerusalem let my right hand wither let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest Joy so you know this is a pong of mourning but it's obviously also a song of deep memory you know uh this is an Oaths here that let my right hand wither if I if I forget this component of my identity you know this Focus that we

(04:49) have on Zion on Jerusalem um and ultimately for the Exiles this kind of morning memory is about identity formation We are continuing to be Exiles as opposed to people who have now move to Babylon and are assimilating into Babylonian culture and becoming Babylonians like all of our our neighbors who are around and one of the things we can pick out of this also and this is going to be true in Antiquity anytime you have someone who has the capacity to write this is part of the Elite Class since only um very wealthy people are able to write

(05:35) and it's generally a courtly or U at least certainly part of associated with the Royal courts and then um some of maybe some of the top uh uh merchants and and Artisans might also are using writing for their for their figures and so on but poetry like this is a courtly uh component and um the Exiles here uh therefore are Elite Exiles and they are um being asked by other members of the court of Babylon uh to perform to sing and so it's showing that this is uh being written by a cordier a court style of function um so we don't normally quote

(06:22) the next part of it but there is you know uh a a final stanza that goes on and it takes on a dark and vengeful turn and so after you know it says we don't want to forget Jerusalem now it says remember O Lord against the the day of Jerusalem's fall how they said tear it down tear it down down to its foundations oh daughter Babylon you Devastator happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against The Rock so um wanting uh vengeance upon uh ultimately

(07:07) the Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem and took them into Exile but then also um uh remembering as an outgroup and uh as negative neighbors the had been very close neighbors of the kingdom of Judah just immediately to the South um they're remembered here as Allied with the Babylonians in destroying the judaic kingdom and so now um this identity formation is also about saying who we are and who they are and the them the outgroup includes the the moabites and so on um ironically so when um you know where whereas this may be true that the

(07:54) uh were had had been Rivals and may have been uh pleased to take advantage of uh judah's downfall um a similar thing had happened PR a century earlier when the northern kingdom when Israel was destroyed uh by the Assyrians the uh Kingdom of Judah didn't help out and instead took uh Advantage by allying with the Assyrians and and indeed had its great rise uh after um after the northern kingdom which had been so much more important and more prosperous actually felt so anyway you we don't always um we don't always uh

(08:36) recognize that kind of you know our own kind of hypocrisies when it comes to those kind of things okay when uh we are looking at the Levant what is sort of the larger area of you know what is now uh Israel and Palestine and Jordan and uh Lebanon and Syria but um at the time we call us maybe the Levant or greater Syria um the western part of the Fertile Crescent the Levant in general is a relatively uh small Territory between much larger neighbors much more powerful neighbors so it's especially um stuck in between

(09:27) Mesopotamia now think of as Iraq and Egypt uh which tended to be the cradles of civilization that had great Imperial Powers um but there's also um nearby Anatolia Asia Minor what we not think of as turkey uh which had this could be the seat of a large empire like the Hittites uh and also um Beyond Mesopotamia is the great Persian or Iranian plateau and so where Iran and Persia can also be the heart or the seat of very large empire indeed and so it's really when those um normal or more traditional uh centers of Empire like Mesopotamia

(10:14) when they are in disarray uh that kingdoms based in the Levant like uh Judah or Aram or Phoenicia are actually able to really Thrive um but it's very difficult for them to have the basis of and being the center of an Empire so for example we mentioned um the destruction of the northern kingdom this is when uh the mes great Mesopotamian Empire of Assyria was at its height in the 7th Century BCE uh and Judah as we say was a uh client of the Assyrian Empire um that had its major r as the Assyrian Empire uh declined so let's look at the kind of

(11:06) background of the great pow so that we can consider um uh where Judah is in all of this and and how the Exile happened in the Babylonian captivity so Assyria was based in northern Mesopotamia and it conquered from there the whole feral Crescent including Babylon which is at the center of the Southern portion of Iraq the southern Mesopotamia and the syrians also conquered the Levant including the destruction of the northern kingdom the Kingdom of Israel in 720 BCE and Assyrians even temporarily conquered Egypt which they held directly for a

(11:49) decade uh and then they replaced uh the previous Egyption dynasty of pharaohs with a new Dynasty that was their allies um before uh in the 7th Century the late 7th Century um uh Assyria broke into Civil Wars and had a very rapid decline that's on the one side on the other side we have Egypt uh which had been a great power going way way way back and so as early as the 3000s BCE um had be a unified Kingdom ruled by pharaohs and fre quently when it was strong it would have Imperial Ambitions and the kind of easiest place to

(12:35) immediately start conquering is again uh the Mediterranean Coast so the Levant Canaan and Syria so after briefly being conquered by the Assyrians as he mentioned the 26th dynasty of the Pharaohs which is the last native Dynasty uh in Egypt prior to the Persian Conquest um this dynasty regained Egypt's Independence initially as an ally of uh the Assyrian uh leadership so um with the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and the fall of its capital Nineveh Pharaoh Neco II LED an army into the Levant uh to assert Egyptian control over the region so

(13:23) there's chaos and so the Egyptians are maybe um taking opportunist to advantage of that um as they're doing this Egypt begins to be in conflict with the Babylonians the Babylonians are uh the uh great power that revolted against the Assyrians and overthrew the Assyrians and start to put together a new uh Fertile Crescent based Empire so uh pharoh Neco uh as part of his campaign in 609 BCE uh goes to the great city of megiddo which is had been a a provincial capital in the Assyrian Empire in the lant and there he is met by uh King Josiah of

(14:13) Judah and Neco then kills him there the Babylonians we were mentioning after centuries of subjugation to the Assyrian Empire Babylon emerged from the Assyrian civil wars in the 7th Century uh as the great C capital of the successor Empire so babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar thei rained for 43 years and a lot of times one of one of the things that's happening is when you were on the rise if you could have that kind of stability in a monarchy that also helps build up your power um Nebuchadnezzar successfully contested

(14:54) with the Egyptians uh over the Fertile Crescent and ultimately brought the Levant and including Judah into the Babylonian Empire as opposed to allowing the Egyptians to uh take that control of that area and at it to their sphere of influence and so um the ultimate uh picture here by the time we get to the Babylonian captivity is uh a Middle East with the Fertile Crescent in the middle dominated by the Babylonian Empire which includes uh some of the heartlands of the Assyrians then a median Empire which is their allies in destroying the Assyrians

(15:38) uh ultimately um owning that that uh Iranian Plateau including Persia and so this is the predecessor state of what will ultimately be a Persian Empire uh Egypt has been kind of contained but can still be powerful in its own little corner um and then there's a state in Anatolia Lydia that has been emerging um you can see all of this is going to come together uh at the end of the Babylonian captivity when the Persian Empire uh combines all of these uh different states so let's look at the kind of timeline so that we can kind of see um

(16:24) where the Babylonian captivity fits here so uh this is a zoom in of the normal chronology that we normally look at and so we're looking here from 800 before the Common Era to 500 and the Babylonian captivity is the period of time uh that we have after the bar here in purple that is the kingdom of Judah disappears with the fall of Jerusalem in 587 and before the uh fall of the Babylonian Empire in 537 with the return of the Exiles so just in terms of background context we have before that uh Assyria Assyria is

(17:05) conquest of Israel it's kind of brief conquest of Egypt as we can see um this is when there is a rise of Judah um as Exiles from the northern kingdom come and join the court and there is an upswing of uh of literary um writing that occurs in the uh Court of King Josiah and his successors and ultimately also because Judah has been able to be part of an Assyrian economic system it also allows uh Judah to grow and its country to become more populated and Jerusalem to grow nevertheless um uh the decline happens pretty fast and so King Josiah

(17:54) who has been this last great hope for the kingdom of Judah is killed like I say by the Pharaoh Pharaoh Neco and then Judah is being fought over by the Egyptians and the Babylonians the Babylonians ultimately uh win and destroy the kingdom entirely and anex it and then are in charge until they are in turn defeated by the Persians who ultimately also conquer Egypt so that gives us kind of a background uh context so like I say when we're in the first temple period Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah are fairly small and

(18:37) are therefore at kind of the mercy of these greater Powers around them and that on the one hand is true militarily but it's also uh true in terms of uh Power culture influence and so Assyria uh in that time period is um affecting uh Israelite and Jud uh the courts how they behave their military even their religious traditions and all at the same time uh they also look in the other direction to Egypt which is uh continues to be a power that has influence in the area as well and especially for Israel and Judah

(19:20) which are immediately next to the Egyptians as opposed to um let's say if you're Phoenicians that are way up the coast you're farther away from the Egyptians so as we are getting to the end of that first temple period uh Jerusalem has expanded a lot from where it would have been uh when David would have been around so um we don't we've talked a lot about how David is essentially the aonomus ancestor of the the House of David and what's really known about him as a historical figure is simply that the kings of Judah

(19:59) understood themselves to have had a Founder David about whom we have a lot of literary tradition that um probably doesn't have a lot of historicity to it but nevertheless the original little sliver in there of what Jerusalem had been is what the city of David was and then the temple complex which is assigned to David's uh kind of legendary son Solomon then by the time we're getting to um the last Generations after the fall of the northern kingdom under Hezekiah manasse Josiah the city has expanded significantly and there is a

(20:40) new Western Wall enclosing uh a new portion of the city um and this uh is sort of the kind of prosperous time that is the beginning of literary tradition that is getting the whole biblical uh the biblical setting rolling so the kingdom of judah's height naturally corresponded uh with the decline of Assyria because as we say when the Great powers are there dominating you you aren't able to you aren't able to have a a strong power in the Levant instead now though as they are uh declining small clients like Judah are able to uh assert

(21:22) more of their autonomy and Independence so Josiah assumes the throne at the age of8 and so that means that he had um you know Regents and counselors there was a faction that was ruling in his name but he ultimately uh becomes old enough to have the majority and become king in his own right so he reigns during this prosperous end of the first temple period so let's look about what it says in the book of Kings Second Kings about uh this time period the very end uh before the Babylonian captivity so Josiah was 8 years old we hear when he

(22:01) began to Reign he reigned 31 years in Jerusalem he did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the ways of his father David so David is not his father but this ancestor David he's of the House of David so he's called a son of David here Josiah did not turn aside to the right or to the left he's doing exactly what a king is supposed to be doing according to the biblical author here so the deuteronomic historians as we call them the editors of the books uh from Joshua through Kings judge the Kings of Israel and the kings of Judah

(22:44) by their Fidelity to monolatry which is to say worshiping the god of Israel and the god of Israel alone and putting down worship of any other other gods and so as a result of this the deuteronomist rates Josiah's great-grandfather Hezekiah who uh is said to have destroyed all of the high places so all of the ancient shrines where um Yahweh and other gods are worshiped uh outside of Jerusalem and Begins the centralization of Yahweh ISM in Jerusalem so he is a very very good King according to the biblical writers but

(23:27) they absolutely condemn Josiah's grandfather King manasse who restores the Pagan Cults to the Jerusalem Temple as a wicked King for doing that so Josiah here is given special praise and he's even compared with David anticipating uh the program that he is going to have so we read in the 18th year of his Reign that Josiah now around 26 years old orders that the temple be repaired and as they are doing that it leads to a discovery so we read that the high priest hilaya said to shafan the secretary I have found the book of the law in the

(24:10) house of the Lord this is an amazing Discovery the inside when he went in the temple to look around they found the book of the law when helaya gave the book to shaan he read it shaan the secretary informed the king the priest hkaya has given me a book shafan then read the it aloud to the king and when the king heard the words of the book of the law he tore his clothes in abject grief so Josiah has this reaction because this book of the law uh that was found in the temple contains Commandments that he has never

(24:46) previously heard and that nobody in his kingdom is obeying so these are um presented as ancient Commandments in a book newly found uh that people are not obeying and so now we need to start obeying them if we are going to accept this as uh a legitimate book the book becomes the basis for a religious reform according to the Bible so the King Josiah directed that all the Elders of Judah and Jerusalem should be gathered to him the king went up to the house of the Lord and with him went all the people of Judah all the inhabitants

(25:26) of Jerusalem the priests the prophets and all the people both small and great he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the Covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord to follow the lord keeping his Commandments his decrees and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul to per to perform the words of this Covenant that were written in this book and all the people joined in the Covenant the King commanded the high priest hilaya the

(26:01) priests of the second order and the Guardians of the threshold to bring out of the Temple of the Lord all of the vessels that had been made for Baal for Asher and for all of the hosts of Heaven all of the all the other gods besides Yahweh and he burned them outside of Jerusalem in the field of kiddan and carried their Ashes to the shrine at Bethel so Josiah's reforms then eliminate all of the shrines to the other Gods so the gods other than Yahweh uh in the Jerusalem Temple and then all shrines to Yahweh as well

(26:36) outside of Jerusalem so centralizes worship on uh Jerusalem and uh eliminates all worship other than Yahweh worship um the book also included the introduction of the Passover Festival so there are now new religious practices so the king we read Comm commanded all the people keep the Passover to the Lord your God as prescribed in this book of the Covenant and the Bible goes on here to say no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel even during all the days of the Kings of Israel and of all the kings of

(27:18) Judah but in the 18th year of King Josiah this Passover was kept to the Lord in Jerusalem so um Josiah's grandfather King Manasseh um who uh had supported all of the different uh Gods and all of the Pagan shrines all of the Canaanite uh shrines in Jerusalem and in the Jerusalem Temple um and we also are told that he um practiced U uh the Canaanite religious practice of of infant sacrifice so the firstborn of every womb is to be sacrificed so um one of the religious reforms that may be being described here now that this new Passover is being

(28:08) experienced for the first time um the idea of the Passover is uh the the angel of death uh passes over or the angel probably essentially originally the god of death no longer demands the your the the first born uh and the household shows that because you have had a substitute sacrifice you s sacrificed a lamb or another animal and put the uh blood over the lentil that means that um that the uh sacrifice has been done a substitute sacrifice has been appeased and so the religious reform here is trying to eliminate this uh this

(28:46) practice that had been uh very common in Canaanite religion so it's happening pretty late here in jith uh Reign here as we're getting to the end of the first temple period so unlike the stories in Genesis and exodus which are set centuries and even Millennia before those books were composed um the first draft of the book of Kings may actually date from the reign of Josiah or in the immediate aftermath the next couple decades so as a result The Narrative details of finding this book and the religious reforms um are more like likely to have

(29:29) historicity although um there are arguments that that some Scholars make that you know that these that these actually occur are actually written later and and that these still are probably not uh historical but some anyway there is a potential to argue it both ways that this is maybe the very beginnings of um some of some of the biblical historicity that is actually uh traceable because this may be when the texts are being written as early as 1805 so biblical scholarship has been going on a long time um Scholars have

(30:09) suggested that the book that is found by hilaya is Deuteronomy or maybe the earliest component of Deuteronomy so um the deuteronomic law code which is now chapters 12 through 26 of the book of Deuteronomy uh which is generally understood to be the oldest part of the book where other sections of Deuteronomy then are added by later authors and editors during the Exile in order to connect it into the rest of the Biblical history that is being written and also um there are anachronisms that are introduced into those sections that are

(30:49) effectively um giving the logical answers to why the temple and the kingdom uh will be or in other words have been d destroyed so U those parts are later or the whole book is later but sometimes many scholars think that part the portion of it here is coming from this time from this uh time of Josiah in 1943 as this idea uh was taking shape Martin no who is a German biblical scholar um coined this term that we use the deuteronomic histories to identify the text from Joshua to judges um as part of um a composition that uh maybe preserves some

(31:36) older texts or edits together a bunch of older texts but nevertheless puts brings them together in order to share a particular theological Outlook and specifically that is the um the deuteronomic cycle which is uh that you are blessed when you uh are worshiping Yahweh in other words when you were worshiping Yahweh only when you go to monolatry U but when you forget Yahweh and go to paganism you will be punished by Yahweh in 1968 Frank morross proposed maybe that a first draft of these texts was compiled during the reign of King

(32:22) Josiah um if so then that means we have also again have later editors who have added to it because editorial revisions and sections were added after the Exile including for example uh the last few chapters of 2 Kings which tell of the Kingdom to its destruction after Josiah's death so this is the earliest likely or possible date for any of these texts um or for a draft of this but um and the argument can also be made that this is happening in the Exile or even later the deuteron onus believes as I say that God punishes those who forget

(33:03) him by turning and when you turn to other gods and bless those who remember him by putting aside all of the other gods and um because Josiah does that uh so very strongly uh it should augur a long blessed Reign for Josiah instead uh we read in 2 Kings in the days of pharaoh Neco king of Egypt uh in his days Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates King Josiah went to meet him but when Pharaoh Neco met him at megiddo he killed him his servants carried him dead in a chariot from megiddo brought

(33:51) him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb so like I said according to the deuteronomist the ology Josiah should have been blessed with peace and a long life and so in order to explain such a righteous King's death the editor is forced to kind of make a you know reach make a reaching argument so an apologetic argument so the editor or author here says before Josiah there was no King like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart with all his soul and with all his might according to the law all the law of

(34:26) Moses nor did any like him arise after him so this is a great king U they had a lot of hopes for him still however the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath by which his anger was kindled against Judah against the kingdom of Judah because of all the provocations which manasse had provoked him so his grandfather Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had been such a terrible King that uh God is still bus he punishing Judah for it the Lord said I will remove Judah also out of my sight as I have removed Israel and I will

(35:06) reject the city that I have chosen Jerusalem and the house which I have said my name shall be there the house of which I have said my name shall be there so unable to explain you know how King manasse who had reintroduced all the shrines to all the gods in the Jerusalem Temple and it brought back the the temple prostitute and everything else even the practice of infant sacrifice how could that King have had such a long peaceful successful Reign while good King Josiah was struck down so ignobly by Pharaoh um the second

(35:43) edition of the deuteronomist reactor essentially assigns the blame for both Josiah's death and the fall of the Kingdom back to manasse and so this is another potential argument um this argument of embarrassment of uh why maybe this is when a draft of this is being written uh because if you were just creating um you know sort of Mythic stories like they're able to do with the book of of uh uh judges then it's always it always ends the story always ends properly uh according to the deuteronomist uh theology which is to

(36:25) say um the people are are always punished when they forget the Lord and the Lord raises up a judge the judge is able to miraculously defeat all of the enemies and the people remember Yahweh and they and they live in peace for a generation until they forget the Lord become wealthy and and the whole thing happens again so the Cycle Works um perfectly when it's able to be entire entirely literary when the stories are entirely Mythic uh or just based on you know a legendary hero but now as it's getting to the time period when maybe

(36:58) the text is actually being written or it's being at least the time period that is being remembered by the authors um they have to come up with apologetic excuses for why their theology didn't work out um later during the second temple period a scribe uh who had access to the deuteronomic histories the books from Joshua Judges Samuel and Kings um had that as his source and wanted to rewrite them we call this the chronicler and the chronicler often uh did this by fixing uh stories that are embarrassing or even eliminating altogether

(37:43) embarrassing stories uh changing them so that embarrassing things don't happen again probably with the idea of replacing those uh those texts they probably word didn't circulate enough that um the chronicle maybe thought well I'll make a new version of this a shorter version and then these older versions will maybe uh Fall by the wayside instead what ended up happening was we have those same six books in the Bible and then Chronicles comes right after it um but Chronicles um uh sort of fixes this Josiah story um Second Kings

(38:22) simply stated Josiah went to meet Neco at megiddo and was killed there by him Chronicles reimagines this meeting as a battle so we read in the book of Chronicles after all this when Josiah had set the temple in order King Neco of Egypt went up to fight at kemes on the Euphrates and Josiah went out against him but Neco sent envoys to him saying what I have to do what what have I to do with you king of Judah am I not come I am not coming against you today but against the house with which I am at war and God has commanded me to hurry cease

(39:05) opposing God who is with me so that he will not destroy you it's very um crazy word unusual words of God coming in the mouth here of pharaoh but Josiah would not turn away from him but disguised himself in order to fight with him he did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God but joined battle in the plain of megido The Archers shot King Josiah and the King said to his servants take me away for I'm badly wounded so his servants took him out of the Chariot and carried him to his second Chariot and brought

(39:43) him to Jerusalem there he died and was buried in the tombs of his ancestors so um you know the idea here that um you know the words of God are issued um by the mouth of pharaoh is a very um strange apologetic idea um we can maybe say again is the chronicler is um trying to figure out how we can explain um why Josiah who had been the super righteous King why is he um killed in this ignoble way so at least it's upgraded to a battle so this meeting at megido so megido was a major Center um it had previously been been a Royal City

(40:29) part of the Kingdom of Israel so um later these are as it's subdivided into Assyrian provinces where Judah is a client Kingdom and megiddo Gilead and Samaria are um the former uh they're the provinces that are ruled directly by the Assyrians that formerly made up the Kingdom of Israel the northern kingdom so megiddo would is right there on the um the uh the coastal route that you would be taking as you go up from Egypt and are going to uh Syria to um you know initially he would have been Allied Neco would have been allied with the

(41:10) Assyrians but by the time uh he meets with jiah the Assyrians have been overthrown so um um Neco here uh his dynasty had been allies like I say of the Assyrians he might have originally wanted to bring them aid but with the Assyrian Empire's rapid collapse uh he and the Egyptian Army may have been opportunistically asserting their own control of the newly liberated letine Powers so maybe uh the reason why Josiah goes to meet him is that pharaoh who brings a huge Army uh summons all of the local Kings of the different client

(41:51) states and also uh the upstart provincial leaders who are now kind of independent and said says I am now asserting um Egyptian control over all of this territory and um and Josiah uh perhaps U you know looked at him the wrong way or whatever it is we can't know it's very we don't know exactly what happened but in any event um it's not what the deuteronomist would have expected it's not what the biblical uh writers would have wanted to have happen if they're uh creating this story from so Josiah's in glorious end like I say

(42:33) was inexplicable for the Theology of the deuteronomist and it was embarrassing for the chronicler so whether or not there was any battle um the death of Josiah was kind of the beginning of the end now for the kingdom of Judah um the location at megido um which is sometimes also now called har middo which means U mount megiddo in Hebrew but the har is actually a tell it's a a ancient city that's been built up uh on ruins has been built up and left a big hill which is like a tell um the location of harag and the death of

(43:14) Josiah inspired um the later Christian writer John the Revelator uh his vision for a battle at the end of the world taking place at Armageddon um this midu place that uh where Josiah died so it's seen as a very important turning point and it actually really was in terms of the history uh of first temple Judaism so after the Pharaoh kills Josiah Judah initially Falls within Egypt's sphere of influence um Josiah's son jeho aaz initially becomes the new king but the narrative in Kings tells us that uh jeho has was 23 years old when he began to

(43:59) Reign he reigned 3 months in Jerusalem he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord just as his ancestors had done so unlike Josiah all the Le the rest of these kings are not good Kings Pharaoh Neco confined him at riblah in the land of HTH so that he might not reign in Jerusalem and impose tribute on the land of 100 talents of silver and a talent of gold pharoh Neco made made eliakim son of Josiah King in place of his father Josiah and he changed uh his name to yakim yakim anyway there all these guys have harder to harder and harder to say

(44:42) names at the end and they all sound the same but anyway the Pharaoh took uh jehoahaz away he came to Egypt and he died there uh jeim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh but he taxed the land in order to meet Pharaoh's demand for money he exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land from all according to their assessment to give it to Pharaoh Neco so Judah now becomes a heavily taxed client state of Egypt um it's completely under the control of the Pharaoh who is able to actually depose Exile uh the king and

(45:19) put one of his brothers on the throne uh and I to say exacting a very heavy tribute uh for Egypt meanwhile um under Nebuchadnezzar thei the Babylonians continue to try to assert control over all of Assyria former Empire and so Joakim this guy who uh the Pharaoh put on the throne switches his Allegiance actually from Egypt to Babylon and becomes Nebuchadnezzar's servant as they say for three years before deciding that he has to rebel and reassert his independence and so this is the kind of path that the kingdom is on for the last little while

(46:00) it's trying to go It Alone where it can there's a um there are factions within the kingdom that are pro Egypt and others that are pro- Babylon wanting to have uh a Babylonian Alliance or an Egyptian Alliance or go It Alone uh and ultimately um they're not able to U go It Alone by themselves so yoakim died and was succeeded by his 18-year-old son uh jeho chin just as the Babylonians were besieging Jerusalem so he dies probably um during the uh during the war in the fighting uh King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to

(46:40) the city while his servants were besieging it so he comes to Jerusalem himself the king of Babylon King Jo je hoakin of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon himself his mother his servants his officers his Palace officials the king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eth year of his Reign he carried off all the Treasures of the house of the Lord and all the Treasures of the King's house he cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the Lord that Solomon of Israel had made all this as the Lord had foretold

(47:16) he carried away all Jerusalem all the officials all the Warriors 10,000 captives all the Artisans and all the Smiths no one remained except the poorest people of the land he carried away jein to Babylon the King's mother the king's wives his officials the elite of the land he took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon all the men of valor 7,000 The Artisans and the Smiths 1,000 all of them strong and fit for War the King of Babylon made matah jeho Chin's Uncle King in his place and

(47:55) changed his name to zedekiah so now uh Judah becomes a client state of Babylon the Babylonians bring the former King members of the royal family the entire Court members of the army all of The Artisans and leave behind zedekiah as a client King all right so uh let's look at the end here of the um House of uh David as as rulers so Josiah we had all these name changes so I thought we maybe say what the names even mean so Josiah is that last king that the deuteronomist hoped would be uh this great king who has all of these reforms but is uh

(48:47) killed by the Pharaoh Neco so Josiah means Yahweh has healed um when he dies uh jeho ahaz uh whose name means Yahweh has held Reigns but he's immediately deposed by the Pharaoh Pharaoh puts eliakim uh on the throne but changes his name to jeim so that just is changing from a um there's both theophoric names but you're changing from an L name to the the Yahweh version of the name so it means established by God and then established by Yahweh so Pharaoh is probably not not caring about that kind of a name but it's just maybe asserting control

(49:31) and it's also showing there's so many of these um Yahweh names it's showing uh how important um yahwism is for these last kings so uh jeho Kim is probably killed by the Babylonians his son jeho chin is deposed by Nebuchadnezzar and brought away into um Exile in Babylon and then his uncle matah his name is changed to zedekiah so from God's gift to God is my righteousness um he is put on the throne before he's ultimately deposed as we'll see so zedekiah himself after reigning as a client of the Babylonians Rebels

(50:16) against Nebuchadnezzar who responds by once again bringing his army to L sieg to Jerusalem so King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came with all his Army against Jerusalem and laid Siege to it they built sieg Works around against it all around so the city was besieged until the 11th year of King zedekiah so it's a multi-year Siege uh the 11th year of of zedekiah's range they're siing it for the last two two or three years on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine inside the city became so severe that there was no food for the people of the

(50:54) land then a breach was made in the city wall the king with all his soldiers fled By Night by way of the gate between the two Walls by the King's Garden though the Chaldeans so the Babylonians were all around the city uh the king and his army went in the direction of arabah but the army of the Babylonians the Chaldeans pursued the king and overtook him on the plains of Jericho all his army was scattered deserting him then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at ribla who passed sentence on

(51:28) him they slaughtered the sons of zedekiah before his eyes and then they put out the eyes of zedekiah bound him in feds and took him to Babylon as a prisoner so Babylon obviously ultimate completely crushes uh the Rebellion um and and it's not just um bringing him into a a nice Exile he they've actually killed his sons before his eyes and and and blinded uh the LA this last King when that happened then having um having now put down one more Rebellion than he ever wanted to deal with Nebuchadnezzar decides to burn the house

(52:08) of the Lord so he burns the temple he burns the Royal Palace he burns all of the houses of Jerusalem every great house he burned down all of the army of the Chaldeans who were uh with the captain of the Guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem so they burned everything then they also tore down the Walls nebuzaradan the captain of the Guard carried into Exile the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had defected to the king of Babylon all of the rest of the multitude but the captain of the Guard

(52:41) left some of the poorest people of the land to be Vine dressers and tillers of the soil so anybody who's even remotely Elite now they're they're taking and they bring them into Exile in Babylon so Judah is now fully incorporated into the Babylonian Empire it is no longer going to be a client state it is now a province with a governor governor gel Galia is appointed who is not from the davidic royal family uh nevertheless while he is uh reigning or governing a member of the royal family Ishmael son of nethaniah um

(53:20) who's still at large uh forms a conspiracy and he assassinates the governor which then causes everybody to panic and we read that all of the people high and low and the captains of the forces set out and went to Egypt for they were all afraid of the Chaldeans they're all afraid of the Babylonians so the remaining anybody who had been remained in the land uh as part of the elite including the remaining uh army forces of the of the province the judahite Army uh fled now to Egypt and so finally the book of kings and ends uh

(53:58) with the earlier exiled King the first the first group of Exiles jeho chin of Judah um is ultimately released from prison in Babylon and given a place of honor at the Babylonian Court which starts to describe how um the Exiles end up becoming uh corders instead of prisoners so that doesn't happen for zedekiah who was seen as a traitor but uh for uh jein so kind of just brings us back I just thought thought I'd um bring back this uh chronology slide so we can kind of see it again you can see those last Josiah and the last kings Josiah who

(54:40) killed by Pharaoh um the others who were killed or deposed or imprisoned by Nebuchadnezzar as um the Babylonian Empire uh ultimately destroys the kingdom of Judah um meanwhile uh in addition to the king we have active prophets and so both the Prophet Jeremiah and Ezekiel are alive in the time period before the fall of Jerusalem uh and they both now go into Exile uh although they end up in the different uh in the different directions this begins this moment when Judaism so now first temple Judaism is gone and now we have have the beginnings

(55:28) of Judaism as a diaspora religion so the yist religious reforms were still relatively new uh in the Kingdom of Judah um there had been uh reforms as we s see biblically under Hezekiah and Josiah with the idea of centralizing the religion and um and making sure that Yahweh is the only God that is worshiped but but um you know again in the immediate leadup so Josiah's grandfather Manasseh reverses all of that and so the full um uh you know the full Canaanite Pagan worship at Jerusalem was happening also very close

(56:15) to the end so this is still relatively novel this centralization and Yahweh Focus um and it's something that is happening among the elite so the vast um majority of the Common People continued to remain in the land as peasants um the biblical text minimizes it but the proportion of people in a population pyramid in Antiquity or even in the Middle Ages the elite is just the very tip of the pyramid and everybody in terms of the bulk are all agricultural workers and they would have all remained and they just would have had new um new

(56:52) overseers effectively uh that the Babylonians will have brought and appointed uh to to collect um taxes and so forth so those peasants um continued to practice Canaanite folk Pagan practices um and that continued on um and there's there's actually a lot of the lived um religion actually has its change even later so after the Exiles return and specifically um it reaches down to the common people especially in the time period of the Haans the Mapes in response um in part to uh the challenge of helenismo you know the Bible pretty much

(57:38) ignores the common people and uh civilization isn't usually focused or history is not focused on the common people as much as it should be but instead is focusing on the um the people who can write and read and the elite and the bulk now of judah's elite therefore are finding themselves in Exile and they are now part of a diaspora that means they are not living in the land anymore they're living in these Exile communities and so the Exile period then uh begins uh as Exiles flee to Egypt and captives are taken to Babylon so there

(58:16) are these two different communities as the land becomes uh a Babylonian province that is uh where the elite is not there anymore so let's look at the people in Egypt so after uh gelia the governor's assassination like I say the leader of the remaining judahite Army johanan um who was potentially galia's successor as Governor but at a certain point realized that he needed to get out of there before the Babylonians uh came and destroyed everything again so he fled with uh his forces to Egypt um the Prophet Jeremiah uh went with him in Exile into

(59:01) Egypt even though he was prophetically warning against the plan he didn't think that they should be going to Egypt for their Exile but that's where they went um it seems like what happens is that Pharaoh establishes um this these soldiers this military force at a um Outpost in Upper Egypt at the site of the first cataract which is uh where Aswan is where the Aswan dam is the island of elephanttine and so um they create a uh Community for them there it's very normal actually for these um like World Empires when you have um you have let's

(59:51) say what's going to become for you a a mercenary or a um uh a an an ethnic Army Force that is now going to work directly for for you and your Empire you it makes more sense for you to put them on the other side of your Empire than on the side where they are from so you wouldn't want to have this judahite force on the border with Judah because at some point or other they might try to conquer that part of Egypt that is next to Judah and reconnect with um their countrymen that might be back in Judah instead if you

(1:00:28) put them in the other Frontier the frontier now with Kush uh at the deep south of Egypt then they are going to be more loyal to you because they don't have any allies anywhere near there uh and so this is a normal kind of tactic of of world Empires um where when they're at elephanttine um the Jewish Community is able to make a temple of its own um and so there are sacrifices that are port perform there for Yahweh but also for other gods and so this indicates that um for this Exile Community anyway the the monolatry focus

(1:01:08) you know Yahweh only uh wasn't as Central since they obviously are maintaining traditions of of of having additional gods that are part of their religious worship and then also um uh the strict kind of biblical prohibition of having uh of the centralization of having sacrifices take place anywhere other than the Jerusalem Temple here's a temple where they're able to have you know a separate Temple so they have a different religious focus in the Egyptian Exile Community than is occurring in Babylon um Jewish soldiers continued to

(1:01:47) serve in elephanttine even after the Persian conquest of Egypt and maybe even especially then because the um uh Jewish people got along very well with the Persians and so the community might have even been reinforced um nevertheless uh local Egyptians uh when didn't like you know uh foreign ethnic group among them and um and and also were occasionally trying to revolt against Persian overlords and so uh they uh Egyptian priests around the year 410 apparently uh bribed Persian officials to let them destroy the Jewish temple

(1:02:32) and elephanttine uh the Jews from elephanttine then appealed to countrymen all around to help them rebuild it get funds to rebuild their Temple which apparently it was um it didn't necessarily it um we don't know what happens to it over time so how long it lasts it falls out of the historical record however even though we don't have as good a records Egypt continued to house a diaspora Jewish population and when the Persian Empire fell to the uh to Alexander and Alexander's successors the tmes um the Jewish population vastly

(1:03:19) increased as we see and and became centered in the new toic capital of Alexandria which ended up having a very large Exile Jewish population indeed okay let's switch also then to Babylon whereas the Exiles in Egypt were stationed at a frontier as part of the military the Exiles in Babylon including members of the davidic royal family were at the imperial capital Babylon itself where they had opportunities to serve serve as corders as uh State officials as scribes and so this allowed the Jerusalem Court's significant literary

(1:04:07) output all of that activity that had been occurring in that last um fertile years of uh the Juda monarchy under Josiah and his successors that was able to continue in Exile um which is one of the reasons why the Babylonian exile is so much more influential than the early Egyptian Exile which doesn't have texts um one example is that the prophet Ezekiel um did all of his writing in Babylon so or in Babylonia he had been part of the first group of those deportees so before Jerusalem was destroyed 10 years later after zedekiah

(1:04:52) but that whole first group um that went with the first king of Judah to Babylon in 597 and then he wrote all of his prophetic writings after so um like the author of The Priestly voice within the Torah so uh the author that is always talking about all the rules for sacrifice and and all the way that um that priests are supposed to behave all the boring parts of the books of Genesis Exodus Leviticus and numbers that Priestly voice Ezekiel is part of that same kind of high Priestly Community the zadokite lineage

(1:05:37) a clan that claims descent from the semi- legendary high priest of David zadok so their eponymous ancestor is zadok um that group's ideas become especially important for shaping uh the identity of the Exiles so the davidic line continues so jeho chin who um was deposed by Nebuchadnezzar and is the first king that's brought uh to Babylon he becomes the leader of the Exile Community it's a name that uh tradition many many centuries later gives the title exilarch and so by the time we get to the um 2 Century of the

(1:06:30) Common Era and then all through the Middle Ages um there continues to be an exile community based in Persia in Babylon and Persia um and the leader of that Community uh has the title exilar or uh rashago goola the head of the Exile in Hebrew exilarch is the kind of Latin Greco Latin um name for that um H jein has uh his sons with him and one of those uh shtiel um has a child named zerubabel um and probably also shesh Bahar is another son of jein so those two as we've seen shesh Bazar and zerubabel um are the leaders who take

(1:07:22) the Exiles back to Jerusalem when the Persians conquer Bon and they create a Persian province of yehud centered around Jerusalem uh and so both of those are the leaders of the Exiles who return um the fact that je jeho kin's um grandson zerubabel has an Acadian name which means seed of Babylon indicates kind of the speed of the Exiles adoption of Babylonian culture U of course to be able to be part of the Court they're going to have to be able to speak uh the local language and understand the courtly rules and so on they're also um

(1:08:03) being influenced by all of the Babylonian imagery and ideas and everything that was all around them however unlike the earlier Israelite Elite that had been resettled in Assyria so the so-called lost 10 tribes um that group fully assimilated the reason reason why it seems that the judahite elite maintained their distinct identity was at least in part because they had these written works so either um they had written these first drafts they certainly had memory that they had found this book this important book uh in the reign of

(1:08:45) Josiah they brought them with them to Babylon their sources and they reworked them or they were um busily composing new works while they are in Exile in Babylon works that become identity formational and so when the Persian conquest of Babylon happens in 539 this Exile Community was given permission to return to Jerusalem to build the temple but actually just as importantly or probably more importantly um Babylon continued to serve as a capital of now an even greater Empire the Persian Empire and the still extremely large and important

(1:09:29) Jewish diaspora Community there continued to provide corders now for the Persian court and the Persian kings um and so there continues to be um influence there and also the influence that the Persians and Mesopotamian culture continue to exert so um as we go into the Persian period Exiles return to build the second Temple uh and some of the diaspora Jews might have returned too from Egypt but the diaspora continues in Egypt and in Mesopotamia as uh the Jewish people now in the second temple period are part of

(1:10:11) this Persian uh Persian larger Persian World Empire and so I just wanted that brings us back full circle to these charts and so um this is this moment when now uh a religion the first temple Judaism that had been extremely different um has a transformation because one it is experienced by the elite in diaspora so they're no longer in the land they're in Exile and two because uh the focus has come on Tex and identity formational text and stories there's another whole transformation that happens through the second temple period and the destruction

(1:11:01) of the second temple uh leads to still more Transformations um that occur uh in rabic Judaism and modern Christianity as well and so um I think we're going to end there and we'll let Leandro uh tell me what kind of questions you guys have been having and thoughts so first off I want to thank uh JM uh and Matthew rowski and Dave Anderson for all of your support Julie bazooki asks um did the Babylonian captivity begin the transformation of Judaism into a text-based religion without the need for a temple despite the fact that they immediately

(1:11:57) built a second temple upon return um so they are able to operate like you're saying they're able to operate uh during that time period without a Temple and so even though it has remains a core Focus which is why they immediately um go back and do that um they are able to live it for several Generations like you say with without having the having the temple or at least having one in Babylon um the the Egyptian Community does feel like they have a need for it and they have their own one in elephanttine so I think so yes that's one of the focuses

(1:12:34) so the one of the ma two major focuses along with also just simply being in diaspora uh Matthew uh Rakowski says how much did Babylonian law influence uh both Jewish and Islamic law um so I think that there's been um you know a lot of studies on on Mesopotamian law in general and so Babylonian so when we're talking about this Babylonian Empire and actually even this Assyrian Empire that I was talking about today those are often called the Neo Babylonian Empire and the Neo Assyrian Empire which is because there

(1:13:14) are later iterations of earlier um Mesopotamian World Empires that are centered in Assyria and Babylon and you have to go back to the beginning of the the first Babylonian uh Empire to you know have the you know like the ear early great lawgivers and those um those lawgivers are you know important precursors for all of the later Mesopotamian all the later near Eastern law including uh including Jewish law and then Islamic law is very much influenced by um uh Christianity and and and Judaism so it's very much influenced um and also has a

(1:13:59) lot of its own local Traditions that were already existent in in Pagan Arabia before um before the time of Muhammad but um the scriptural components are very much influenced by uh by the Bible uh Jared thank you so much for uh your support Michael L says in what script should this Found book have been written so it would have been written in um well we paleo Hebrew but it's uh which is almost exactly the same as what we think of as Phoenician so Canaanite paleo Hebrew Phoenician this is all essentially the same uh abjad so it is a

(1:14:43) um uh that's not doesn't not a complete alphabet because they don't do the vowels um for for those but it's essentially uh the same thing as The Phoenician and so then this is like one of your points uh one of the points of of how much um how much influence happens so fast so when they come back uh when the Exiles come back and they're part of this world Empire they have stopped using their their own script um the modern Hebrew isn't based on Paleo Hebrew it's based on uh on the Aramaic alphabet or abjad again so again this

(1:15:18) it's a they they stop using the original Hebrew um writing system and adopt uh the right system that had been used by the world Empire um and Recker says can you expand on how the Sam the Israelites the Samaritans thought the Judah ites the Jews who came back from Exile had been corrupted by Zoroastrianism and no longer practice the same Faith well we are going to have a full uh full lecture on the Samaritans and so um so yeah there are the two the two sides um have um a lot of times when you were when you were going into sism when you

(1:16:06) are uh against your what neighbors people who had been really close to you uh you you especially dislike them and so you have um you end up with all kinds of apologetic arguments back and forth and so the the Judah ites have um their apolog etics that they say about the Samaritans and the Samaritans um the Israelites uh from the northern kingdom have the same looking back and so we'll we'll look at how that grew in a lot of detail um next uh the next lecture uh Kelly Higgin says any indication the Found book

(1:16:49) Deuteronomy uh is an apologetic for reforms taken for unpopular reasons um well there is there is definitely um the reforms that happen uh so we can look at what Deuteronomy says we can also look at the reforms that um that second Kings say happens so the reforms that happen include um destroying you know all of these uh shrines preventing people from uh worshiping in Traditional High places in the countryside uh and centralizing everything so that for all the sacrifice that you're able to do uh locally within

(1:17:30) the kingdom has to be brought to the capital and has to be brought to the Jerusalem Temple so it puts for example the local Levites out of business uh the Levites are given then instead just a supporting role for for what the uh the high priests are having the temple priesthood is is able to have and so a lot of that is unpopular so um if you are um an Israelite woman who uh is especially has an especially close uh personal relationship with ashar and now you're no longer able to worship Asher or at least you can't do so um very

(1:18:13) easily at in any kind of uh at the traditional Shrine that you would have would have gone to that could have been a very unpopular um reform there many of those uh practices U might have been very popular with a bunch of people and now um now there's a change that happens so some people are interested in the change and some people like the change but some times there are going to be other people that don't like the change and so I would say yeah some of these are are unpopular and and the the book um the book gives legitimacy to

(1:18:47) making change you often in religion want to have everything have Antiquity and yet reformers are actually imposing new things and so the the advantage of having a book that is supposedly an ancient book is that it gives Antiquity to the new changes that you want to make um Winston Barz says was uh the Torah written in its almost final form during the Babylonian exile so um so we don't know exactly when it is written when all the different pieces are written so the idea is that it isn't exist before the Exile in its present

(1:19:29) form um but that it's um maybe maybe as early as um as Ezra so the time period soon after the rures go back and rebuild the Temple and rebuild Jerusalem that it's taken its final form then in the second temple period in the early Persian period And so maybe that's when the earliest date for it being in in this uh form that we have it comes um let something shine says since ancient um canite Hebrew and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics did not use vowels in their writing system could pharoh Neco be Enoch since it's uh and

(1:20:12) and N ch um I don't think so no so so I don't think that that's where they're getting um I don't think that that's where they're getting uh Enoch and I think that the Reas one of the things we can say about Enoch is that I think that um I think that Enoch might actually be henok so I think that there actually may be a um there might be another letter there or you know that that gets knocked off in English um so so I've never heard that before I don't think so and so so I'll say no so Ricky palasio says um how

(1:20:53) much of the Babylonian capacity uh I'm sorry how did the how much of the how did the Babylonian captivity influence the Book of Daniel so the Book of Daniel is Set uh during the time frame of the Babylonian captivity So Daniel uh is a legendary figure who supposedly lived during the time of Nebuchadnezzar but the Book of Daniel is written many many centuries later um and the author of The Book of Daniel um doesn't really know too much about the actual history of the Babylonian captivity and they are talking about a

(1:21:36) um they're talking about events that are they're concerned about in their own time frame which is the time frame when the seusd uh Kings of Syria are asserting their control over U over Jerusalem and are are desecrating the temple with with uh Greek Greek uh statuary and so on and so um I would say that the the helenistic age is what's influencing The Book of Daniel although the Book of Daniel is set during the time period of the Babylonian captivity uh Christopher musante says are there any influences in Ezekiel and Daniel from

(1:22:18) what they learned in Egypt um so in terms of the um so Ezekiel didn't go to Egypt so Ezekiel it's Jeremiah who ends up in Egypt um and he is talking about it at the end in the end of his book um I'm not sure how much he learns because he's really that's really just the very end um in terms of Ezekiel Ezekiel spending um his whole career in Exile in the uh in Babylon and so he's um thinking about that and learning about it from that direction um as I mentioned the Book of Daniel is uh uh much later book and so it is it's

(1:23:01) understanding a context of the helenistic time period um and so is not as focused on Egypt um but it is focused on this later on this later time period uh Kelly Higgin says in Babylonia were Jewish Scholars comingled with Scholars of other communities in Exile other conquered peoples Elites so the biblical text says yes and so uh when it says that um the exilarch the exiled king um jein when he is uh released from his prison and puts off his prison clothes and and wears clothes of a cord official again or a cordier then he is

(1:23:44) uh able to have dinner with the king of Babylon and also all of the other exiled Kings and so the other um the various exiled uh Elites are coming together to to presumably be part of a broader Court in this great Empire and its great Capital so they're co-mingling um they're all then learning like a Common Language together a lingua franka and some of them may be just directly and fully assimilating others like the um the Juda ites are are maintaining their own identity by by maintaining their own um um identity for AAL uh narrative

(1:24:28) literature K Tempest Bradford asks um why did the Egyptian pharaoh care about theophoric names of the Judean Kings does it have anything to do with why yahm became prominent so so yeah I think that the I think it's a little strange that the way that the the um the B biblical author says that the Egyptian pharaoh changes uh you know puts somebody on the throne and changes his name and same thing that same thing happens when um the Babylonian King puts somebody on his throne and changes his name I think um I think what we're what

(1:25:11) what the biblical author here is illustrating is they're saying that this is a full full a real client King because the the ability to name somebody is the is control over that person so so I don't think that Pharaoh is is coming up with that name so so so rather the this this Prince has more than one name or more than one version of the name and so it's um and so and so I don't think I think that the the point in the story of of the Pharaoh or the um king of Babylon changing the name of the king is simply a literary device that's

(1:25:54) showing that those guys are in charge that these Kings of Jerusalem are not really their own Kings anymore um that now a greater power is in charge of them and I think that you're right about the theophoric name so the idea of changing your name from an L name to a uh to a Yahweh name is probably showing that these last kings have special Devotion to the um to the yahwism uh uh you know cult or yah centralizing yahm worship uh Michael L says was the part of Deuteronomy found by Josiah transliterated to the Aramaic script is

(1:26:37) there any Clear Proof of this I don't think we have any um I don't think we have any biblical texts in um paleo Hebrew um maybe I would have to I don't think I'm wrong about that there might be um uh I think there might be like the The Name Of The Scribe baroo or something like that written on on some kind of a seal that we maybe have in paleo Hebrew but I don't think we have any of the texts in paleo Hebrew so all of our texts the earliest um actual manuscript texts that we have are the Dead Sea Scrolls and so those are all

(1:27:12) written in um in the Aramaic script I don't know that it would uh I don't know that there would be any clear evidence about it because I think it's a similar thing it's just a matter of switching um switching the one characters for the other characters uh Jeremy Brown says do we have any idea when and where the Book of Job may have been written it seems to be answering the question of the problem of evil in response to the failure of the deuteronomic answer uh but it does not seem to have a zor asrian influence with

(1:27:48) its lack of a cosmic devil yeah so Jeremy we have um I've done a whole lecture on job and the interesting thing about job is that it doesn't have any one author it is actually um a book that has been expanded by multiple authors and so as a result it has um it has uh a bunch of different actually it has a bunch of different competing answers to the problem of evil but perhaps the U the earliest part of it and the most challenging part of it does like you say seem to really be um uh tack Ling the failure of the

(1:28:26) deuteronomic answer to the problem of evil um and like you say that part of it lacks a cosmic devil and so it's not answering it with having a cosmic devil and so it doesn't it isn't as late as the as when when zor asianism is more influenced the um uh the second temple period so the later second temple period so I think you're you're exactly right so um there is I don't know off hand the dating for each of the different opponents but there's a whole lecture on um on the Book of Job that we've done um W Consulting says do we have any

(1:29:04) parallel stories of Exile and later return to ancestral land with permission to rebuild a temple in the region um I we don't I don't think we have that as a particular um that exact thing but we do have um um various laws from the Persian Emperors who are allowing to have a tolerance effectively religious tolerance and so um whereas uh earlier World Empires like the Assyrians had really focused on um destroying a foreign God's Temple and just saying our God the god of Assyria is the great God and your God is in is

(1:29:51) defeated and in shame um now now the Persians have as their idea no actually we're going to um you know yes we all are kind of becoming more and more zor asianism zor asrian in our own um Court that's becoming kind of our entral world religion but we are tolerant of all of the um local religions and allow uh everybody to kind of practice their thing and that also went along with the um Persian Administration where U they relied on on you know local large important local Governors sat traps in order to um keep

(1:30:31) the Empire all cohesive and together so it's able to be a much bigger Empire as a result of of some of that um cosmopolitanism and some of that uh tolerance and so it does seem to be in keeping with um what we know about the Persians and it's also a reason why um out of all of these different Empires the uh the um ancient Jewish people get along the best with the Persians and don't get along as well with um some of the other Empires like the the Greeks who want everybody to to henize so all right well in closing don't

(1:31:10) forget to like share the video and subscribe to the channel you know if you're able we always appreciate it if you're able to donate uh to the lectures at Centerplace doca donate um the next lecture is going to be who are the Samaritans then we're going to have a lecture on donatism and then we'll get back to um our lecture on the worst Crusade