RE: Question: How accurate is the information on this graphic?
June 23, 2012 at 11:53 am
(This post was last modified: June 23, 2012 at 11:54 am by Minimalist.)
Once you understand that the David-Solomon united kingdom is nothing but horseshit the reality of Judah is that we have only two periods in the entire first millennium when there was a king with even a modicum of independence. Judah was a poverty-stricken shithole until the Assyrians overran the northern kingdom of Israel, Philistia and Aram-Damascus in the 8th century. Judah was a rather poor vassal state of Assyria however and they benefited immensely from the Arabian trade which the Assyrians set up...as did the equally emergent state of Edom. Under Hezekiah, who is attested in the historical record, Judah became prosperous and Jerusalem grew into a city of perhaps 10,000 people...which is about all the water supply would allow. Hezekiah tried to rebel against Assyria, failed miserably, and lost a great deal of territory as a result. Under Manasseh the country rebounded. When the Assyrians were forced to withdraw from their Western territories whoever was king of Judah may well have had an idea about expanding to the north. This is the first time in the millennium that a Judahite king "might" have had the ability to operate independently even if it was an illusion because the Egyptians were also coveting the same territory. It is this period which Finkelstein hangs his hat on even though the attempt achieved no successes and ended in catastrophe.
From then on Judah was a subject province of Babylon, Persia and first Alexander and then the Ptolemaic and finally Seleucid Greeks.
The Greeks were expelled in the Maccabaean revolt which ended c 140 BC. By the close of the second century BC there actually was a kingdom centered on Jerusalem which had made itself a regional power by overrunning territories to the south and north. In fact, the "empire" of John Hyrcanus comes very close to matching in fact what "David" conquered in fiction. I find this more than coincidental. So the answer to the question is the second century kingdom of the Hasmoneans which dissolved into dynastic squabbling with various powers intervening on behalf of one claimant or another to the throne until Pompey the Great arrived in 64BC to sweep away both the remnants of the Seleucid Empire and the Hasmonean dynasty.
At no other times in the entire first millennium did you have kings who might benefit from having a story told of a great king of Judah in the past.
From then on Judah was a subject province of Babylon, Persia and first Alexander and then the Ptolemaic and finally Seleucid Greeks.
The Greeks were expelled in the Maccabaean revolt which ended c 140 BC. By the close of the second century BC there actually was a kingdom centered on Jerusalem which had made itself a regional power by overrunning territories to the south and north. In fact, the "empire" of John Hyrcanus comes very close to matching in fact what "David" conquered in fiction. I find this more than coincidental. So the answer to the question is the second century kingdom of the Hasmoneans which dissolved into dynastic squabbling with various powers intervening on behalf of one claimant or another to the throne until Pompey the Great arrived in 64BC to sweep away both the remnants of the Seleucid Empire and the Hasmonean dynasty.
At no other times in the entire first millennium did you have kings who might benefit from having a story told of a great king of Judah in the past.
