(March 8, 2014 at 3:39 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: The Jews never had an independent kingdom. They were always under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, or Romans thumbs.
Incorrect.
Judah, which had prospered under the Assyrian economic sphere, had a brief flirtation with independence c 610 BC as the Assyrians were forced to withdraw in the west due to the pressure of the Babylonian revolt. The Egyptian pharaoh, Necho II, advancing to the aid of his Assyrian allies put an end to that and until the Babylonians came rolling through Judah seems to have been a puppet between the two sides with various factions trying to claim the throne in the name of one side or the other. The Babylonians won and Jerusalem was sacked and burned.
As you say for the next few centuries the land - which reverted to the status of an underpopulated shithole that it had been prior to the Assyrian economic miracle - was held in a dizzying array by the Babylonians, Persians, Alexander's Greeks, Ptolemy's Greeks and Seleuchus' Greeks.
In 190 BC the Seleucid Empire was crushed by the Romans at Magnesia. This set off a chain of rebellions against Seleucid authority and when Antiochus IV was killed fighting the Parthians a revolt broke out in Judea (as it was by then known ) which even assuming that the Maccabee tale is a pile of shit does seem to have been successful. From c 140 BC to 63 BC a largely independent Jewish kingdom did exist and became something of a regional power by 100 when it overran Itrurea, Idumea, and Galilee.
Shortly thereafter the kingdom dissolved in dynastic squabbling/civil war which continued until Gnaeus Pompey, exceeding his orders but the Senate didn't care, came along and swept the entire region up for Rome.
It is to this very period, c 100 BC, when the whole notion of a powerful Davidic kingdom makes the most sense in a politically. The OT is less about some fucking god and more about the ruling pretensions of the nobility.
