in the regional power games between Egypt and the declining Assyria, and the
disappearance of a powerful neighbor to its north, the kingdom of Israel.^63
Judah went on to develop its own hopes and dreams of greatness and
expansion. Most involved trying to capture territories that had once belonged to
its northern neighbor and consolidating the rule of the house of David in the
kingdom’s old as well as new domains. Attempts to consolidate the rule of a
national religion around the cult of the Yahweh divinity accompanied these
political efforts. The culmination of this centuries-long transformation came
under the reign of King Josiah (r. 639 – 609 ), during which Judah expanded
northward, annexing territories that had belonged to the now-defunct kingdom
of Israel, former home of the ten tribes. Josiah, a charismatic and active leader
most probably moved by messianic motivations, presided over the “great
reformation”—the triumph of the Deuteronomistic movement, which insisted
on the cult of one god in the temple in Jerusalem and was violently opposed to
other cults or locations of worship. The event that marks the beginning of this
reformation, in 2 Kings, was the discovery in the temple in Jerusalem of a lost
book, Deuteronomy, which would be the blueprint for the emerging faith.^64
These developments brought a further locative dimension to the Israelite world
view; alongside the distant world boundaries marked out first by Assyrian
propaganda came a very rigid sense of Jerusalem as the definitive center, the
ultimate place to which one was to (re)turn.
In the end, however, Judah’s ambitions were brutally crushed, twice.
The Egyptian pharaoh Necho II (r. 610 – 595 ) killed King Josiah in Megiddo
in 609.^65 Following Josiah’s untimely and traumatic death, Judah was
ruled by a series of mostly incompetent kings until its destruction by the
Babylonians in 586 bce; this destruction was followed by a deportation.
But the decades before these calamities saw the Judahite production of the
blueprint for an Israelite national history, one that included the story of two
kingdoms and their fates. Significant portions of the story were written during
this period.^66
Here, we at last draw closer to the ten tribes themselves. The exile and
salvation of the Judahites provided an important referent, alongside Assyrian
propaganda, for the later reframing of the story in the biblical narrative. With
the 589 arrival of a new imperial power, the Babylonians, the Judahite elite
found itself, like the ten tribes in the north before them, sent into exile. In the
Babylonian case, though, the destination was known: Babylon itself. The
Babylonians, who succeeded the Assyrians as the major power in Mesopota-
mia, had crushed the Egyptians earlier and come to dominate the entire region.
Once Judah was left with no major power behind it, it was doomed. In 597 bce,
Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, laid siege to Jerusalem, captured its king,
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