Jehoiachin (Jeconiah), and took him back to Babylon. The last blow came in
586. The Babylonian armies came to Jerusalem, sacked it, burned the temple,
and exiled the Judahite elite to Babylon as captives. Miraculously, the exiled got
to witness a speedy return to Judah: within a matter of decades, they were
allowed to return, and the temple was restored. As the book of Ezra tells us, the
Babylonian exile ended when a new imperial power, the Persians, defeated the
Babylonians and allowed the exiles to return to their land and rebuild the
temple, which they did in 518 bce.^67
Over this period, the Deuteronomistic history, the Bible’s major historical
narrative, was written. The history of one kingdom split in two (Judah and
Israel) and next the disappearance of its northern half, Israel, became the
larger context into which all biblically recorded events and subsequent inter-
pretations are placed. The project of writing the history of Israel did not end
with the destruction of Jerusalem, of course. It continued in the diaspora,
intensifying when some of the Judahite deportees returned to Judah and
rebuilt a new polity there. In these contexts of exile and repatriation, the story’s
basic contours were brought into further relief.
With the biblical transformation of historic events into theologically sig-
nificant ones, “local histories” were transformed into expressions of “universal
values,” and “trivial events” underwent “significant re-elaboration,” to borrow
Mario Liverani’s useful terminology.^68 The seeds of the story’s main elements,
namely, the exile of the tribes as a divine punishment, their loss, and their
promised return, were written into theur-text of the ten lost tribes in the period
before Judah’s destruction by the Babylonians. The final loss of the tribes
occurred when the Judahite deportees returned to Judah and the Israelites
did not.
The mainstream approach to the book of Kings holds that it began taking
shape during the last decades of the first kingdom of Judah, most probably
during the days of Josiah’s reform. Among twentieth- and twenty-first-century
scholars of the biblical period are many who suggest that this history was
invented to serve the ideological and political programs of Judah under Josiah
and to question the historicity of the Davidic united kingdom. By this view, the
Judahites’ plans to expand and take over the northern territories after the
Assyrian retreat, and the consolidation and centralization of the one-god cult
under their rule, were the real motives underlying the historiographic proj-
ect.^69 This proposition (along with many others questioning the historicity of
an array of biblical stories) is the subject of intense controversy.^70 But what is
crucial is the fact that the biblical narrative of the ten tribes and their fate was
taken as historical fact right up until the modern period. While elements of the
story have been established as accurate—the Assyrian practice of deportation,
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