That this backdrop stands as a lesson for the Judahites is underscored by
the two tales’ outcomes. While the Assyrian campaign resulted in deportation,
this one was mysteriously aborted after the dramatic showdown outside Jer-
usalem ( 2 Kings 18 : 13 – 37 , 19 : 1 – 37 ). The biblical authors describe the righteous
Judahites as the direct opposite of their wicked Israelite counterparts. Despite
his foolish and near-disastrous misreading of world political conditions, the
Judahite king Hezekiah (r. 727 – 698 ) does everything right. He listens to
Isaiah, God’s prophet, and the people of Judah all repent and live to see, only
two decades after the punishment of their northern brothers, the “angel of
God” strike all Assyrian soldiers dead within one night. The Judahites are
saved, for the time being at least, and will not go into exile.^73 The Israelites,
on the other hand, failed to heed all warnings and are now gone.
The biblical depiction of the deportations as punishment and exile was
further reinforced by the prophecies of the northern prophets Amos and Hosea
and the southern prophet Isaiah, whose oracles postdate the fall of Israel and
predate the fall of Judah.^74 These prophecies, which claim to have originated in
times before the actual events took place (thus rendering them “prophetic”),
commonly speak of exile as the ultimate and inevitable fate of the Israelites.
Hosea (c. 760 – 720 ), who likened Israel to a whore, delivered his warnings to
the Israelites during the reign of Jeroboam II, repeatedly urging them to repent
and predicting, “They will not dwell in the Lord’s land, Ephraim will go back to
Egypt, or eat unclean food in Assyria” (Hosea 9 : 3 , 11 : 5 ). Amos, a contemporary
of Hosea from Judah who also prophesied in the northern kingdom, made
several predictions relating to the Assyrian deportations: “Jeroboam will die by
the sword, and the Israelites will assuredly be deported from their native land”
(Amos 7 : 11 , 17 ).
Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos illustrate how the lens of divine punishment
transformed the deportations of the Israelites into the exile of an entire
people. They were the first to put their oracles in writing; as such, they
were hugely influential in turning the exile of Israel into a historical para-
digm.^75 They elaborated the notion of exile as it appears in 2 Kings and
transformed the kernel of actual history, the patchy narrative of deportations,
into an invented Israelite history of sin and all-encompassing divine punish-
ment. The mundane history of several small-scale Assyrian deportations
was transformed into a large-scale forced migration enacted by Isaiah’s “Rod
of God.” So it is that, while Assyrian kings deported some Israelites for
military and political purposes, the Judahite authors of the biblical narrative
“exiled” the entire Israelite kingdom for their own theological and ideological
reasons.
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