Lecture 7

We began by discussing Hezekiah and the Golden Age.  It has been said that Hezekiah was preparing for the Assyrian invasion because he knew that he was going to rebel against Sennacherib and Assyria.  After the division of Judah and Israel, they would fight each other with the help of friends.  Israel would get help from a small kingdom, and then Judah would get help from Egypt.  To fight back, Israel would get help from Assyria and then get tired of paying back their debt.  This cycle kept going until the bigger nations decided to fight to get their money.

Later we talked about how the Government and writing became more prevalent in the cities.  Of these two, writing became a very powerful force.  We would see this in Assyria taking the aramaic language, and we also see it in their religions.  The stories and the myths were kept around because they were written, and withstood the test of time.

Next we discussed what it meant to be a messiah.  Literally, a messiah is someone who rubbed oil on their head.  This is a marker for someone of the royal lineage.  The anointment of the king has a role in the definition of a messiah.  We see the description of a messiah in Isaiah 7,9 and 11 where Hezekiah is referenced as the new messiah to maintain David's dividic lineage.

But, after the death of the dividic line, people had to find a way to explain God's promise to David in that someone of his dividic lineage would always rule Jerusalem.  It can be said that after the fall of the lineage, the rest of the bible is an attempt to keep god's words true.

We see in Isaiah 36-39 the major story that permits Jerusalem to have the hand of god protecting it.  This is the story of when the Assyrians were going to siege the city and take down Hezekiah's reign.  Due to particular reasons, however, Sennacherib and his men did not keep fighting.  The bible writes this as a win for Jerusalem, saying that god had helped them to fight back.  On Sennacherib's prism though, it is written that he had them cornered but due to internal reasons the Assyrians had to fall back.  The failure of the Assyrian's attack on Jerusalem sparked the development of the Zion theology that Jerusalem is the place where god resides and protects.  Jeremiah argued that due to this "protection" that god is giving the city, the people think they are free to do whatever they want.  Because of this the poor and weak do not do well.  After Hezekiah's "victory" he went on a religious reform by abolishing all other areas of worship so that the hebrew god is worshiped only in one area.

Josiah's Jerusalem is somewhat similar in that he has centralized religious reform.  After King Hezekiah was King Manasseh, who undid all the reform that Hezekiah did.  Josiah, after his "good" rule according to the bible, died at the Megiddo at the hands of Pharaoh Neco.  His religious reform came a lot from literature and books.  There are 2 trains of thought regarding how Josiah ruled: 1) a scroll detailing how to rule, or 2) the people fabricated that they found a scroll that gave them these rules.

From this we could see that literature was becoming a big deal around the city.  Even more so would be literacy.  In the Lachish letter 3 there is a soldiering exclaiming that he knows how to write, and that it shouldn't be assumed that he didn't.