The Cities That Built the Bible

by Dr. Robert Cargill

  ASSYRIA AND JUDAH

  After the fall of Samaria and the Northern Kingdom, Jerusalem feared it would be next. To prevent just that, King Ḥizqiyah (Ḥezekiah) of Judah, according to 2 Kings 18:13–16, did exactly what King ’Asa’ of Judah had done: he looted the Temple and paid off King Sennacherib of Assyria with three hundred talents of silver (“all the silver that was found in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the king’s house”) and thirty talents of gold (“stripped . . . from the doors of the temple of the LORD”).

  Unfortunately, bribing the Assyrian king only worked for a while. Whether it was because Judah could no longer afford the heavy tribute payments, or because Ḥezekiah saw his kingdom expand to such an extent that he felt he might actually have a chance against Assyria, Ḥezekiah rebelled against Assyria. The Bible credits him with instituting a series of religious reforms (2 Kings 18:1–5) that refocused the worship of the people only upon YHWH and only in Jerusalem.

  Of course when Assyria learned that Judah was in rebellion, it saw fit to campaign once again into Cana‘an and this time to teach the king of Judah a lesson. It was this contest between King Ḥezekiah of Judah and the Assyrian army that began the snowballing legend of Jerusalem as the inviolable city of God.

  Second Kings 18–20 and its nearly word-for-word parallel in Isaiah 36–39 tell of Jerusalem’s miraculous survival of the Assyrian siege, which includes the famed encounter between Ḥezekiah’s ministers (Yo’aḥ, Shebna’, and ’Elyaqim) and the Rab Shaqeh, the Assyrian vizier and royal messenger of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. The scene always reminds me of the classic “French taunting scene” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table attempt to convince a French castle minister to open the gates and let them in, only in reverse.13 In the same way that that scene generated a classic final insult, so too does the Assyrian Rab Shaqeh loft an insult at Ḥezekiah’s ministers (which the eleventh-century CE Masoretic redactors of the Hebrew Bible attempted to paper over).

  Ḥezekiah’s ministers make an almost comical request of the Rab Shaqeh: “Please speak to your servants in the Aramaic language, for we understand it; do not speak to us in the language of Judah [i.e., Hebrew] within the hearing of the people who are on the wall” (2 Kings 18:26), as they were becoming frightened. The Rab Shaqeh taunts back the following insult: “Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the people sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine?” (18:27).14 Ḥezekiah’s ministers essentially scream at the Assyrian negotiators, “Please don’t speak in Hebrew, because you’re scaring our people. Speak in Aramaic so only we can understand you,” forgetting that the whole purpose of the Assyrians’ siege negotiation is to scare the living dung and urine out of the people inside the city.

  The remainder of 2 Kings 18–20 records the siege of Jerusalem and the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem from the hands of the Assyrian army. It was an episode so important that the Bible’s editors didn’t mind recording it twice—in 2 Kings and Isaiah 36–39. But the story of this failed siege isn’t just detailed twice in the Bible; it also appears in the Assyrian chronicles, which corroborates both this siege and Jerusalem’s survival.

  SENNACHERIB’S PRISMS

  Sennacherib’s royal annals preserve his deeds in cuneiform on multiple hexagonal prisms. Toward the end of the records, the prisms record a campaign of Sennacherib into Cana‘an and address King Ḥezekiah specifically:

  As to Hezekiah, the Jew, he did not submit to my yoke. . . . Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. . . . I reduced his country, but I still increased the tribute and the katrû-presents (due) to me (as his) overlord which I imposed (later) upon him beyond the former tribute, to be delivered annually. Hezekiah himself . . . did send me, later, to Nineveh, my lordly city, together with 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, precious stones, antimony, large cuts of red stone, couches (inlaid) with ivory, nîmedu-chairs (inlaid) with ivory, elephant-hides, ebony-wood, boxwood (and) all kinds of valuable treasures, his (own) daughters, concubines, male and female musicians. In order to deliver the tribute and to do obeisance as a slave he sent his (personal) messenger.15

  Note that Sennacherib’s summary is vastly different from the account in 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37, which state that Ḥezekiah’s prayer to YHWH resulted in God’s striking down 185,000 Assyrian troops besieging Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35; Isa. 37:36). The account preserved on the Sennacherib Prisms much more resembles the accounts of payment of tribute to an overlord for the purposes of making him go away peacefully like those we regularly find in the Bible.16 Sennacherib states that he besieged Jerusalem and only departed without destroying the city after Ḥezekiah paid him off precisely as 2 Kings 18:13–16 says he did.

  Thus, the Sennacherib Prisms confirm two claims made in the Bible: Assyria did, in fact, besiege Jerusalem, and Jerusalem survived! Sennacherib never says he “laid waste” to Jerusalem and never says he killed Ḥezekiah. Rather, Sennacherib says he made Ḥezekiah a prisoner in Jerusalem, “like a bird in a cage.” That is language of a siege, not of destruction.

  Sennacherib’s hexagonal prism, from Nineveh, Assyria, dates to 691 BCE and contains cuneiform writing that mentions Ḥezekiah, King of Judah, and the Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem. Image courtesy Israel Museum.

  So not only were four chapters in Isaiah (36–39) and three parallel chapters in 2 Kings (18– 20) dedicated to the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, but it was Jerusalem’s survival against the seemingly invincible Assyrian menace that propelled it into its lofty status as an impregnable city under the constant protection of God—the kind of protection that Jeremiah later mocked as overconfident when he warned the residents not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD’” (7:4).

  Jerusalem’s survival against the superior Assyrian army (however it came about) was credited to YHWH and held up as evidence of Judah’s righteousness, its people’s “chosenness,” and Jerusalem’s inviolability, especially in the face of the Assyrian conquest of Samaria and the defeat of the “rebellious” Northern Kingdom, Israel. Jerusalem’s escape from the Assyrian siege helped produce other legends about Jerusalem, which in turn inspired the biblical texts praising Jerusalem as God’s sole dwelling place. Many of these texts are found among the biblical prophets who address Nineveh and Jerusalem’s response to it, and it is these prophetic texts to which we turn next.

  NINEVEH AND THE PROPHETS: JONAH, ZEPHANIAH, AND NAḤUM

  JONAH

  The Assyrians were so feared and hated that they warranted condemnations by multiple prophets, including Zephaniah and Naḥum (the entire book). Nineveh is also known from the story of Jonah and the Great Fish that takes up the first two of four chapters of the book of Jonah.17 Many scholars treat Jonah differently from the other prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, and not simply because it is the only prophetic book that is about a prophet instead of a record of the words of a prophet. In fact, only one line of prophecy is recorded in Jonah, and that is in 3:4, where the text says: “And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’”

  That’s it. One line. As far as we know, that is the sum of God’s “message that I tell you” mentioned in 3:2. Remember that in 1:2 Jonah was instructed, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” It is interesting that Jonah is never recorded as having preached a message of repentance, only that God has noticed their wickedness and is about to destroy the city.

  And yet, after Jonah is punished by God for his disobedience by suffering through a storm and having to spend three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, Jonah finally does God’s bidding and preaches to the Ninevites. And of course, the Ninevites do exactly what Jonah was afraid they’d do: they repented, which is precisely wh
y Jonah didn’t want to go and prophesy against Nineveh in the first place.

  Most scholars view the story of Jonah as a critique—some even say a satire—aimed at the Jews, and specifically the Jewish concept of “chosenness.” In this canonical book, Jonah represents an overconfident Jew (depicted as an Israelite in this case) who feels that God has made only Israel his “chosen people” and must destroy Israel’s oppressive enemies, like the Assyrians of Nineveh.

  God thinks otherwise. God makes abundantly clear in the book of Jonah that God is God, and he’ll save whomever he wants. So hateful was Jonah when God spared Nineveh (3:10) that 4:1 says, “This was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.” God then goes on to have a little fun with Jonah, creating a bush (possibly a castor oil plant) to provide shade for him, and then sending a worm to eat the bush, which made Jonah even angrier. When Jonah became so faint from the sun that he asked to die, God replied:

  “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (4:9–11)

  Thus, many think the story of Jonah is about obedience and a great fish, but it is actually about God’s sovereignty and his right to save whomever he wants to save. In this case, God chose to save Nineveh—an event that Jesus would praise centuries later. Jesus praised Nineveh for its immediate repentance upon hearing the words of the prophet Jonah. In fact, Jesus is so frustrated with “the evil and adulterous generation” around him that he states: “The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah” (Matt. 12:41; cf. Luke 11:32). The implication is that the Ninevites were wise enough to respond to Jonah, yet the people of Jesus’s generation do not recognize him as sent from God.

  Thus, as he did in the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus once again holds up a traditional archnemesis of the Jews to highlight just how evil he believes those who do not accept him really are. In the same way that a Samaritan—a remnant of the kingdom of Israel destroyed by Nineveh—was the hero of Jesus’s parable about what a true neighbor looks like, Jesus also highlights those who destroyed Israel and Samaria to argue that even they knew to recognize God and repent.

  But not every reference to Nineveh was in praise of its repentance. In fact, the Bible mostly views Nineveh as the epitome of savagery and wickedness and an instrument that God uses to punish his own people. And no prophets condemn Nineveh any more harshly than Zephaniah and Naḥum.

  ZEPHANIAH

  The prophet Ṣefanyah (Zephaniah), who is claimed to have prophesied during the days of King Yo’shiyahu (Josiah) of Judah (r. 641–610 BCE), also discusses the city of Nineveh as a symbol of power. The purpose of Zephaniah’s prophecy was to convince his readers to stop worshipping deities other than YHWH, namely, Ba‘al, Milcom (Molek), and the “heavenly host” (cf. Zeph. 1:4– 5), which is understood to be either other Cana‘anite deities or YHWH’s heavenly army.18 As a deterrent, Zephaniah warns the Judahites that what happened to the Northern Kingdom of Israel will also happen to them if they do not repent. But Zephaniah also prophesies the downfall of Nineveh:

  And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert. Herds shall lie down in it, every wild animal; the desert owl and the screech owl shall lodge on its capitals; the owl shall hoot at the window, the raven croak on the threshold; for its cedar work will be laid bare. Is this the exultant city that lived secure, that said to itself, ‘I am, and there is no one else’? What a desolation it has become, a lair for wild animals! Everyone who passes by it hisses and shakes the fist. (2:13–15)

  Although Zephaniah has some harsh words for Nineveh—no one wants an owl hooting in the window of their now-deserted home—the words of the prophet Naḥum are considered some of the most damning in the Bible.

  NAḤUM

  One of the shorter books of the Bible is the text of the prophet Naḥum, whose name in Hebrew derives from the word “to comfort.” Naḥum is a mere forty-seven total verses, yet it provides one of the most condemnatory indictments of Nineveh in the Bible.

  The opening verse declares the prophecy’s intent: “An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Naḥum of ’Elqosh.”19 And following a majestic exordium trumpeting the power of YHWH, Naḥum lets it rip:

  It is decreed that the city be exiled, its slave women led away, moaning like doves and beating their breasts. Nineveh is like a pool whose waters run away. ‘Halt! Halt!’—but no one turns back. ‘Plunder the silver, plunder the gold! There is no end of treasure! An abundance of every precious thing!’ Devastation, desolation, and destruction! Hearts faint and knees tremble, all loins quake, all faces grow pale! (2:7–10)

  Naḥum 3:1–7 gets even more graphic:

  Ah! City of bloodshed, utterly deceitful . . . Because of the countless debaucheries of the prostitute, gracefully alluring, mistress of sorcery, who enslaves nations through her debaucheries, and peoples through her sorcery, I am against you, says the LORD of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a spectacle. Then all who see you will shrink from you and say, ‘Nineveh is devastated; who will bemoan her?’ Where shall I seek comforters for you?

  Naḥum essentially says that since Nineveh has lured nations to itself with its power like a prostitute lures men with her seduction, in the same way God will “lift up [Nineveh’s] skirts over [its] face” and will “let nations look on [its] nakedness and kingdoms on [its] shame”—a clear reference to the sexual assault and domination that usually befell the women of conquered cities in antiquity. Although many modern readers may rightfully feel uncomfortable with God’s using the language of rape and sexual domination as a God-ordained, God-endorsed, or God-empowered punishment for anyone, neither Naḥum nor the editors of the Bible had any problem with it. Such was Naḥum’s hatred (on behalf of God) of Nineveh.

  Naḥum prophesied about Nineveh’s downfall in the same manner that Assyria conquered: brutally and savagely. In the end, the Hebrew prophets vindictively called for God to punish Nineveh and all of Assyria in the same way that they punished ancient Israel and Judah.

  THE FALL OF NINEVEH AND ITS IMPACT ON THE BIBLE

  The great city of Nineveh eventually fell after the death of King Ashurbanipal in 627 BCE. Ashurbanipal’s death marks the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which will make its own contributions to the Bible, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter.

  Nineveh came to symbolize Assyrian dominance over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Nineveh was therefore representative of ancient Assyria and contributed both to the content of the Bible and its overarching theological perspective, as it allowed the Bible’s Second Temple–period editors to claim that obedience to God (as in the case of Ḥezekiah and Jerusalem), even in the face of overwhelming odds, is always superior to rebellion against him (as in the case of Jeroboam and the Northern Kingdom), which leads to destruction. It furthermore allowed for the elevation of Jerusalem as the inviolable city of God, as it was able to survive the Assyrian onslaught when Samaria and Israel could not. Later, it was this sense of inviolability that garnered chastisement from the prophet Jeremiah (7:4) and it was Israel’s sense of chosenness that was critiqued in the last half of the book of Jonah. Likewise, it was Nineveh’s ability to recognize the coming judgment of the Lord and repent of its wrongdoing in the book of Jonah that Jesus highlighted while contrasting the behavior of Jews of his time who did not recognize him as the Me
ssiah. For these reasons, Nineveh was a city that greatly influenced the Bible we have today.

  CHAPTER 4

  Babylon

  My young son, MacLaren, once asked me where Babylonians come from. I answered him the way I answer a similar awkward question he asks: “Well, when a Daddylonian and a Mommylonian really love each other . . .”

  Babylon played an important role in the formation of the Bible. Babylon’s ziggurats influenced the story of the Tower of Babel, King Hammurabi’s law code served as a template for the biblical law codes, and the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem followed by the exile to Babylon fundamentally altered the theology of ancient Israel and provided the basis for numerous prophetic books like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the book of Lamentations. Many scholars also argue that much of the Hebrew Bible was composed (written down) or at the very least redacted (collected, arranged, corrected, altered, and generally edited) during the exile in Babylon. Thus, Babylon can be said to have been the city where what Jews today call the Hebrew Bible and what Christians call the Old Testament began to take its written shape.