The Prophets, Josiah's Reform and the Worship of Yahweh Alone

The prophets and Josiah’s reform in one paragraph

In the second half of the eighth century BCE a handful of prophets in Israel and Judah began to say things that were remembered, collected and eventually written down: that Yahweh was angry with his own people, that sacrifice without justice was worthless, and that Israel must have nothing to do with Baal and the other gods. Within a few decades Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom and devastated Judah, and the prophets’ warnings looked like fulfilled predictions. In Jerusalem, a movement of priests, scribes and officials turned the prophetic demand into law. Its programme, preserved in the book of Deuteronomy, was put into force by King Josiah in 622 BCE: Yahweh alone was to be worshipped, at one place only, in one way, and according to a written book. This is not yet monotheism. The prophets and Deuteronomy argue about which god Israel should worship, not whether other gods exist. Majority

The story told in the books of Kings presents this as a return to an original faith from which Israel had strayed. Historians mostly read it the other way round: as the moment when a minority position, the worship of Yahweh alone, gained royal backing and began to define what Israel’s religion should be. Both readings agree on the main events. They disagree about whether the “Yahweh-alone” demand was new or old. Majority

Timeline of the prophets and the reforms, with the evidence

Royal dates follow the most widely used chronology; individual dates can vary by a year or two between systems.

Prophets before the prophetic books

Prophets were not an Israelite invention. Across the ancient Near East, kings and temples consulted people who claimed to speak for a god. Letters from Mari on the Euphrates, in the eighteenth century BCE, report messages from prophets and prophetesses of several gods to the king. Oracles to the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE, many from prophetesses of Ishtar of Arbela, were copied onto tablets and kept in the royal archives.^[24] Consensus

The closest parallel to the Bible comes from Deir ʿAlla in the Jordan Valley. In 1967 a Dutch expedition led by Henk Franken found fragments of an inscription written in ink on a plastered wall, from about 800 BCE. Its heading names “Balaam son of Beor”, a man who was “a seer of the gods”. The gods come to Balaam at night, he weeps, and he tells his people of a vision of disaster decreed by a council of gods called the šaddayin.^[1]​^[25] The same Balaam is the foreign seer of Numbers 22–24, who is hired to curse Israel and blesses it instead. Consensus

The Bible’s own earlier prophets fit this pattern. Samuel, Nathan, Elijah and Elisha appear in stories, not in collections of their words. They advise and oppose kings, work wonders and belong to groups of “sons of the prophets”. The books of Kings also mention hundreds of prophets of Baal and Asherah (1 Kings 18:19) and four hundred prophets of Yahweh who tell King Ahab what he wants to hear (1 Kings 22).^[26] Prophecy was a profession, and most prophets supported their kings. Majority

What changed in the eighth century was not prophecy itself but the survival of a particular kind of prophecy: words that opposed the king and the people, and that were kept because events seemed to prove them right. Majority

The eighth-century prophets

Amos: justice before sacrifice

Amos, according to his book (1:1; 7:14), was a herdsman and tender of sycamore figs from Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, who went north to prophesy at Bethel in the reign of Jeroboam II (c. 790–750 BCE), “two years before the earthquake”. The northern kingdom was prosperous, and Amos attacked its prosperity: the rich “lie on beds of ivory”, “sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals”, and crowd the sanctuaries with offerings.^[27]​^[2] Majority

His central claim was new in its sharpness: Yahweh does not want sacrifice from people who practise injustice. “I hate, I despise your festivals … let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos also turns the idea of a chosen people against itself: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2). And he denies Israel any special status: Yahweh brought the Philistines and Aramaeans from their homelands just as he brought Israel out of Egypt (9:7).^[28] Majority on the core sayings.

Amos does not denounce other gods by name in the oracles most scholars attribute to him. His god is already the god of other nations, judging them for their crimes (Amos 1–2), but the issue is justice, not exclusive worship. Majority

Hosea: Yahweh’s jealous marriage

Hosea, a northerner active in the last decades of the kingdom of Israel, introduced the image that defined the Yahweh-alone movement: Israel as Yahweh’s unfaithful wife, who runs after “lovers”, the Baals, and credits them with the grain, wine and oil that Yahweh gave her (Hosea 2). He attacks the calf of Samaria (“a workman made it; it is not God”, 8:6) and the sacrifices on hilltops “under oak, poplar and terebinth” (4:13).^[29] Majority

Hosea gives the clearest early statement of exclusive worship: “I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt; you know no god but me, and besides me there is no saviour” (13:4).^[3] This is monolatry. Other gods are real enough to be lovers; Israel simply may not have them. Hosea also connects Yahweh exclusively with the Exodus and the wilderness, which suggests that the Exodus tradition was a northern possession before it became all Israel’s.^[30] Majority

Isaiah of Jerusalem: the Holy One of Israel

Isaiah son of Amoz worked in Jerusalem from about 740 to 700 BCE, under Ahaz and Hezekiah. Only part of the book that carries his name is his: most scholars attribute much of chapters 1–39 to him, chapters 40–55 to an anonymous prophet of the exile (§4), and chapters 56–66 to the Persian period (§5).^[31] Consensus on the division.

In his call vision (Isaiah 6) Yahweh sits enthroned in the Temple, surrounded by seraphim who call, “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”^[4] Isaiah’s god is the king of Jerusalem’s Temple and master of the nations. Assyria is “the rod of my anger” (10:5), a tool Yahweh uses and will then break. Isaiah also gave Jerusalem its royal hope: a child of the house of David who will rule with justice (Isaiah 9 and 11). These passages became central to later messianic expectation, but in their setting they describe an ideal king of Judah, not an end-time saviour (§6).^[31] Majority

Micah: Zion ploughed like a field

Micah of Moresheth, a town in the Judahite lowlands, attacked Jerusalem’s rulers, priests and prophets for corruption, and predicted the unthinkable: “Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins” (3:12).^[32] A century later, when Jeremiah was put on trial for predicting the Temple’s destruction, elders defended him by quoting Micah’s words and naming Hezekiah’s reign as their date (Jeremiah 26:18).^[33] It is the only place in the Bible where one prophet’s words are quoted by name as precedent, and it shows that a collection of Micah’s sayings was known in Jerusalem around 600 BCE. Majority

What the eighth-century prophets did not say

They did not say that no other god exists. They did not demand a single sanctuary; Isaiah’s vision takes place in the Jerusalem Temple, but neither Amos nor Hosea objects to sacrifice as such, only to sacrifice offered by the unjust or to the wrong gods. They did not appeal to a written law of Moses as such. Hosea once mentions Yahweh writing “my many laws” (8:12), but none of them quotes a law code. Majority

Assyria and the end of the northern kingdom

From the 740s BCE, the Assyrian empire under Tiglath-pileser III turned the states of the Levant into vassals and then provinces. Israel rebelled, and in 722–720 BCE Samaria fell. The Bible attributes the siege to Shalmaneser V; Sargon II claimed the conquest in his own inscriptions and boasted of deporting 27,280 people and resettling the region with foreigners.^[6]​^[34] The most likely reconstruction is that Shalmaneser took the city shortly before his death and that Sargon reconquered it after a revolt.^[35] Majority

For the history of religion, the fall of Samaria mattered in three ways. Majority

• It seemed to vindicate Amos and Hosea. Their words had predicted disaster for Israel; the disaster came. That is one reason their sayings were preserved.
• Northern traditions moved south. Refugees, scribes and priests from Israel brought to Judah traditions such as the Exodus, the Jacob stories, Hosea’s oracles and probably early forms of Deuteronomic law. Much of the Bible’s northern material was preserved by Judahite editors.^[36]​^[37]
• Judah became “Israel”. After 720 BCE the only surviving kingdom of Yahweh’s people was Judah, and its writers took over the name Israel for themselves.

Jerusalem’s sudden growth

Archaeology shows Jerusalem growing in the late eighth century from a small hilltop town on the City of David ridge to a city that also covered the Western Hill. Nahman Avigad uncovered part of a seven-metre-thick fortification, the “Broad Wall”, in the Jewish Quarter in the 1970s. Magen Broshi argued in 1974 that the city grew three- or fourfold in a few decades, and that two waves of refugees explained the growth: Israelites fleeing the fall of Samaria, then Judahites fleeing Sennacherib’s devastation of the lowlands in 701; Finkelstein and Silberman developed the theory.^[9]​^[7]​^[38] Consensus on the growth.

Nadav Naʾaman disputed the northern-refugee explanation. He argued that the growth was more gradual, began before 720, and was fed by people from Judah’s own countryside, especially after Sennacherib’s campaign of 701 devastated the lowlands; in 2014 he added that northern personal names do not increase in Judah after 720.^[8]​^[39] Finkelstein replied in 2015 that the demographic evidence still required substantial migration from the north.^[40] A radiocarbon study published in 2024 adds that Jerusalem’s westward expansion had already begun in the ninth century BCE, which makes the growth look more gradual than the refugee model assumed.^[41] Contested

Hezekiah, Sennacherib and the first reform

Hezekiah (c. 715–687 BCE; some chronologies begin his reign c. 727) is the first king of Judah whose reign is well documented outside the Bible. He prepared to rebel against Assyria: he fortified Jerusalem, secured its water supply with a tunnel from the Gihon spring, and stored provisions in jars stamped lmlk, “belonging to the king”.^[42]​^[43] A clay seal impression found in 2009 in the Ophel excavations below the Temple Mount and published in 2015 reads “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz, king of Judah”, beside a winged sun flanked by two Egyptian ankh signs of life.^[44] A king later remembered as a reformer used the royal sun emblem common across the region. Consensus

The reform. 2 Kings 18:4 says that Hezekiah “removed the high places, broke the standing stones and cut down the asherah. He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.”^[10] The detail about Nehushtan is striking: an object attributed to Moses had been worshipped in Jerusalem until Hezekiah’s day. Majority that the verse preserves a real tradition about Nehushtan; Contested on the reform as a whole.

Archaeology. Three sites have been connected with the reform.

• Arad. The shrine in the royal fortress was dismantled and buried in the late eighth century, its altars laid on their sides (§2).^[45]​^[46]
• Beersheba. In 1973 Yohanan Aharoni’s team found the dismantled stones of a large horned altar reused in the walls of a storehouse of the late eighth century.^[47]
• Lachish. In 2016 excavators announced a shrine in the city gate whose altar horns had been trimmed off and beside whose altar a stone toilet seat had been placed, apparently as a deliberate desecration. Tests suggested it was never used. The shrine was sealed before Sennacherib destroyed the city in 701.^[11]​^[48]

Supporters of a historical reform see these as a pattern. Critics point out that the dating of each site is debated, that a dismantled altar could be explained by rebuilding or by Assyrian destruction, and that Kings’ account of Hezekiah may be modelled on its account of Josiah. Naʾaman argued in 1995 that no religious reform by Hezekiah can be shown to have happened.^[49] Contested

701 BCE: the Assyrian invasion

In 701 BCE Sennacherib marched west to crush the rebellion. His annals, first composed in 700 BCE and recopied on clay prisms of c. 691–689 BCE, give the Assyrian version (translation from the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period edition):

“Moreover, (as for) Hezekiah of the land Judah, who had not submitted to my yoke, I surrounded (and) conquered forty-six of his fortified cities, fortresses, and small(er) settlements in their environs, which were without number … I brought out of them 200,150 people, young (and) old, male and female … As for him (Hezekiah), I confined him inside the city Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage.”^[13]

The annals then say that, after Sennacherib’s departure, Hezekiah sent to Nineveh 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, precious goods and his own daughters. The Bible (2 Kings 18:14) gives 30 talents of gold and 300 of silver.^[14] The two accounts agree on the essentials: Judah was devastated, Lachish was taken, Jerusalem was besieged but not captured, and Hezekiah paid. Consensus

Sennacherib celebrated the fall of Lachish, not Jerusalem, on the walls of his palace at Nineveh. The carved reliefs, excavated by Austen Henry Layard between 1847 and 1851 and now in the British Museum, show the siege ramp, the defenders on the walls, the impaled prisoners and the families leaving with their goods. Archaeologists have found the Assyrian siege ramp itself at Lachish, the only Assyrian siege ramp yet excavated and the oldest known anywhere.^[50]​^[51] Consensus

Why Jerusalem survived became a theological question. The Bible says that “the angel of Yahweh” struck down 185,000 Assyrians in a night (2 Kings 19:35).^[52] Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, tells a story from Egyptian priests of mice gnawing the bowstrings of Sennacherib’s army on the border of Egypt.^[53] Historians usually explain the withdrawal by Hezekiah’s submission and tribute, which gave Sennacherib what he wanted, perhaps helped by disease in the camp or the approach of an Egyptian army.^[54] Majority

The survival of Jerusalem, when Samaria and Lachish had fallen, fed a belief that Yahweh would never let his city and Temple be taken. Jeremiah would have to fight that belief a century later. Majority

Manasseh: the villain of Kings

Hezekiah’s son Manasseh reigned for about fifty-five years, longer than any other king of Judah, as a loyal vassal of Assyria. Esarhaddon lists “Manasseh, king of Judah” among twenty-two western kings who sent building materials for his palace at Nineveh, and Ashurbanipal lists him among the kings who supported his campaign against Egypt.^[15] Consensus

The books of Kings make Manasseh the worst king in Judah’s history. He rebuilt the high places, set up altars for Baal and an image of Asherah in the Temple, worshipped “all the host of heaven”, practised divination and “made his son pass through the fire” (2 Kings 21).^[55] Kings blames him for the destruction of Jerusalem, which came more than fifty years after his death. Majority on the texts.

Historians read this verdict as the judgment of his opponents. What Kings calls apostasy was largely the ordinary religion of Judah, described in §2, together with Assyrian astral cults that came with imperial power. Manasseh’s long, stable reign was probably prosperous; the Judahite economy recovered from 701 and expanded in the Negev and the Judaean desert. Kings needed a villain to explain why Josiah’s reform did not save Judah.^[38] Majority

One change visible in this period points the other way. Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger noted that after a phase in the eighth and early seventh centuries when astral symbols were popular on Judahite seals, the seals of the late monarchy increasingly carry only names and no images. The shift can be connected with the growing prestige of writing and, more debatably, with a reserve about divine images among the scribal elite; Uehlinger himself cautions that it cannot be tied directly to Josiah’s reform.^[56]​^[57] Majority on the trend; Contested on its meaning.

Josiah and the book of the law

Josiah came to the throne at eight, in 640 BCE, after the assassination of his father Amon. In his eighteenth year, 622 BCE, according to 2 Kings 22, the high priest Hilkiah found “the book of the law” in the Temple during repairs and gave it to the scribe Shaphan, who read it to the king. Josiah tore his clothes, consulted the prophetess Huldah, assembled the people, and made a covenant “to follow Yahweh and keep his commandments … with all his heart and soul”.^[17] Majority on the core narrative.

What followed, in 2 Kings 23, was the most radical religious reform described in the Bible:

• The vessels for Baal, Asherah and the host of heaven were taken out of the Temple and burned; the asherah was burned and ground to dust; the houses where women wove for Asherah were destroyed.^[18]
• The priests who had sacrificed at the high places throughout Judah were brought to Jerusalem, and the high places were defiled “from Geba to Beersheba”.
• The horses and chariots dedicated to the sun were removed; the Tophet, where children were “passed through the fire”, was defiled.
• The altar at Bethel, in the old northern kingdom, was destroyed.
• A Passover was celebrated in Jerusalem “as had not been kept since the days of the judges”.^[58]

Why the book is Deuteronomy

In 1805 Wilhelm de Wette argued that the book found in the Temple was Deuteronomy, or an early form of it, and most scholars still accept the identification.^[59]​^[60] Majority The reasons:

• Centralisation. The heart of Deuteronomy’s law code is the demand that sacrifice be offered only “at the place that Yahweh your God will choose” (Deuteronomy 12). No other book of the Torah makes this demand, and it is exactly what Josiah enforced.^[61]
• The other gods. Deuteronomy bans standing stones, asherahs and the worship of the sun, moon and “all the host of heaven” (16:21–22; 17:3), the objects Josiah removed.^[62]
• Passover. Deuteronomy 16 turns Passover from a family meal into a pilgrimage feast at the central sanctuary, as in Josiah’s Passover.
• Language. The style of Deuteronomy matches the speeches and verdicts in the books of Kings, which judge every king by whether he removed the high places.^[63]

The Assyrian model

The strongest evidence for a seventh-century date came from Assyria. In 672 BCE Esarhaddon made his vassals swear an oath to support the succession of his son Ashurbanipal. Copies of the treaty were found at Nimrud in 1955 and, in 2009, at Tell Tayinat in southern Turkey, where it had been displayed in a temple.^[16]​^[64] Consensus

Deuteronomy uses the same form for Israel’s relationship with Yahweh. Deuteronomy 13 demands that anyone who urges disloyalty to Yahweh, even “your brother, your son or daughter, the wife you embrace”, be reported and killed; the treaty demands the same of anyone who speaks against Ashurbanipal. The curses of Deuteronomy 28 follow the treaty closely, sometimes in the same order: “The heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron” (28:23) echoes the treaty’s curse that the gods will make the ground like iron and the sky like bronze. Hans Ulrich Steymans (on chapter 28) and Bernard Levinson with Jeffrey Stackert (on chapter 13) argued that Deuteronomy’s authors adapted the Assyrian text directly, transferring to Yahweh the total loyalty that vassals owed the Assyrian king.^[65]​^[66] Others, notably C. L. Crouch, argue that the shared material is not specific or frequent enough to show that Deuteronomy was adapting this treaty, or Assyrian sources at all, because loyalty oaths and curses of this kind were common across the ancient Near East.^[67] Conservative scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen argue that Deuteronomy’s covenant form is closer to Hittite treaties of the second millennium BCE and that its curses draw on a much older and wider tradition.^[68] Majority on the Assyrian background; Contested on direct borrowing.

If they are right, Deuteronomy’s demand to “love Yahweh your God with all your heart” (6:5) uses the language of political loyalty, in which “love” meant faithful service to an overlord.^[69] The Yahweh-alone covenant was written in the vocabulary of the empire it implicitly rejected. Majority

The Shema: one god or the only god?

The best-known verse of Deuteronomy, later the central declaration of Jewish prayer, is 6:4: šĕmaʿ yiśrāʾēl YHWH ʾĕlōhênû YHWH ʾeḥād.^[70] It can be translated “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one”, or “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone”. The Jewish Publication Society’s translation (1985) takes the second. In its seventh-century setting the verse probably meant that Israel’s god was Yahweh alone, not Baal or the Yahweh of some other place, and not that no other god existed. Later Jewish tradition read it as a statement of the unity and uniqueness of God, and in that sense it became the centre of Jewish faith. Majority

How far did the reform reach?

The reform is told in the books of Kings by writers who admired Josiah, and there is no account of it outside the Bible. Archaeology gives mixed signals. The Judean pillar figurines, which many scholars associate with Asherah, continue in Judahite households into the sixth century BCE. On the other hand, seals and seal impressions of officials named in the Bible from Josiah’s time onwards, such as Gemaryahu son of Shaphan, carry names built on Yahweh and almost no divine images.^[71]​^[21]​^[72] Contested

Jeremiah gives the clearest evidence that the reform did not win everyone over. In Egypt after 586, Judahite refugees, led by women, tell him that they will go on making offerings to “the queen of heaven”, because things went well when they did and badly when they stopped.^[73] The reform, in their view, had caused the disaster. Majority

Josiah himself was killed at Megiddo in 609 BCE by Pharaoh Necho II.^[19] Within twenty-five years Jerusalem was destroyed. The reformers’ own theology now had to explain why the most faithful king in Judah’s history had died in battle and his kingdom had fallen. Consensus

The Yahweh-alone movement

In 1971 Morton Smith proposed that the Hebrew Bible was largely the work of a “Yahweh-alone party”, a minority of prophets, priests and laymen who insisted on the exclusive worship of Yahweh against a majority who worshipped Yahweh alongside other gods. Bernhard Lang developed the idea in 1983 as the “prophetic minority” that eventually won.^[74]​^[75] Majority on the basic picture.

The movement’s ideas can be followed through the sources: Elijah’s contest with Baal (told later but set in the ninth century), Hosea’s marriage metaphor, Hezekiah’s reform, Deuteronomy, Josiah, and Jeremiah. Its success was not certain. Under Manasseh it seems to have lost royal support entirely, and the refugees of Jeremiah 44 show that many Judahites rejected it to the end. Majority

The movement’s greatest influence came through writing. The books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which Martin Noth in 1943 called the “Deuteronomistic History”, tell Israel’s story from Moses to the fall of Jerusalem as a test of exactly one thing: whether Israel worshipped Yahweh alone at his chosen place.^[76] Frank Moore Cross argued that a first edition was written under Josiah, celebrating him as the king who fulfilled the law, and a second edition after 586, explaining the disaster.^[77] Majority

The evidence ledger for the prophets and the reforms

Primary sources

1. Justice, not sacrifice: Amos 5:21–24

Hebrew (vv. 21, 24): śānēʾtî māʾastî ḥaggêkem, wĕlōʾ ʾārîaḥ bĕʿaṣṣĕrōtêkem … wĕyiggal kammayim mišpāṭ, ûṣĕdāqâ kĕnaḥal ʾêtān.

“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them … Take away from me the noise of your songs … But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”^[2]

What it proves. That by the mid-eighth century a prophet could claim that Yahweh rejected the worship offered at his own sanctuaries, because of the worshippers’ conduct. Sacrifice is not condemned as such; it is made conditional on justice. This principle runs through the later prophets and into rabbinic Judaism, which survived the loss of sacrifice altogether (§7). Majority

2. “Are you not like the Cushites to me?”: Amos 9:7

Hebrew: hălôʾ kibnê kušîyîm ʾattem lî bĕnê yiśrāʾēl, nĕʾum-YHWH; hălôʾ ʾet-yiśrāʾēl heʿĕlêtî mēʾereṣ miṣrayim, ûpĕlištiyyîm mikkaptôr, waʾărām miqqîr.

“Are you not like the Cushites to me, O people of Israel? says Yahweh. Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Aramaeans from Kir?”^[28]

What it proves. In this oracle Yahweh directs the migrations of other peoples as well as Israel’s. The god of Israel is already imagined as the lord of history for the whole region, although not yet as the only god. The Exodus is not unique; it is one of Yahweh’s acts among many. Some scholars think the verse is a later addition; most keep it with Amos. Majority

3. “You know no god but me”: Hosea 13:4

Hebrew: wĕʾānōkî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkā mēʾereṣ miṣrāyim, wēʾlōhîm zûlātî lōʾ tēdāʿ, ûmôšîaʿ ʾayin biltî.

“I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt; you know no god but me, and besides me there is no saviour.”^[3]

What it proves. The demand for exclusive worship, tied to the Exodus, in the eighth century. “Know” here is the language of relationship: Israel is to acknowledge no other god as its own. The verse does not say other gods do not exist, which is why historians call Hosea’s position monolatry. The opening, “I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt”, is close to the formula that introduces the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2). Majority

4. Holy, holy, holy: Isaiah 6:1–5

Hebrew (v. 3): qādôš qādôš qādôš YHWH ṣĕbāʾôt, mĕlōʾ kol-hāʾāreṣ kĕbôdô.

“In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphim stood above him … And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’”^[4]

What it proves. The Jerusalem theology of Isaiah’s time: Yahweh as a king enthroned in his Temple, attended by a court of divine beings (the seraphim are the council of §2 in a new form), whose glory fills the whole earth. The verse later entered Jewish liturgy as the Qedushah, recited in the synagogue service. Majority

5. Zion ploughed like a field: Micah 3:12 and Jeremiah 26:18

Hebrew (Micah 3:12): lākēn biglalkem ṣiyyôn śādeh tēḥārēš, wîrûšālaim ʿiyyîn tihyeh, wĕhar habbayit lĕbāmôt yāʿar.

“Therefore because of you Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.”^[32]

Jeremiah 26:18: “Micah of Moresheth prophesied in the days of King Hezekiah of Judah, and said to all the people of Judah: ‘Thus says Yahweh of hosts: Zion shall be ploughed as a field …’”^[33]

What it proves. That Micah’s oracle was remembered, in the same words, about a century after it was spoken, and dated to Hezekiah’s reign. It is the earliest evidence that the sayings of an eighth-century prophet circulated as a recognised collection. The elders cite it to argue that Hezekiah listened to an unwelcome prophet and that Jehoiakim should do the same. Majority

6. The Assyrian account of 701: Sennacherib’s annals

The annals survive on three nearly identical clay prisms of c. 691–689 BCE: the Taylor Prism (found at Nineveh in 1830, British Museum), the Oriental Institute Prism (Chicago) and the Jerusalem Prism (Israel Museum).

Akkadian (extract): u Ḫazaqiau Iaudāya ša lā iknušu ana nīrīya … šâšu kīma iṣṣur quppi qereb Ursalimmu āl šarrūtišu ēsiršu.

“Moreover, (as for) Hezekiah of the land Judah, who had not submitted to my yoke … As for him (Hezekiah), I confined him inside the city Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage.”^[13]

What it proves. That the biblical account of 701 rests on real events: the names, the devastation of Judah, the siege of Jerusalem and the tribute all match. It also shows what the Bible leaves out. Kings has Hezekiah pay tribute before the siege and Yahweh rescue the city; the Assyrian account has Hezekiah pay after it, in submission. Each side presents the outcome as a victory. Consensus

7. The tunnel: the Siloam inscription, c. 700 BCE

Carved into the wall of the tunnel near its southern end and discovered in 1880 by a boy wading through it. The inscription was cut out of the rock in 1890 and is now in Istanbul.

Hebrew (opening): […] hnqbh. wzh hyh dbr hnqbh …

”… [when the tunnel] was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through: While [the quarrymen were] still […] axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow … And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed [the rock], each man towards his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits.” (trans. W. F. Albright)^[12]

What it proves. That Jerusalem carried out a major engineering project around 700 BCE, matching 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30, which credit Hezekiah with bringing water into the city.^[42] The inscription does not name a king, and the date rests on the letter forms; a few scholars have proposed a later date, but most accept Hezekiah.^[78] It is also one of the longest Hebrew inscriptions of the monarchy, written in fluent prose by someone used to writing. Majority

8. The loyalty oath: Esarhaddon’s succession treaty and Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 13:7–10 (English 13:6–9, abridged): “If your brother, your mother’s son, or your son or your daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods’ … you shall not yield … your hand shall be first against him to put him to death.”^[79]

Deuteronomy 28:23: “The heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you shall be iron.”^[80]

Esarhaddon’s succession treaty (672 BCE, §§63–64, trans. Parpola and Watanabe): “May they make your ground like iron (so that) nothing can sprout from it. Just as rain does not fall from a brazen heaven so may rain and dew not come upon your fields and your meadows.”^[16]​^[64]

What it proves. That Deuteronomy’s authors knew Assyrian treaty language well, probably from the oath that Judah, as a vassal, had to swear to in 672 BCE, though no Judahite copy has been found and critics such as Crouch doubt that its contents were widely known in Jerusalem.^[67] They turned it into a covenant with Yahweh: the jealous overlord who demands exclusive loyalty is now Israel’s god, not the king of Assyria. This is strong evidence that Deuteronomy’s core was composed in the seventh century. Majority

9. “We will burn incense to the queen of heaven”: Jeremiah 44:15–19

After the destruction of Jerusalem, Judahite refugees in Egypt answer Jeremiah:

Hebrew (v. 17, part): lĕqaṭṭēr limleket haššāmayim wĕhassēk lāh nĕsākîm

“We will do everything we have vowed: burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we did, we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven … we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine.”^[73]

What it proves. That the worship of a goddess was a long-standing, royal and popular practice in Judah, not a foreign novelty, and that some Judahites blamed the reform, not idolatry, for the catastrophe. The book of Jeremiah preserves the argument because it rejects it, but it records the opponents’ case in their own words. The goddess is unnamed; most scholars identify her with a form of Ishtar or Astarte, some with Asherah. Majority on the practice; Contested on the identity.

What is absent from the record of this period

• Monotheism. Not one text of this period that most scholars date before the exile states that no other god exists. The argument is about loyalty. Majority
• A complete Torah. Deuteronomy’s core existed by the late seventh century; the Torah in its final form, with the Priestly material, did not (§4, §5). Majority
• A sacred canon. The prophets’ sayings were preserved and quoted, but no list of authoritative books existed. Consensus
• Synagogues. Worship centred on sacrifice at sanctuaries, and after Josiah, in theory, on the Jerusalem Temple alone. Consensus
• The Sabbath and circumcision as marks of identity. The Sabbath is mentioned as a holy day (Amos 8:5) and circumcision was practised, but neither yet served as the badge separating Israel from others (§4). Majority
• An end-time Messiah. Isaiah’s ideal Davidic king is a ruler of Judah, not a figure of the end of history (§6). Majority

Debates about the prophets and the reforms

Was the book of the law found or written?

The majority view combines the second and third: a seventh-century composition drawing on older northern material, whose “discovery” was the way a new programme was presented. The traditional reading and the critical one agree that the book’s demands were felt as new by Josiah and his court. Contested

Did Hezekiah carry out a reform?

For: Arad, Beersheba and the Lachish gate shrine all went out of use or were deliberately destroyed in the late eighth century, and 2 Kings 18:4 records a detail, the destruction of Nehushtan, that a later writer had no reason to invent.^[46]​^[48]​^[47] Against: the dating of the archaeological evidence is disputed, the Kings account is brief and may be modelled on Josiah’s, and a king preparing to rebel against Assyria had political reasons to centralise that need not be religious.^[49] Contested

Did the eighth-century prophets write their books?

The traditional view is that the books record the prophets’ own words, written by them or their disciples. Most critical scholars accept that core sayings go back to the eighth century but think the books were expanded over centuries, so that each book is a layered collection; Isaiah is the clearest case. A minority, influential in recent European scholarship, argues that the prophetic books are mostly literary creations of the exile and Persian period, built around a small or unrecoverable core.^[31]​^[83] The quotation of Micah in Jeremiah 26, the close fit between oracles and Assyrian events, and the Deir ʿAlla evidence that prophetic texts were being written in the region around 800 BCE support the majority. Contested

Was the Yahweh-alone movement a minority?

Morton Smith and Bernhard Lang argued that exclusive Yahweh worship was a minority view that became dominant only after the exile.^[74]​^[75] Yehezkel Kaufmann and, more cautiously, Jeffrey Tigay argued that most Israelites were already devoted mainly to Yahweh, as personal names show, and that the polytheism the Bible condemns was a marginal deviation.^[84]​^[85] The two positions are closer than they seem: Yahweh was clearly the main god of Israel and Judah, and the question is how many people also honoured other deities, and how much that mattered to them. The evidence from Kuntillet ʿAjrud, the figurines and Jeremiah 44 suggests that many did. Contested

Further reading

• Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (rev. ed., Westminster John Knox, 1996).
• Martti Nissinen, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003) — the Mari, Assyrian and other non-biblical prophetic texts in translation.
• Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (Columbia, 1971).
• Bernhard Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Almond Press, 1983).
• Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (Free Press, 2001), chapters on Hezekiah and Josiah.
• Jacob Lauinger, “Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty at Tell Tayinat: Text and Commentary”, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 64 (2012).
• Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 1988) — the Assyrian sources alongside the biblical text.
• Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History (T&T Clark, 2005).