The tribes of Israel were carried into exile in two stages: the northern ten tribes were carried into exile by the king of Assyria, who also invaded Judah and took many of its cities during the reign of King Hezekiah. Sennacherib of Assyria was driven back, however, by divine intervention which killed a large portion of his army (2 Kings 18-19), allowing the kingdom of Judah to continue for another century and a half as a state with varying degrees of independence. In 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against Judah and rendered it a client state (2 Kings 24:1). This was the year the exile of Judah began, as the first wave of Jewish exiles were carried off to Babylon, among whom were included Daniel and his friends (Daniel 1:1-3). Around twenty years later, after Judah rebelled against the Great King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar sacked the city and destroyed the Temple, removing the dynasty of David from power and incorporating Judah fully into the Babylonian administration (2 Kings 25). Today, I want to help you consider the relation between these two powers. A casual reading of the Biblical history without attention to the introduction of these national characters suggests that Assyria was the great power in the days of Hezekiah and was simply replaced by Babylon- a different great power- in the days of Jeremiah. But this is not the Scriptural vision.
In order to understand any passage of Scripture in a robust manner, one must go to the first introduction of the character whose story is being told. The scriptural vision of mankind, moreover, is not one of atomized individuals who only accidentally exist in genealogical and social relations. Instead, it is of a single organism- creation- in which the human family exists as the single head giving life (or death) to the whole. The story of Adam is not merely his story as an individual person. It is rather our story, for we are his descendants. The generation of Judah’s exile was not simply punished as a wicked generation- they experienced the punishment of the kingdom of Judah for the sins which had been repeated, transmitted, and magnified through a lineage. A culture perpetuates its sins through time because each generation begets the next. Begetting is more than a merely biological relation. The parents who beget children will mold and shape those children by the culture of their family- marked out by language, habits, and religion. We each carry the whole history of our lineage in our heart. In Nechama Price’s remarkable book Tribal Blueprints, we find that each of the tribes of Israel bears a distinct and consistent personality tied to the history of the founding patriarch. Reuben, for example- the firstborn son who is stripped of the privileges of the firstborn- bears that history in its soul in each of the stories in which the tribe appears. The rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (Numbers 16), for example, prominently features Reubenites (Numbers 16:1) who are jealous of Moses’ authority but too cowardly to speak to him directly. Instead, Moses must specifically send for Dathan and Abiram (Numbers 16:12) who refuse to speak to him directly. When Israel is gathered to fight a war against the reconstituted Canaanite kingdom centered on Hazor (Judges 4), Reuben sits “still among the sheepfolds” endlessly deliberating with “great searchings of heart” but no action (Judges 5:15-16).
We should consider, then, the great powers which come against Israel and Judah as characters whose history stretches backwards through the Bible. And we meet Assyria and Babylon for the first time in Genesis 10. The origins of Assyria go back even further- Assur, the son of Shem from whom the Assyrians came (Genesis 10:22) is named for the antediluvian country of Assur which lay to the west of the antediluvian river Tigris for which the postdiluvian Tigris was named. The name “Assur” appears to be derived from the word “happy” or “blessed” - sharing the identical three consonants, and from which Jacob’s son “Asher” is also derived. Genesis 10 gives us a crucially important story about the origins of the Assyrian state:
“Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.” The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.” (Genesis 10:8–12)
We will continue exploring this story in future posts.