While Ahaz did his
dreadful worst in Judah, Hoshea claimed the northern throne. As had become a
pattern, he was corrupt.
They literally had no remaining sense of right and
wrong.
I live in a land where
the leader has absolutely no concept of right and wrong, but believes the world
simply does not understand his culture: a culture of entitlement and
self-aggrandizement.
Well Hoshea had no
moral incentive to do otherwise so he just did like those before him. He reigned
9 years, but in the 6th year Assyria came and laid siege to Samaria
for 3 years .
Let the Assyrian king Ashurnibanipal tell you in his own words how things
worked for anyone who resisted them:
“I built a pillar at the city gate and I flayed all the chief men who
had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up inside
the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes." Such punishments
were not uncommon. Furthermore, inscriptions recording these vicious acts of
retribution were displayed throughout the empire to serve as a warning”.
Assyria had a large
standing army of well-equipped, well-trained, professional soldiers. They were
adept at diplomacy when it suited them, but intolerant of weak realms like
Israel. Those they simply squashed and overran.
The bible spares the
gruesome details. It merely says that at the end of Hoshea’s reign, which I
presume coincided with his untimely death, all the people of Israel were led
away to faraway places. The frieze shown, depicts the exile of Israel - note there were no enslaving chains.
The real reason was
that Hoshea offered to pay tribute to the Assyrians, who really were not
specifically interested in conquering them. But he reneged by
double-dealing with Egypt, in the hopes of getting the Egyptians to drive back
Assyria – a naïve underestimate.
Assyria drew the line
and crushed the fragile Jewish state. The date of their fall and, as such, the
demise of the northern kingdom, was about 721 BC. They had lasted about 200
years, dated from the rebellion of Jeroboam.
This is how Assyrian
exile worked, as described by KarenRadner:
The deportees, their labour
and their abilities were extremely valuable to the Assyrian state, and their
relocation was carefully planned and organised. We must not imagine treks of
destitute fugitives who were easy prey for famine and disease: the deportees
were meant to travel as comfortably and safely as possible in order to reach
their destination in good physical shape. Whenever deportations are depicted in
Assyrian imperial art, men, women and children are shown travelling in groups,
often riding on vehicles or animals and never in bonds. There is no reason to
doubt these depictions as Assyrian narrative art does not otherwise shy away
from the graphic display of extreme violence”.
The rest of the
chapter lists the cumulative offences of Israel on God’s charge list. They were
as guilty as could be. Yet, God conceded that Judah was not far behind.
Their fall would yet
come, delayed only by two outstanding kings: Hezekiah and Josiah. It would come roughly 330 years after the northern kingdom seceded, dated from Saul.
Meanwhile Judah staged a comeback (2 Chronicles
29-31)
Isaiah and Jeremiah
gained their voices during the remaining years of Judah, to pronounce judgments
on God’s people and on the nations.
The world was in a
state of flux. Empires were rising. The first, Assyria, would eventually
succumb to the vast Babylonian and the Medo-Persian empires. The world would
never be the same again.
The age of city states
had given way to larger nation states, like Israel and Judah, but they in turn
were about to be absorbed into the empires.
The last of the great
empires fell in WW1, when the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian
empires fell to the rise of the axis powers.
Hezekiah ascended the
throne at age 25 and reigned for 29 years. He was an outstanding king who was buried
with great honor alongside David.
He restored the priesthood,
renewed the laws and rekindled the honor of God. He also covenanted with God,
to assuage his wrath, but most of all he accepted that all that what they had
suffered was their fault and thanks to their sins.
I once did a study on the
rise and fall of businesses and found that growing firms are characterized by
a psychology of problem-solving, problem-ownership and all-hands-on-deck. The
psychology of declining firms is characterized by scapegoating, blaming
and abdication.
Hezekiah did right to
accept responsibility and do something about it: He ordered the priests
to cleanse the temple, then rose early to offer atonement
sacrifices and repent before God.
The whole congregation
of Judah joined in and embraced the occasion with songs of praise on the harp
and psaltery. It was a true cleansing. What a glorious moment.
He summonsed the
tribes to join in but many just scoffed. However, a vast majority of Judah
assembled in Jerusalem to renew the feast of unleavened bread and the Passover,
according to the prescriptions of Moses.
It had not happened
for a long time. The feasts had been neglected and the Sabbath years were
notably overlooked for 70 x 7 years, which God would claim back through the
70 years of exile in Babylon.
Nonetheless God
delighted in Hezekiah, heard his prayers and healed the land.
The people who shared
in that consecration went out and destroyed all the groves and shrines in high
places, but they also renewed their tithes to the priests and to the temple.
There was so much
inflow that the priests accumulated heaps of wealth that went way beyond their
needs, so Hezekiah built storehouses for all the wealth: to be used to rebuild
the nation.
That a people should
open their wallets so, says so much for the opening of their hearts. It truly
was a national cleansing: a great tribute to a great leader.
(c) Peter Missing @ bethelstone.com
