Unit 10 · Torah: Leviticus to Deuteronomy, and the Former Prophets

The third book of the Torah opens with the words "And He called." In Hebrew that is Vayikra. Jewish tradition names the book by that first word. In English it is called Leviticus, from the tribe of Levi. The priests who served at the Tent came from that tribe. Most of the book is God speaking to Moses at the Tent of Meeting. That was the portable sanctuary built at the end of Exodus.

Leviticus has little story. Instead it describes offerings brought to the altar: grain, oil, and animals such as sheep, goats, cattle and birds. The text names a purpose for each. Some give thanks. Some mark a festival. Some make up for a wrong done by mistake. The Hebrew word for an offering is korban, from a root meaning "to come near." Jewish tradition reads the offerings as a way of drawing near to God.

Modern readers ask what these chapters meant to the people who first heard them. Historians note that offerings were common across the ancient Near East. Leviticus gives its own order and meaning to the practice. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. After that, the rabbis taught that prayer, study and acts of kindness take the place of offerings. Jewish communities still read Leviticus every year in the Torah cycle.

Young children in traditional Jewish schools once began their Torah study with Leviticus, not Genesis. A midrash explains: let the pure come and study what is pure. Whether or not a reader shares that view, the choice shows how central this book has been to Jewish life.

Leviticus 16 sets out one day each year unlike any other. On the tenth day of the seventh month, the high priest was to enter the innermost room of the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. He did this on no other day. He brought offerings for himself and for the people. The text calls this making atonement, setting right what had gone wrong between the people and God.

The chapter also describes two goats. Lots were cast over them. One goat was offered at the altar. On the head of the other the high priest confessed the sins of the people, and then the goat was sent away into the wilderness. The Hebrew text says it was sent "to Azazel," a word whose meaning readers have long debated. The English word "scapegoat" comes from an early translation of this passage.

Jewish tradition keeps this day as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Since there is no Temple, there are no offerings. Instead, Jews fast from evening to evening, pray, and confess wrongs together. The rabbis taught that Yom Kippur atones for wrongs against God, but wrongs against another person require first making peace with that person. The day comes ten days after Rosh Hashanah, the new year, and closes a season of teshuvah, returning or repentance.

For many Jews in Chicago and across Illinois, Yom Kippur is the most widely kept day of the year. Even families who rarely attend a synagogue often fast on it. Reading Leviticus 16 shows where the day began. It also shows how far its practice has traveled from the Tent in the wilderness.

Chapters 17 to 26 of Leviticus have a shared theme, and scholars since the 1800s have called them the Holiness Code. The name comes from a line repeated through them: be holy, because God is holy. Chapter 19 is the heart of it. It moves quickly from one command to the next, and many of them are about ordinary life, not the altar.

The chapter says to leave the corners of a field unharvested so the poor and the stranger can gather food. It says not to hold back a worker’s wages overnight. It says not to curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind. It says to use honest weights and measures. Then, in verse 18, it says: love your neighbor as yourself. Rabbi Akiva, a sage of the second century CE, is recorded in the midrash as calling this a great principle of the Torah.

Readers have asked who counts as a neighbor. In the chapter itself, the same command appears again in verse 34 about the stranger who lives among you. Love him as yourself, it says, because you were strangers in Egypt. Jewish commentators such as Ramban read verse 18 as a call to want good for another person as you want it for yourself. Christian readers know the verse from the Gospels, where it is quoted alongside the Shema.

The word holy, in Hebrew kadosh, means set apart. Leviticus 19 connects being set apart with how a person treats a worker, a stranger and a neighbor. That link between holiness and fairness matters to readers. It is one reason some communities read this chapter in the synagogue on the afternoon of Yom Kippur.

The fourth book of the Torah is called Bamidbar in Hebrew, "in the wilderness," from its opening line. Its English name, Numbers, comes from the counting that fills its first chapters. The text says the count took place in the second year after leaving Egypt. Moses and Aaron counted every man of fighting age, tribe by tribe. The total given is 603,550. The Levites were not included; they were counted separately for service at the Tent.

The book then arranges the camp. The Tent of Meeting stands in the middle. The Levites camp closest around it. The other twelve tribes camp in four groups of three, one group on each side. When the cloud that the text says rested on the Tent lifted, the people packed up and marched in that same order. The picture is of a whole people moving together around a center.

Historians read these numbers with care. A census of over 600,000 men would mean a nation of two million or more. By most estimates that is far larger than the whole population of the region at the time. Some scholars suggest the Hebrew word for "thousand" may once have meant a unit or clan. Jewish tradition has often read the count another way: each person mattered enough to be counted by name and tribe.

Numbers also contains the blessing the priests were to say over the people, in chapter 6. Jewish families still say these words over their children on Friday evening. It is also one of the oldest passages of the Torah found on any object. Two tiny silver scrolls from Jerusalem carry it. They are dated to around the 600s BCE.

Numbers 13 says Moses sent twelve men, one from each tribe, to scout the land of Canaan. They were gone forty days. They came back with a cluster of grapes so large that two men carried it on a pole. The land, they agreed, was good. But ten of the spies said its cities were walled and its people were giants. "We were in our own sight as grasshoppers," they said. Only two, Caleb and Joshua, urged the people to go up.

The people wept all night. They talked of choosing a new leader and going back to Egypt. The text says God’s response was that this generation would not enter the land. They would wander in the wilderness forty years, one year for each day the spies had scouted. Their children would go in instead. Of the adults who left Egypt, only Caleb and Joshua would live to enter.

Jewish tradition remembers this night. The Talmud connects it with the ninth of Av. On that date, tradition holds, both Temples were later destroyed, and it became a day of mourning. The midrash turns the spies’ words over. They were not lying about the walls, the rabbis say, but they lost trust. Modern readers note that the story explains two things: why the wilderness period is forty years, and why Moses’s generation does not enter the land.

The story also shows a pattern in Numbers. The people complain, about water, about food, about leaders. Moses is worn down. In one scene he asks God to let him die rather than carry the people alone. The book does not hide the strain of leading.

As the people camped near Moab, its king, Balak, grew afraid. Numbers 22 says he sent for Balaam, a seer from far away who was known for powerful blessings and curses. Balak wanted Israel cursed. Balaam, the text says, was told by God not to curse them, but after more messengers came, he saddled his donkey and set out anyway.

On the road the donkey stopped three times. It saw an angel with a drawn sword blocking the way. Balaam, who saw nothing, struck the animal each time. Then the text says the LORD opened the donkey’s mouth, and it asked Balaam why he had beaten it. Only then did Balaam’s eyes open to see the angel. The famous seer had been blind to what a donkey could see.

Balaam went on to Balak. But each time he opened his mouth to curse, blessing came out instead. One of his lines, "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob," is sung in synagogues today at the start of morning prayers. Jewish tradition treats Balaam with suspicion because he wanted to curse. Yet it kept his words. The midrash lists the donkey’s mouth among things created at the very end of the six days of creation.

In 1967, archaeologists at Deir Alla in Jordan found plaster fragments with an ink text. It is dated to around the 800s BCE. It mentions a seer named Balaam son of Beor. He is one of the few figures in the Torah named in a text found outside the Bible. Historians debate what the inscription shows. But it makes clear that Balaam was a known name in the region.

The story that opened this chapter comes in Numbers 27. Zelophehad of the tribe of Manasseh died with five daughters and no sons. Under the rules of the time, a family’s land passed to sons. The daughters, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah, came to the Tent of Meeting and put their case to Moses, Eleazar the priest and the leaders. They asked for a holding among their father’s brothers.

Moses, the text says, brought the case before God. The answer was that the daughters spoke rightly, and a general rule followed. If a man dies with no son, his inheritance passes to his daughter. If he has no daughter, it passes to his brothers, then to his father’s brothers, then to the nearest relative. The story is one of a few places where the Torah shows a law being made because someone asked.

The story has a second part in Numbers 36. Leaders of Manasseh worried that if the daughters married men from other tribes, the land would leave the tribe. A further rule was given: in such a case, the daughters should marry within their tribe. The text says they did. Readers have noted that the sisters gained land, but within limits set by the tribal system of the time.

The rabbis of the Talmud call the daughters of Zelophehad wise, skilled at interpreting, and righteous. Rashi, the medieval commentator, notes when they came forward. It was a moment when others wanted to go back to Egypt, and the sisters asked for land instead. Modern Jewish readers, including many women scholars, return to this story. They use it when they discuss how the tradition has changed and can change.

The fifth book of the Torah is called Devarim, "words," from its opening: "These are the words which Moses spoke." The English name Deuteronomy means "second law," because the book retells much of what came before. The setting is the plains of Moab, across the Jordan from the land. The people are the children of those who left Egypt. Moses, now old, speaks to them in a series of long addresses.

The best-known passage comes in chapter 6. It begins "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one," and goes on: love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul and might. Jewish tradition calls this the Shema, from its first word, "hear." Jews say it morning and evening. Many say it as the last words at night and, tradition holds, at the end of life.

The passage also says to teach these words to your children. It says to bind them as a sign on your hand and between your eyes. It says to write them on the doorposts of your house. Rabbinic tradition reads these lines as the source of two objects. Tefillin are small boxes with Torah passages, worn at weekday morning prayer. A mezuzah is a small case on the doorpost of a Jewish home. A visitor to many homes in Chicago’s Jewish neighborhoods will see a mezuzah beside the door.

Scholars note that Deuteronomy’s style is different from the earlier books. It speaks in the second person. It repeats key phrases. It argues with the listener. Many scholars date the core of the book to the 600s BCE. They tie it to a scroll found in the Temple under King Josiah, a story told in the next chapter. Jewish tradition holds that Moses spoke the book. Both readings agree that it is a book of persuasion.

Deuteronomy returns again and again to four groups: the stranger, the orphan, the widow and the Levite, who had no land of his own. The book says to leave forgotten sheaves, fallen olives and leftover grapes for them. It says to bring a tithe, a tenth of the harvest, every third year for them to eat. It says to lend to a poor neighbor and, every seventh year, to release the debt.

The reason the book gives is memory. Deuteronomy 10:19 says to love the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Deuteronomy 24 repeats it: remember that you were a slave in Egypt. The command to care for the outsider is tied to the people’s own story. Scholars count the stranger, in Hebrew ger, as one of the most repeated concerns in the book.

Jewish tradition calls giving to those in need tzedakah. The word comes from tzedek, justice, not from a word for charity or pity. In that reading, giving is not a favor but something owed. Deuteronomy 16:20 says "Justice, justice shalt thou follow." Rabbinic readers asked why the word is doubled and gave many answers, including that the means must be just as well as the goal.

A tzedakah box sits in many Jewish homes and classrooms today. Giving before Shabbat and before holidays is a common practice. Jewish federations in Chicago and across the country run food and housing programs. Their leaders often describe that work in these terms.

Near its end, Deuteronomy sets out two paths. Chapter 27 has the tribes stand on two mountains, Gerizim and Ebal, with the Levites calling out curses on those who break the law. Chapter 28 lists blessings for keeping the covenant and long curses for breaking it: drought, defeat, exile. Chapter 30 sums it up: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; choose life.

The book then turns to Moses himself. He is one hundred and twenty years old. He hands leadership to Joshua. He teaches the people a long song. He blesses each tribe. Then, in chapter 34, he climbs Mount Nebo, and the text says God shows him the whole land. He dies there, in Moab, and is buried in a valley, and, the text says, no one knows his grave to this day.

The Talmud asks who wrote the last eight verses, which describe Moses’s death. One view is that Joshua wrote them. Another is that Moses wrote them in tears at God’s dictation. The question shows how carefully the rabbis read. Modern scholars see the ending as a fitting close to the Torah: the promise is in view but not yet in hand, and the story goes on in Joshua.

Deuteronomy’s last line calls Moses a prophet without equal, whom the LORD knew face to face. Each fall, on the festival of Simchat Torah, Jewish congregations read these verses. Then, without pause, they roll the scroll back to the beginning and read the first lines of Genesis. The Torah is read as a cycle, not as a book with a last page.

Read through Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and you will meet hundreds of commands. Jewish tradition calls each one a mitzvah, a commandment; the plural is mitzvot. The Talmud records a teaching of Rabbi Simlai, from the 200s CE, that the Torah holds 613 of them. There are 365 "do not" commands, one for each day of the solar year. There are 248 "do" commands, said to match the parts of the body as the rabbis counted them.

The number 613 is a teaching, not a list in the Torah itself. Scholars over the centuries did not agree on exactly which commands to count. In the 1100s Maimonides wrote a Book of the Commandments that set out his list of 613 with reasons. Other rabbis made different lists. Many of the 613 concern the Temple and its offerings. They cannot be kept today, since the Temple no longer stands.

Traditional Jews often speak of mitzvot in daily life: lighting Shabbat candles, giving tzedakah, honoring parents, saying a blessing over food. In everyday speech a mitzvah can also mean a good deed. Jewish thinkers have asked why the commands exist. Maimonides argued that each has a reason a person can understand. Others held that some are kept simply because the Torah gives them.

Rabbi Simlai’s teaching in the Talmud goes on. Later prophets, he says, summed up the commands in fewer words. David gave eleven principles, Isaiah six, Micah three, and Habakkuk one. The point, as the rabbis read it, is that the many commands share a core.

The Torah’s laws cover food, clothing, farming, courts, festivals, family and worship. Jewish tradition treats them not as separate rules but as a single path. The Hebrew word for Jewish law is halakhah, from a root meaning "to walk." In that view, keeping the mitzvot is a way of walking through an ordinary day. It runs from the blessing said on waking to the Shema said at night.

The path was worked out over centuries. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud discussed how each command applies. Later codes gathered the rulings, like the one Maimonides wrote in the 1100s and the Shulchan Aruch of the 1500s. Jewish communities today differ on how they keep halakhah. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews are all present in Chicago. They read the same Torah and reach different practices.

The Torah itself is read aloud in the synagogue in weekly portions. Each portion is called a parashah, and the cycle goes from Genesis through Deuteronomy in one year. Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy make up more than half of those portions. A boy or girl becoming bar or bat mitzvah often reads from that week’s portion, a first public act as a member of the community responsible for the mitzvot.

Historians and literary readers approach these laws differently, comparing them with other ancient law collections and asking how they took shape. Jewish tradition asks how to live them. This course holds both questions side by side: what the text says, and what it has meant to the people who have kept reading it.

The Tanakh’s second part, Nevi’im, the Prophets, opens with four books that read like one story: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Jewish tradition calls them the Former Prophets. They begin just after Moses’s death. They end with Jerusalem in ruins and its king a prisoner in Babylon. In Jewish counting, Samuel is one book and Kings is one book. So the Former Prophets are four books, not six.

Read together, the books share a way of judging. A king who keeps the covenant and worships only in Jerusalem is called good; one who sets up other altars is called evil. The good and bad outcomes match the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy. In 1943 the German scholar Martin Noth argued that one editor or school, working during or after the exile, had shaped these books into a single work. He called it the Deuteronomistic History.

Not every scholar agrees on the details, but the name stuck. Historians read the Former Prophets as a work with a point of view. Its writers had seen the kingdom fall and wanted to explain why. Jewish tradition reads the same books as prophecy. Following a passage in the Talmud, it attributes Joshua to Joshua, Judges and Samuel to the prophet Samuel, and Kings to Jeremiah.

Both readings agree on something important: these books are not neutral records. They select, they judge, and they teach. This chapter reads them as story and as history, and sets them beside evidence found in the ground.

The book of Joshua tells of the people crossing the Jordan on dry ground, marching around Jericho until its walls fall, and taking city after city in a few campaigns. Chapters 13 to 21 then divide the land among the tribes. The book’s own last chapters say the work was not finished; Judges 1 lists cities the tribes did not take. So even within the text, the picture is mixed.

Archaeologists have dug at many of the sites Joshua names. At Jericho, excavations in the 1950s led by Kathleen Kenyon found that the city’s great walls had fallen centuries before the time most readers assign to Joshua, and the site was small or empty in the period usually proposed. Hazor, by contrast, shows a large destruction in the 1200s BCE. Some cities show no trace of attack at all.

What the ground does show is a wave of new small villages in the central hill country around 1200 BCE. They have simple houses, storage pits and few pig bones. Many historians read these as the first Israelite settlements. The Merneptah Stele from Egypt, dated to about 1208 BCE, names "Israel" as a people in Canaan, the oldest mention of the name outside the Bible.

How to hold the text and the evidence together is a real debate. Some readers see a memory of conquest reshaped over time; others see a story written to teach later generations; traditional Jewish readers hold to the account as given. This course does not decide the question. It asks you to know what the text says, what the ground shows, and how different readers put them together.

The book of Judges covers the time between Joshua and the first king. Its leaders, the judges, were not judges in a courtroom. They were rescuers who rose up in a crisis, led for a time, and died. The book gives the pattern in chapter 2: the people turn to other gods, an enemy oppresses them, they cry out, God raises a deliverer, the land has rest, and then it all begins again.

The stories are vivid. Deborah, a prophetess, directs Barak in battle and sings a victory song that scholars count among the oldest poems in the Tanakh. Gideon defeats Midian with three hundred men and jars, torches and trumpets. Jephthah makes a rash vow that costs him his daughter. Samson, strong and reckless, fights the Philistines and dies pulling down their temple.

The book grows darker as it goes. Its last chapters tell of a civil war among the tribes, with a line repeated four times: in those days there was no king in Israel. The final verse adds that everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Many readers see the book as arguing for a king. Others note that the next books show kings failing too.

Jewish tradition reads the judges as flawed people through whom, the text says, God still acted. The rabbis discussed Jephthah’s vow at length as a case of a promise that should not have been kept. The story of Deborah is read as the haftarah, the prophetic reading, alongside the Song at the Sea in Exodus.

The book of Samuel opens with a woman named Hannah praying for a child at the shrine at Shiloh. Her son Samuel grew up to be a prophet and the last of the judges. When he was old, the elders came to him with a request: give us a king, like all the other nations. Samuel, the text says, was displeased. He warned them what a king would take: their sons, their daughters, their fields and a tenth of their crops.

The people insisted, and Samuel anointed Saul, a tall man from the small tribe of Benjamin. Saul won early victories. But the text says he lost Samuel’s support after he failed to carry out commands fully, and Samuel told him the kingdom would go to another. Saul’s later years are dark: jealousy of the young David, fits of rage, and a night visit to a woman at Endor to call up the dead Samuel.

Saul died on Mount Gilboa fighting the Philistines, along with his son Jonathan, David’s close friend. David’s lament for them, "How are the mighty fallen," is one of the best-known poems in the Tanakh. The book presents Saul with sympathy and judgment at once. He is a man chosen and then rejected. He could not stop fighting what the text says had been decided.

Readers have long noticed that Samuel gives two views of kingship side by side. In some passages a king is a gift; in others, asking for one is a rejection of God as king. Scholars see different sources; Jewish commentators such as Abarbanel, who had served kings in Spain and Italy, wrote that the request itself was the problem. The tension runs through the rest of the Former Prophets.

David enters the story as a shepherd boy from Bethlehem, anointed in secret by Samuel while Saul still reigns. He plays the harp for Saul, kills the Philistine giant Goliath with a sling, and becomes so popular that Saul tries to kill him. He lives as an outlaw for years. After Saul’s death he is made king in Hebron, and then, the text says, by all the tribes. Historians place his reign around 1000 BCE.

David captured Jerusalem, a hill city held by the Jebusites, and made it his capital. He brought the Ark of the Covenant there, dancing before it. Second Samuel 7 records a promise the text says God made through the prophet Nathan: David’s house would endure. Jewish tradition reads this as the root of the hope for a future king from David’s line, the messiah, meaning anointed one. Christian readers read the same promise as fulfilled in Jesus; Jewish readers do not.

The book then tells a story it could have left out. David saw Bathsheba, the wife of one of his soldiers, and took her. When she became pregnant, he arranged for her husband Uriah to die in battle. Nathan came to the king with a parable of a rich man who stole a poor man’s one lamb. When David condemned the rich man, Nathan said: "Thou art the man." David’s later years are full of loss, including a rebellion led by his son Absalom.

Jewish tradition remembers David as the sweet singer of Israel, the author to whom many Psalms are attributed. It also holds him up as a model of teshuvah, repentance, because the text says he confessed at once. Historians add a stone found in 1993 at Tel Dan. It mentions the "House of David," the first reference to his line outside the Bible.

Solomon, David’s son by Bathsheba, became king after a struggle over the succession. First Kings 3 says he had a dream at Gibeon. He asked God not for riches or long life but for an understanding heart to judge the people. The text follows with the story of two women claiming one baby. Solomon proposes to cut the child in half, and so learns which woman is the true mother.

Solomon’s great work was the Temple in Jerusalem, built, the text says, over seven years with cedar from Lebanon and skilled workers from Tyre. It replaced the tent and housed the Ark in its innermost room. First Kings 8 gives Solomon’s long prayer at its dedication, in which he says that even the heavens cannot contain God, let alone this house. Jewish tradition calls this building the First Temple.

The book also records the cost. Solomon used forced labor, taxed the tribes heavily, and, the text says, married many foreign wives who led him to build altars to their gods. First Kings 11 gives that as the reason the kingdom would be torn from his son. The account is careful to praise and blame in turn, as the Former Prophets do with every king.

Jewish tradition attributes the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs to Solomon. The Talmud discusses when in his life he wrote each. Historians debate the size of his kingdom. Some think the text describes a grander realm than the evidence supports. Others point to building remains at cities such as Hazor and Megiddo. The Temple itself lies beneath later structures and has not been excavated.

When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam went to Shechem to be made king. The northern tribes asked him to lighten the heavy labor his father had laid on them. First Kings 12 says Rehoboam ignored his father’s older advisers and listened to his young friends. He answered that he would make the yoke heavier. The north replied with a cry that broke the kingdom: what share have we in David? To your tents, O Israel.

Ten tribes made Jeroboam, a former official of Solomon, their king. From then on there were two kingdoms. The northern one kept the name Israel, with its capital later at Samaria. The southern one, Judah, kept Jerusalem, the Temple and David’s line. Historians date the split to about 930 BCE. The books of Kings follow both kingdoms side by side, switching back and forth, king by king.

Jeroboam set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan so his people would not go to Jerusalem to worship. The book of Kings names this "the sin of Jeroboam" and measures every later northern king by it; none escapes the charge. The north had nineteen kings from several families, often taking the throne by killing the last king. Judah’s kings all came from David’s house.

Reading Kings means keeping two timelines in your head. The text helps by dating each king’s reign to the year of the other kingdom’s ruler. Historians use these cross-references, together with Assyrian and Babylonian records, to work out dates. The divided kingdom lasted about two hundred years in the north and more than three hundred in the south.

Elijah appears in 1 Kings 17 without introduction, telling King Ahab there will be no rain. Ahab’s queen, Jezebel, had brought the worship of Baal, a Canaanite storm god, into the royal court. On Mount Carmel, the text says, Elijah challenged Baal’s prophets to a contest: two altars, and the god who answered with fire would be God. The people, watching, cried out that the LORD is God.

Then Elijah fled from Jezebel into the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of Moses. First Kings 19 says a great wind, an earthquake and a fire passed by. But the LORD was not in them. After the fire came "a still small voice." Readers have long asked what that means. Some take it as a lesson that God is found in quiet rather than in spectacle. Others read it as a rebuke to a prophet who wanted fire.

Elijah did not die, the text says. He was taken up in a whirlwind with a chariot of fire, and his cloak fell to his student Elisha. Elisha’s stories fill 2 Kings 2 to 13. He feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves. He heals the foreign general Naaman of a skin disease by having him wash in the Jordan. He advises kings in war. Where Elijah was fierce and alone, Elisha moved among ordinary people.

Because Elijah did not die, Jewish tradition holds that he will return before the final redemption, following the last verses of the prophet Malachi. A cup of wine is poured for Elijah at the Passover seder and the door is opened for him. A chair is set for him at every brit milah, a boy’s circumcision. Christian tradition also honors Elijah, and the Gospels ask whether John the Baptist was Elijah come again.

In the 700s BCE the empire of Assyria, based in what is now northern Iraq, spread west with a large army. Its kings demanded tribute, and when a small kingdom rebelled, they crushed it and deported its people. The northern kingdom of Israel rebelled. Second Kings 17 says the Assyrian king besieged Samaria for three years and took it, and carried Israel away to Assyria. Historians date the fall to 722 BCE.

The book of Kings pauses to explain why. In a long passage it says the north fell because its people worshiped other gods and would not listen to the prophets. The deported Israelites were settled far away and did not return as a people; later legends called them the ten lost tribes. Assyria moved other peoples into Samaria, and the text says a mixed population grew there, the ancestors, some hold, of the Samaritans.

Judah survived, but barely. Its king Hezekiah rebelled too. In 701 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib marched on Judah, took its fortified towns, and surrounded Jerusalem. Second Kings 18 and 19 tell the story. An Assyrian officer shouts threats at the wall in Hebrew. Hezekiah prays in the Temple. The prophet Isaiah promises the city will stand. Then the Assyrian army leaves after, the text says, a great loss in one night.

Sennacherib’s own account survives on clay prisms. It boasts of taking forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled towns and shutting him up in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage." It does not claim to have taken the city. Both sources agree that Jerusalem was not captured; they differ on why. Hezekiah’s tunnel, cut through rock to bring water inside the walls, can still be walked in Jerusalem today.

The story that opened this chapter comes in 2 Kings 22. Josiah became king of Judah as a boy of eight, after his father was killed. In his eighteenth year, about 622 BCE, workers repairing the Temple found a scroll. The high priest Hilkiah gave it to the scribe Shaphan, who read it to the king. Josiah tore his clothes and sent to the prophetess Huldah, who confirmed that its warnings were real.

Chapter 23 lists what Josiah did next. He read the scroll to all the people and renewed the covenant. He removed the objects of other gods from the Temple. He shut down the shrines outside Jerusalem, so that worship would happen in one place. He destroyed the altar at Bethel that Jeroboam had built. And he kept a Passover, the text says, greater than any since the days of the judges.

Readers noticed long ago that these acts match the demands of Deuteronomy: one place of worship, no other gods, a Passover kept by all. In 1805 the German scholar W. M. L. de Wette argued that the found scroll was an early form of Deuteronomy, and that the book took its shape around Josiah’s time. Many historians today accept some version of this. Jewish tradition holds that the scroll was the Torah of Moses, lost or hidden during the reigns of bad kings.

The book of Kings praises Josiah more highly than any other king. Yet the story ends in grief. In 609 BCE Josiah went out to meet Pharaoh Neco at Megiddo and was killed. Within a generation Judah fell. The text does not soften the blow: the best king could not undo what earlier kings had done.

Assyria fell to a new power, Babylon, at the end of the 600s BCE. Judah was caught between Babylon and Egypt. Second Kings 24 says the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem in 597 BCE, carried off its young king Jehoiachin with the Temple’s treasures and thousands of its leading people, and set Zedekiah on the throne. A Babylonian clay tablet, the Babylonian Chronicle, records the capture of the city in that same year.

Zedekiah rebelled. Nebuchadnezzar’s army came back and besieged Jerusalem for about a year and a half. Second Kings 25 tells of famine inside the walls, the wall broken through, the king caught as he fled, his sons killed before him and his eyes put out. Then a Babylonian officer burned the house of the LORD, the palace and every great house, broke down the walls, and deported most of those who were left. Historians date the destruction to 586 BCE.

The book of Kings does not end there. Its last four verses jump ahead to the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin’s exile, when a new Babylonian king freed him from prison and gave him a seat at the royal table. Readers argue about this quiet ending. Some see a small sign of hope for David’s line; others see only a record. The story continues in other books: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah.

Jewish tradition holds that both Temples fell on the ninth of Av: the First to Babylon, and the Second to Rome in 70 CE. On that day, Tisha B'Av, Jews fast, sit on the floor, and read the book of Lamentations, whose poems grieve the burned city. The fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE is one of the fixed points of the Tanakh’s history. Everything after it is shaped by exile and return.

In 1993 and 1994, excavators at Tel Dan in northern Israel found pieces of a broken stone slab. It carries an inscription in Aramaic. A king of Aram set it up, probably in the 800s BCE. It boasts of victories over the king of Israel and the king of the "House of David." It is the earliest known mention of David outside the Bible. Scholars debate how to read some damaged lines, but most accept the phrase.

Sennacherib’s account of his 701 BCE campaign survives on several six-sided clay prisms written in cuneiform. One is in the British Museum in London. Another is in Chicago, at the University of Chicago’s museum of the ancient Near East, which acquired it around 1920. Students in Illinois can stand in front of an object that names Hezekiah, king of Judah, in the words of the man who besieged him.

Other objects fill in the picture. The Mesha Stele from Moab, from around 840 BCE, names King Omri of Israel. Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum show the siege of the Judean city of Lachish, which 2 Kings mentions in one line. The Siloam inscription, found in Hezekiah’s tunnel, describes the moment two teams of diggers met underground. The Babylonian Chronicle dates the capture of Jerusalem in 597 BCE.

None of these objects tells the whole story. Each was made to serve its maker: a king’s boast, a victory list, a workers’ note. Historians read them the way they read the book of Kings. They ask who wrote this, for whom, and why. Together the text and the stones place the Former Prophets in a real world of kings, sieges and clay. They do not settle every question the text raises.