From 740 B.C. to 607 B.C. Judah continues to exist for another 130 years.

As we have seen in the previous text, King Ahaz of Judah died in 745 B.C. He was succeeded by his son Hezekiah. This king did all he could do to bring his people back to the exclusive worship of JHWH. He tried to terminate all forms of idol-worship and destroyed all temples and altars meant for idolatry. In 732 B.C., the king of Assyria also invaded Judah, captured a lot of towns, and laid siege to Jerusalem. A messenger of the king arrogantly demanded the immediate surrender of Jerusalem and made fun of JHWH. Fortunately, at that time, the town had a king who was very loyal towards his God, King Hezekiah. In addition, there was a great prophet in the town: Isaiah. Through Isaiah, God told the king that there was no reason for him to be afraid: Jerusalem would not be captured. Shortly afterwards, an angel killed 185,000 men of the Assyrian army, which then decided to retreat. A few years later, the king got seriously ill. He prayed to God to ask him for a few more years to live and God granted him 15 additional years. When the king of Babylonia heard that Hezekiah had recovered from a serious illness, he sent his envoys to congratulate him.

King Hezekiah made the serious error of showing the envoys the wonderful gold and silver objects in the treasuries of Jerusalem. Isaiah then let him know that in the near future, all the treasures of the town would be carried off to Babylonia.

In 716 B.C., the good king Hezekiah died. He was succeeded by his son Manasseh. He reigned in Jerusalem for 55 years until 661 B.C.

Manasseh was a very bad king. He restored idolatry throughout the country. He built altars for Baal everywhere. He even used the temple for the worship of idols. In addition, he was a very evil and violent person who shed innocent blood on a large scale.

When he died in 661 B.C., he was succeeded by his son Amon. This king was just as bad and as evil as his father. After a reign of two years, he was killed by assassins. In 559 B.C., his son Josiah succeeded him.

Josiah was the last king who brought about a complete change-over. He followed the example of one of his ancestors, King David .Just like some of his predecessors, he did all he could to put an end to the idolatry and to turn the people back to the worship of JHWH.

In this context, he brought about a thorough restoration of the temple, which had again fallen into disrepair. During these operations, someone found the books that contained the laws of Moses, which had obviously been forgotten by everybody in the course of the years. When the king and the High Priest read the books and the laws, they got a terrible shock, especially when they began to realize that the law-books were very clear on God’s punishment for disobedience and the breaking of the covenant. Judah would suffer the same fate as Israel: annihilation and exile.

With all the power they had, King Josiah, the High Priest, and Isaiah tried to avert the approaching disaster. They restored the temple, destroyed all the temples and the altars that were meant for idol-worship, and re-introduced the three annual national feasts which God had told them to observe. Among them was the Passover, the feast of the liberation from being slaves in Egypt.

In 632 B.C., there was a war in the territory between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The Assyrians, who lived in the north in what is now northern Iraq, fought with the Babylonians, who lived in the south in what is now Southern Iraq, for the dominion over the region. The Babylonians won by conquering Nineveh in 632 B.C. After this, Babylonia’s power rapidly increased and before long, it had become the third world-power in Biblical history.

King Josiah died in 628 B.C. He was succeeded by his son Jehoahaz.

About this time, Judah had become so weak that actually it was not an independent nation any more. In fact, it was ruled by Egypt which dethroned Jehoahaz after three months and put him in prison and appointed his brother Jehoiakim as the king. Jehoiakim was a bad ruler who undid all the good work of his grandfather and returned to the traditional idol-worship.

In 620 B.C., Babylonia took over the rule of Egypt over Judah. Now Judah was directly governed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. This king forced Judah to pay him tremendous sums of money every year as tribute. In 618 B.C., Jehoiakim died and was succeeded by his son Jehoiachin.

In the meantime, Judah had rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar and refused to pay the annual tribute.

Then the Babylonian king laid siege to Jerusalem in 617 B.C. and captured the town after a short period of time. He carried all the treasures of the king and the temple with him to Babylonia, as had been foretold by Isaiah. He also took King Jehoiachin as a prisoner to Babylonia with him, together with thousands of other prominent Jews.

In that same year, 617 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar appointed Jehoiachin’s uncle Zedekiah as the new king of Judah.

In 609 B.C., Zedekiah rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar. This Babylonian king again marched his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to the town. After almost one and a half years of terrible suffering in which large numbers of people were starved to death, the town fell in 607 B.C.

Zedekiah had to witness how all his sons were killed before his eyes and then he was made blind.

During this time, Jerusalem was completely destroyed, including the temple. The town walls were pulled down. Practically all the inhabitants of Jerusalem who had survived the one and a half years of siege were carried away to Babylonia as exiles.

Nebuchadnezzar left a few thousand insignificant people behind in Judah and made Gedaliah their governor. This governor was killed after a few months, after which event the few thousand people who still lived in the country fled to Egypt.

From that moment in 607 B.C., there were no Israelites any more who lived in the Promised Land, and David’s dynasty had come to an end.

The ten northern tribes had been carried away by Assyria, the two southern tribes by Babylonia.

God’s people seemed destroyed. It was completely annihilated by the great pagan world-powers of those days, which had nothing to do with JHWH and only served their own gods: Assyria and Babylonia. Everything seemed lost, including God’s promise to David that He would produce a dynasty that would never end.

However, between about 780 B.C. and 540 B.C., four great prophets worked in Israel and Judah who, in their preaching and in their writing, placed the catastrophic events in a completely different light: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

(It is certainly worthwhile to read about what happened in Judah between 740 B.C. and 607 B.C. in the Bible itself. These stories are to be found in 2 Kings, from the first verse of chapter 18 to the end of the book.)