Before giving up completely, King Hezekiah of Judah decided to rebel against Assyria. Knowing the Assyrians would attack, he militarized the state. He built the Broad Wall to protect the new refugees and carved the Siloam Tunnel through solid rock to bring fresh water inside the city so they could survive a siege. Archaeologists have also found thousands of jar handles stamped with the letters LMLK (meaning “To the King”). This proves the government ran a massive operation to stockpile food and oil in preparation for war.

In 701 BCE, the Assyrian King Sennacherib invaded and showed no mercy. He destroyed Judah’s smaller cities, which is graphically shown in the Lachish Reliefs—stone carvings showing Assyrians using battering rams and torturing Judean soldiers. The Assyrians claimed they trapped Hezekiah in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.” Hezekiah only saved the city by paying an astronomical amount of gold to the Assyrians, officially submitting to their empire.

Under Assyrian control, the region became a giant economic machine. For example, the nearby city of Ekron was turned into a massive, industrialized olive-oil factory for the empire.

Decades later, as the Assyrian Empire started to fall apart, Judah’s King Josiah tried to make Judah powerful again (c. 620 BCE). He launched a massive reform to shut down local shrines and force everyone to worship and pay taxes only at the main Temple in Jerusalem.

During this time, scribes finalized the book of Deuteronomy. Interestingly, historians note that the religious covenant (the contract between God and Israel) is written in the exact same legal format as Neo-Assyrian political treaties. The Judean writers brilliantly took the language of imperial politics (which demanded absolute loyalty to the Assyrian Emperor) and turned it into religious theology: demanding absolute loyalty to YHWH instead.

Josiah’s ambitions ended in tragedy. In 609 BCE, he tried to stop the Egyptian army at the pass of Megiddo and was killed in battle. Judah became a pawn, bouncing back and forth between the Egyptians and the rising Neo-Babylonian Empire.

The Babylonians conquered Judah in two stages. According to Babylonian cuneiform records, King Nebuchadnezzar II first captured Jerusalem in 597 BCE, kidnapping the king and the upper class. When the replacement king foolishly rebelled again, the Babylonians returned and burned Jerusalem to the ground in 586 BCE. We know this from stratigraphy (studying the layers of dirt and ash). Archaeologists found a massive layer of ash and smashed arrowheads in a Jerusalem site called the “Burnt Room.” Furthermore, the Lachish Letters (pottery scraps used as military messages) capture the terrifying final days, with a soldier writing that they are watching the signal fires of nearby forts go out as the Babylonians destroy them one by one. The neighboring Edomites took advantage of the chaos, moving into Judean territory and looting the refugees, sparking a bitter hatred that lasted for centuries.