Judah

Judah Son of Jacob and Leah (Gen. 29: 35) who gave his name to the tribe which settled in the south of Palestine, and thence to the country itself. David was anointed king of Judah (2 Sam. 2: 4), but after capturing Jerusalem he became king also of the northern area (Israel) and thus the twelve tribes were united until the death of Solomon. After the division or disruption (922 BCE) there was civil war between Judah and Israel but Judah's geographical position proved a bonus for its survival, and when Israel and other states were swallowed up by the assyrians Judah survived, even when Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem in 701 BCE. The religious history of the country was an oscillation between collusion with the non-Israelite population by legalizing Canaanite cults, followed by Yahwist reforms as in the reigns of Hezekiah (727–698 BCE; 2 Kgs. 18: 2) and Josiah (639–609 BCE; 2 Kgs. 22: 3–20). Josiah was killed at Megiddo when attempting to repel an Egyptian army which was hastening to the help of the ailing Assyrians being assaulted by the rising babylonians (2 Kgs. 23: 29). After the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish in 605 BCE, Judah came under their domination, but King Jehoiakim rebelled and Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in March 597 BCE. The deportation of leading citizens to Babylon followed. More seriously, a further rebellion by Zedekiah led to Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem for two years and the destruction of the city in 586 BCE, followed by the Exile (2 Kgs. 25: 11) of most of the population, although the prophet Jeremiah, who had favoured surrender to the Babylonians, was captured by a group of nationalists and removed with them to Egypt.As an independent kingdom, Judah was finished, until the Maccabees threw off the Seleucid yoke. There was then an independent Hasmonean Kingdom of Judah from 164 BCE until Pompey's victories in 63 BCE.