* In 1880, Jacob Eliahu, aged sixteen, son of Jewish converts to Protestantism, invited a school friend to dive the length of the Siloam Tunnel. They were both fascinated by the biblical story of 2 Kings 20.20: ‘And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?’ Jacob started from one end and his friend from the other, feeling the workers’ ancient chisel-marks with their fingers. When the marks changed direction Jacob realized he was at the place where the two teams had met and there he found the inscription. He emerged at the other end to find that his friend had long since given up; and he terrified the local Arabs who believed the Tunnel contained a djinn or dragon. When he told his headmaster, word spread and a Greek trader crept into the Tunnel and roughly cut out the inscription, breaking it. But the Ottoman police caught him; and the inscription is now in Istanbul. Jacob Eliahu then joined the evangelical American Colonists and was adopted by the Colony’s founding family, the Spaffords. Jacob Spafford became a teacher at their school, instructing his pupils about the Tunnel, never mentioning that he was the boy who had found the inscription.
* There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: ‘It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!’ These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical ‘moloch’, the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses.
* Josiah’s reforms were a vital stepin the development of Judaism. Two tiny silver scrolls were found in a Valley of Hinnom tomb of this period: inside was etched the priestly prayer of Numbers 6.24–6 which remains part of the Jewish service today. ‘For YHWH is our restorer and rock. May YHWH bless you and keepyou and make his face shine.’
* Royal courtiers lived and worked atopthe City of David. An archive of forty-five bullae – clay seals hardened by being burned in the destruction of the city – has been found in a house there, which archaeologists call the House of the Bullae. This was obviously a secretariat of the king: one bulla bears the inscription ‘Gemaraiah son of Shaphan’, the name of the royal scribe of King Jehoiakim in the Book of Jeremiah. Some time during the crisis, the king died, to be succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin.
* Shattered sherds bearing messages – known as ostraca – have been found by archaeologists buried in layers of ashes at the city gate of the fortress of Lachish: they give a human glimpse of the unstoppable Babylonian advance. Lachish and another fortress, Azekah, held out the longest, communicating with each other and Jerusalem by fire-signals. At Lachish, the beleaguered Judaean commander Yaush received reports from his outposts as they were gradually destroyed. His officer Hoshayahu soon noted that the fire-signals no longer came from Azekah. Then Lachish too was destroyed in heavy fighting.
* Nothing has been found of the Temple – except the tiny ivory head of a sceptre or staff used in processions, carved into the shape of a pomegranate, dating from the eighth century and inscribed: ‘Belonging to the house of holiness’ (though some claim this fragment is not authentic). But Jeremiah was surprisingly accurate: Nebuchadnezzar’s henchmen set up headquarters at the city’s Middle Gate to organize Judah, and their names in the Book of Jeremiah are confirmed by a text found in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar appointed a royal minister, Gedaliah, as puppet ruler over Judah, but as Jerusalem was in ruins he ruled from Mizpah to the north, advised by Jeremiah. Judaeans rebelled and murdered Gedaliah, and Jeremiah had to flee to Egypt, where he vanishes from the story.
* Between 586 and 400 BC, the mysterious writers of the Bible, scribes and priests living in Babylon, refined and collated the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah in Hebrew, combining the different traditions of God, Yahweh and El. The so-called Deuteronomists retold the history and recast the law to show the fecklessness of kings and the supremacy of God. And they incorporated stories inspired by Babylon such as the Flood, so similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of Abraham in nearby Ur and of course the Tower of Babel. The Book of Daniel was written over a long period: some parts were definitely written in the early Exile, other parts later. We do not know if there was an individual named Daniel or whether he is a composite. But the book is also full of historical confusions that archaeologists have clarified with the helpof the evidence found in Babylon during nineteenth-century excavations.
* One of Cyrus’ decrees of tolerance, later found inscribed on a cylinder, won him the soubriquet Father of Human Rights, and a copy now stands at the entrance of the United Nations in New York. But he was no liberal. For instance, when the Lydian capital of Sardis rebelled, he slaughtered thousands of its inhabitants. Cyrus himself believed in Ahura Mazda, the winged Persian god of life, wisdom and light in whose name the prophet of the Aryan Persians, Zoroaster, had decreed that life was a battle between truth and lie, fire versus darkness. But there was no state religion, just this polytheistic vision of light and dark that was not incompatible with Judaism (and later Christianity). Indeed the Persian word for heaven –paridaeza – became our own ‘paradise.’ Their priests – the magi – gave us the word ‘magic’, and the three eastern priests said to have heralded the birth of Christ.
† This is a biblical exaggeration. Many thousands chose to live as Jews in Iraq and Iran. Babylonian Jews remained a rich, powerful and numerous community under the Seleucids, Parthians and Sassanids upto the Abbasid caliphate and the Middle Ages. Babylon became a centre of Jewish leadershipand learning almost as important as Jerusalem until the Mongol invasion. The community recovered under the Ottomans and British. But persecutions started in the 1880s in Baghdad (which was said to be one third Jewish) and intensified under the Hashemite monarchy. In 1948, there were 120,000 Jews in Iraq. When the shah was overthrown in 1979, there were 100,000 Iranian Jews. The majority of both communities emigrated to Israel. Twenty-five thousand Iranian Jews and a mere fifty Iraqi Jews remain today.
* Darius raided Central Asia east of the Caspian, and probed India and Europe, attacking Ukraine and annexing Thrace. He built his sumptuous palace-capital of Persepolis (in southern Iran), promoted the religion of Zoroaster and Ahura Mazda, organized the first world currency (the Daric), raised a navy of Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians, and created the first real postal service, setting up inns every 15 miles along the 1,678 miles of the King’s Road from Susa to Sardis. The achievements of his thirty-year reign make him the Augustus of the Persian empire. But even Darius reached his limits. Shortly before his death in 490 BC, he tried to push into Greece, where he was defeated at the Battle of Marathon.