Master the fall of two kingdoms

If you have spent any time reading the Hebrew Bible, or working through a history of the ancient Near East, you have probably encountered this period and felt a familiar frustration: the sources give you names, dates, and verdicts, but they do not quite give you understanding. You know that the kingdom split, that Israel fell to Assyria, that Judah lasted a little longer before Babylon finished the job. But the why — the mechanism, the contingency, the web of political pressures and religious choices and imperial logistics that made these outcomes happen — tends to remain just out of reach.

That gap is exactly what this course is built to close.

I have spent years working at the intersection of ancient Near Eastern history, biblical studies, and archaeology, and what I keep finding is that students do not need to be protected from complexity — they need to be equipped to handle it. The Omride dynasty is a perfect example. The biblical account of Ahab and Jezebel is vivid and memorable and theologically purposeful, and it is also a portrait drawn by writers with a very specific argument to make. The Assyrian and archaeological record gives us a different Omri — a king powerful enough that Assyria was still calling Israel "the house of Omri" decades after his dynasty was gone. Both pictures are evidence. Learning to hold them together, to ask what each source is doing and why, is the core intellectual skill this course teaches.

We will move through the full arc: the fracture of Solomon's kingdom and the diverging political and religious identities of Israel and Judah; the wars of the ninth century and the regional power dynamics that shaped them; the Assyrian imperial machine and the specific campaigns of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II that dismantled the northern kingdom piece by piece; Hezekiah's reforms and Sennacherib's siege; Josiah's extraordinary and ultimately tragic attempt to rebuild Judah around a newly discovered law book; and finally the two Babylonian sieges, the deportations, and the long, generative shadow of exile. At each stage, we will read the primary sources — Assyrian annals, the Lachish Letters, the biblical text itself — not as neutral transcripts but as arguments made by specific people in specific circumstances.

I want to be direct about what this course is not. It is not a survey that skims the surface and hands you a timeline. It is not a devotional study, though students of faith will find that serious historical engagement deepens rather than diminishes their reading of scripture. And it is not an exercise in academic credentialism — you do not need a degree to follow the argument; you need curiosity and the willingness to sit with a difficult question long enough to think it through.

If that sounds like the kind of study you have been looking for, I would genuinely like to work through this history with you. The ancient world rewards attention, and this particular stretch of it — four centuries of two small kingdoms navigating a world of empires — rewards it more than most.