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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

Date

900BCE

900–700 BCEapproximate date

Assyria advanced westward, first exacting tribute and later absorbing kingdoms, until it destroyed Israel.

Political history32.2767°N 35.1908°E
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Ancient Israel and Other Ancestors: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

7 statements

Statements for this event

01

The political opening created by the end of Egyptian domination began to close in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, when the Assyrian Empire expanded from Mesopotamia into Syria and Canaan. As with other kingdoms, Assyria forced the kings of Israel and Judah to submit and pay tribute.

03

In 853 BCE, Ahab, king of Israel, took part in a battle against the Assyrians, reported only by an outside source: a text of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. Assyrian and Babylonian sources also name later kings of Israel and Judah, down to the early sixth century BCE (Jehu, Hezekiah, Jehoiachin, the last surviving king of Judah), and the order of their reigns agrees with the Bible.

04

A panel from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, from Nimrud, around 825 BCE, shows the tribute of King Jehu of Israel, on his knees at the Assyrian king's feet.

05

Assyrian and Babylonian records corroborate Assyria's destruction of the Northern Kingdom in 722 to 720 BCE, described in 2 Kings 17. Inscription fragments, architecture in Assyrian styles and imported Assyrian pottery further attest imperial rule over the conquered kingdom.

Context

Toward the end of the third millennium BCE the Sumerians were overtaken by the Akkadians, from Akkad (where Sargon came from), who replaced Sumerian with a Semitic language, Akkadian. From what remained of that empire two variants arose: Assyria in the north and Babylon in the south. The Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires appear in the Bible as major threats to Israel: the Assyrians exiled 10 of the 12 tribes, and the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the population whose descendants would be the Jews.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
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§ 02Museum

Objects and images

Each item states whether it is an ancient object, a modern photograph or a later artistic interpretation.

§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • Daniel Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East 3100 to 332 BCE (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

    Life in the ancient Near East · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 32

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 22; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 22; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 22inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 13; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 23inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 13; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
  6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 8; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 8inspect
  7. 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.