When and How Did Jerusalem Become a Great City? The Rise of Jerusalem as Judah's Premier City in the Eighth-Seventh Centuries B.C.E.

Abstract

This article critically examines the assumption that Jerusalem grew rapidly in the late eighth century due to a wave of mass immigration from the northern kingdom of Israel following Sargon II's conquest of Samaria in 720 B.C.E. This historical hypothesis rests on the analysis of the archaeological evidence from Jerusalem and other Judahite sites. The article seeks to demonstrate that the assumption is contradicted by the historical, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. It further examines issues that are related to the expansion of Jerusalem in the eighth century, such as the problem of dating the foundation of long-enduring archaeological strata, the political status of the kingdom of Judah under Hezekiah, the treatment of runaways and refugees by ancient Near Eastern kingdoms, in particular the Assyrian Empire, the impact of Sennacherib's campaign against the kingdom of Judah on the growth of Jerusalem in the late eighth-early seventh centuries, the decline in the population of Jerusalem in the course of the seventh century, and the contribution of the Book of Chronicles to the study of the building operations of Hezekiah and Manasseh in Jerusalem. It is suggested that the growth of the city of Jerusalem was gradual, starting in the ninth century and accelerating in the eighth century B.C.E., culminating in the late eighth-early seventh centuries, when refugees from the areas around Jerusalem and the destroyed Judahite cities entered Jerusalem to find shelter within its walls. Later, in the course of the seventh century, many of the refugees left the city and either returned to their places and tried to rebuild their destroyed cities or founded new settlements in the area around Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 77 citations exist upstream.