Quick questions on The Levant, Judah's last decades and the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC: HSC Ancient History

The kingdom of Judah spent its last decades caught between a fading Egypt and a rising Babylon. When the reforming king Josiah of Judah was killed at Megiddo in 609 BC, resisting Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt, Egypt briefly dominated the region. Necho deposed Josiah's son Jehoahaz and set up another son, Jehoiakim, as an Egyptian vassal. But the balance shifted decisively in 605 BC, when the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar (soon Nebuchadnezzar II, r.

The Exile is one of the most consequential events in the history of religion, because it forced a transformation of the faith of Israel into what we can begin to call Judaism. The destruction removed the three pillars of the old order at a stroke: the land, the Davidic monarchy, and above all the Temple, the single sanctioned place of sacrifice. A religion built around a national shrine now had to survive in a foreign land with no shrine at all. The response reshaped the tradition.

Oded Lipschits (The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem, 2005) is the leading modern historian of Judah under Babylonian rule, reconstructing the destruction and its aftermath as a deliberate imperial policy toward a repeatedly rebellious province, and using the archaeology to show that the collapse, though severe, was uneven across the land. Rainer Albertz (Israel in Exile) foregrounds the Exile as a period of profound theological reworking, in which the disaster was reinterpreted and much biblical literature took shape. Ephraim Stern described the sharp archaeological collapse of settlement in Judah after 587/586 BC as the "Babylonian gap," physical evidence of the scale of the catastrophe. Israel Finkelstein situates Judah as a structurally minor polity, always vulnerable to great-power politics, and reads the biblical narrative critically against the material record.