Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Obviously, it's not wiped off the map.

There are still people there and farming there.

There's still religion going on there.

There's still Yahweh worship going on there.

But it has an impact on those that are left behind in Jerusalem and Jerusalem

the Kingdom of Judah.

So for some scholars, the end of the 8th century, beginning of the 7th century is the time when a shift towards a programmatic form of monotheism occurs.

So we have stories in the Hebrew Bible about King Hezekiah of Jerusalem, who shuts down lots of temples and sanctuaries outside of Jerusalem and says, you can only worship Yahweh in one place, and that's Jerusalem Temple.

The English Reformation wouldn't have happened without the biblical accounts of King Hezekiah and later on King Josiah in the 7th century basically doing exactly that.

It's iconoclasm, just knocking statues down, getting rid of images, saying that this is the way you can worship and you can only worship by means of...

the Temple in Jerusalem and following a kind of a script, a religious ideological script known as the Torah.

So in other words, the Torah simply means teaching.

We know it now as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

But Torah in

The late Iron Age probably meant a version of what we know as the Book of Deuteronomy, which is all about one God, one place of worship, one people united.

So all Yahweh's worshippers come together.

Yeah.

So there you've said a lot in two sentences that needs unpacking.

My revenge.

So possibly Hezekiah and Josiah as these religious reformers, some scholars think this is historical fact.