Assyrian Ideology and Israelite Monotheism

Few subjects in the field of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies have elicited as much attention in recent decades as the origin and development of Israelite-biblical monotheism. One needs more than the fingers of both hands to list the many collections of articles and individual monographs that treat this threshold in the history of religions. Attention shifts in the search for precursors from ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia, and in the West Semitic sphere, to Ugarit and the Middle Euphrates. It will be the burden of the present discussion, while providing requisite background, to focus on the Neo-Assyrian factor in the ongoing development of Israelite monotheism, rather than on the search for its ultimate origin, which may be beyond reach in the present state of knowledge. More precisely, I will propose that the policies and campaigns of the Sargonids, especially of Sennacherib, who made Nineveh his political capital, elicited an Israelite response that directly impacted the God-idea. That response is most immediately expressed in the prophecies of First Isaiah of Jerusalem, Sennacherib's contemporary. It was the threat to the survival of Judah and Jerusalem, emanating from Assyria, which called forth an enhanced God-idea. That idea evolved into universal monotheism, and in effect, enabled the people of Israel to survive exile and domination by successive world empires. In such terms, universal monotheism is to be seen as a religious response to empire, an enduring world-view founded on the proposition that all power exercised by humans, no matter how grandiose, is transient, and ultimately subservient to a divine plan for the whole earth, for all nations.