Judaism and the Silk Route

Abstract

THE ISRAELITE MONARCHY believed to have been established in Palestine by King David in the tenth century BCE was obliterated by powers from the East in two major stages, beginning in the eighth century BCE and concluding in the sixth. The Assyrians crushed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 and forcibly relocated its inhabitants to other parts of their empire. The book of 2 Kings (18: 11) states that Ten Tribes of Israel were exiled to Halah and Habor by the River Gozan and in the cities of the Medes. Since the former locations have been situated in Khurasan, it has been suggested that Israelite presence in Central Asia should be considered as originating at that time.2 It has accordingly been proposed that these earliest exiles may have engaged in long-distance overland trade.3 Such hypotheses are not implausible, but solid evidence is lacking. The southern kingdom of Judah managed to survive for another century and a half through diplomacy, but in 587 a new power, the Babylonians, put an end to Judean independence, destroying Jerusalem and its Temple which had been the center of the priest-dominated sacrificial religion of the Israelites since the time of King Solomon. Like the Assyrians, the Babylonians deported the Judean survivors to Mesopotamia to live as slaves. Less than thirty years later, in 559 a Persian army under Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and freed the various enslaved peoples there, including the Judeans. Allowed to return home to Judah, many Judeans