(This is Part 3 of a series. Go back to Part 2.)
In 701 BC King Hezekiah and the small kingdom of Judah were anxiously awaiting, behind the walls of their capital Jerusalem, the invasion of Sennacherib, the terrifying emperor of Assyria.
Sennechirib had conquered dozens of small kingdoms in the Middle East, sending them all to rape, pillage and slavery, and there was every reason to believe that the tiny kingdom of Judah would now meet the same fate.
But King Hezekiah knew about a military principle which Napoleon, who used the principle extensively, called
maneuvers on the rear.
What it means is that instead of attacking a superior enemy directly, which simply favors the larger force, a maneuver is attempted upon the enemy's line of supplies, sometimes called the line of communication.
The enemy's supply line is his Achille's heel, his most vulnerable point, and if your army can find a way to cut it off it can sometimes defeat a much larger army.
Outside the walled city of Jerusalem was a desert broken only by a few fountains, natural sources of water scattered here and there. King Hezekiah had these natural fountains closed off, and then built a 600-foot under-ground pipeline to carry water secretly into Jerusalem.
When Sennacherib arrived at the city, his army could find no fresh water. Its source of water had been cut off. So the Assyrian army began drinking from polluted water sources and promptly came down with a devastating epidemic of dystentery and typhoid. The army was so shattered that Sennacherib was forced to withdraw.
Alone among the little kingdoms of the Middle East, Judah had survived. Its maneuver upon the enemy's rear had proved decisive.
The implications to world history from this seemingly small victory were momentous. Since the other little kingdoms had been defeated, their local gods were in disrepute. This created a religious vacuum in the area.
Into this vacuum stepped the radical Judean concept that God was not a local god at all, but a universal oneness that applied everywhere—that there were not a muliplicity of gods but rather one universal God.
In other words, the Judeans introduced their neighbors to the sublime concept of monotheism, the idea that God is one thing, one energy, one force, the One. And in an ironic twist, the spread of this monumental concept was made possible by Hezekiah's use of a military principle.
After Assyria's defeat by Judah at the gates of Jerusalem in 701 BC, the concept of monotheism—the one God—spread widely among the small, defeated kingdoms of the middle Eastern basin.
But that's not the end of the story. A century later the Babylonian empire was the dominant power in the region. And in 586 BC Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, defeated and burned the little kingdom of Judah. And the defeated Judeans were shipped off to Babylon.
What the Judeans created from this defeat and exile was simply remarkable. Up to this time, the only proper place for worshipping God was considered to be at the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. But now exiled in Babylon, the Judeans began a series of weekly meetings from which came the first compilations of their scriptures.
In these scriptures—The Old Testament—which are primarily a record of the words and ideas of the Judean prophets who espoused the idea of monotheism, a revitalized religion was born. This new Judean religion was one in which the universal God could be contacted anywhere, by anyone.
Just as Judah's victory in 701 BC brought something very good, now Judah's defeat in 586 BC brought something that we would also call very good. Moreover, these concepts of an accessible, universal God subsequently led to the religions of both Christianity and Islam, the dominant religions on the planet today.
And all this flowed from the victory in 701 BC of the tiny kingdom of Judah—and its subsequent defeat in 586 BC.
Can we really say that we know what's best in this universe? When we see that even defeats can be the source of great victories, that calamities can lead to developments that we would consider very valuable, can we really say that we know what's best?
That's where trust comes in. At some point perhaps we can just lay back upon this reality and trust it so completely that the outcome—"how it all turns out"—becomes suddenly meaningless. Even if we die this afternoon, that too is just a part of reality's perfection.
It already turned out. This divinely imperfect perfection, right here, right now, is how it turned out.
(This is the end of Part 3. Go to Part 4.)
—jim sloman, 6.21.03 for 11.01.03
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