Complex and unstable, in 922 BC the kingdom of Ancient Israel was divided into Judah, in the South, and Israel, in the North. For the next 200 years, there was almost constant warring between these kingdoms and their neighbors. These bitter feuds eventually led to the collapse of Israel, leaving Judah as a surviving nation until the emergence of the Babylonian Empire, the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, and the exile of the Jewish people. Using ancient Jewish, Biblical, and other contemporary sources, this title examines the politics, fighting, and consequences of Israel's battles during this period. Focusing on the turbulent relationship between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, this book explains Israel's complex, often bloody, foreign policy, and provides a definitive history of these ancient conflicts.

The textual legacy of southern Mesopotamia during the seventh, sixth and fi fth centuries BCE stands out for its abundance. The vast majority of these texts pertain to legal and administrative, rather than literary, matters. Loans, contracts, sales, marriages, adoptions and other day-to-day affairs were recorded on clay tablets by scribes writing in cuneiform script. Thousands of these tablets are known to today’s scholars, while many more are believed to exist and await discovery or publication.1 Modern Assyriological scholarship refers to these texts as Neo-Babylonian legal and administrative texts. They offer pictures of many aspects of Mesopotamian socio-economic and legal institutions in the centuries immediately preceding the Common Era.