Spying in the Bible 21 - 775 BC to 483 BC

Invaders of the Lost Ark

Another fifty years later, beginning in c. 725 BC, the Kingdom of Israel, along with the Philistine kingdom, was all but destroyed by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V. An Israelite revolt against the Assyrians was crushed after the capture of Samaria by Shalmaneser’s son and successor, Sargon II. The Assyrians sent most of the northern Israelite kingdom into exile, thus creating the “Lost Tribes of Israel”. The Samaritans claim to be descended from survivors of the Assyrian conquest. During this time the Assyrians also invaded Egypt. Later, when Sargon II’s son, Sennacherib, was the Assyrian King, he tried and failed to conquer Judah, but he did punish them by making Hezekiah pay him tribute with gold from the temple around c. 701 BC.

The Late Period of Ancient Egypt began around c. 664 BC when twenty-sixth dynasty expelled the Assyrians out of the country. The rest of the Assyrian Empire was overthrown by the Medes and the New Babylonian Empire until the Egyptians eventually repelled the Babylonians. In c. 587 BC King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon breached the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple, conquered Judah, and exiled the Jews to Babylon to relocate other peoples to Judah. This ended the first temple period of Jerusalem and began the diaspora of the Jews.

It is unknown what became of the Ark of the Covenant after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Apocryphal book of 1 Esdras (also known as 3 Ezra) states that the Babylonians took it when they pillaged the Temple (1 Esdras 1:54).

And they took all the holy vessels of the Lord, both great and small, with the vessels of the ark of God, and the king's treasures, and carried them away into Babylon.

However, in another Apocryphal book, 2 Maccabees, it is mentioned that records they had at the time stated that the prophet Jeremiah took the Ark and hid it when he fled Jerusalem (2 Maccabees 2:4-5).

It was also contained in the same writing, that the prophet, being warned of God, commanded the tabernacle and the ark to go with him, as he went forth into the mountain, where Moses climbed up, and saw the heritage of God. And when Jeremiah came thither, he found a hollow cave, wherein he laid the tabernacle, and the ark, and the altar of incense, and so stopped the door.

Wherever the Ark of the Covenant went, Jeremiah prophesied before the Babylonians invaded that it would disappear and that eventually people would no longer remember it (Jeremiah 3:16).

In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,” declares the Lord, “people will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made.

The book Lamentations consists of the prophet Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of the temple. It is highly likely that some portion of local population of Judah remained and that the exile was largely of the upper, nobility class. During this Assyrian conquest Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were among the Jewish nobility taken into captivity in Babylon, where they were trained as advisors to the Babylonian court. They were given the names Belteshazzer, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, respectively. Daniel successfully interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and asks for promotions for the four of them in return. Nebuchadnezzer soon threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a furnace for not worshiping his gods and when Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, he persecuted the Jews even more and put Daniel into the lion’s den for not praying to him.

Not long after that, in 538 BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon and merged it with the Persian and the Medean Empires which he had taken over earlier because his mother’s father was the last king of the Medes and he was married to a woman who was a Mede. This combined Empire was known as the Achaemenid Empire. Probably because of his Zoroastrian religious tendencies, Cyrus issued a proclamation granting people within his empire religious freedom. Because of that proclamation, fifty thousand Jews, led by Zerubabel, returned to Judah and rebuilt the temple. The local, previously transplanted, non-Jewish people wrote to Cyrus to complain that they were rebuilding the temple and taking over the land, but to no avail. Cyrus’ son Cambyses II took over the Empire and later conquered Egypt. This ended the Late Period of Egypt, the Iron Age II, and the entire era of Ancient Egypt.

When Cambyses II died, one of his nobles, Darius I, took over and ruled from c. 522 BC to c. 486 BC. During this period, the Roman Republic was founded and became a western neighbor, while in their eastern neighbor was what is now China, Sun Tzu wrote his famous book, The Art of War, which included many treatises on espionage and spying among other military tactics. During his reign, Darius I had to deal with much unrest and many revolts in the Empire. The Ionian revolt occurred in c. 499 BC and the Battle of Marathon, where the Greeks revolted against his rule in c. 490 BC. Darius I then died when the Egyptians revolted in c. 486 BC and his son Xerxes took over.

When Xerxes’ reign began, the transplant non-Jews in Jerusalem tried again to get rid of the Jews by writing to the king that the people were rebuilding the city and its walls, but again to no avail. Xerxes went on to marry the Jewish woman Esther and be involved in multiple espionage plots. The story of Esther is told in the Biblical book of Esther, the apocryphal book of Additions to Esther, and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. Esther is the only book of the Bible that does not explicitly mention God in any way, shape, or form, but it does strongly allude to Him, particularly when Mordecai speaks to Esther of her having a higher purpose and calling in her Queenship. This story is also the first time that the Israelites from Judah are referred to as Jews. Besides being an interesting book about courtly intrigue, it is also just good literature, with many literary devices making it even more interesting to read. For example, it begins and ends with banquets, the descriptions of which are full of parallels and contrasts.