(This is Part 3 of a series. Go back to Part 2.)
In 701 BC King Hezekiah and the kingdom of Judah were anxiously awaiting, behind the stone walls of their capital Jerusalem, the invasion of the army of Sennacherib, the 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 meet the same fate.
But King Hezekiah knew about a military principle which Napoleon, who used it 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 heal, 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, interrupted here and there by "fountains," natural sources of water. King Hezekiah had these natural fountains closed off, and then built a 600-foot underground pipeline to carry water secretly into the city.
When Sennacherib arrived at Jerusalum, 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 an 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 attack 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 peculiar 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, they had introduced the monumental concept to humanity of monotheism, the idea that God is one thing, one energy, the One.
After Judah's defeat of Assyria at the gates of Jerusalem in 701 BC, the concept of monotheism, the one God, spread widely among the defeated kingdoms.
But that's not the end of the story. 115 years later, in 586 BC, the little kingdom of Judah was defeated by Nebuchadnezzar, emperor of the Babylonian empire. The defeated Judeans were exiled to Babylon, yet still they clung to their faith.
What they created from this defeat was also remarkable. Up to this time, the proper place for worshipping the Judean's monotheistic God was 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, which are primarily a record of the words and ideas of the Judean prophets who communicated the idea of monotheism, a revitalized religion was born, one in which the universal God could be worshipped anywhere.
Thus something that we might call very good came out of the defeat of the little kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. Its religion suddenly expanded to fresh horizons of scope and magnatude. This concept of the universal God subsequently led to the religions of both Christianity and Islam, the dominant religions on the earth today.
And all this flowed from the little kingdom of Judah's victory in 701 BC, 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 we can just lay back upon the universe and trust it so completely that the outcome—"how it all turns out," whatever it is—becomes suddenly meaningless. Even if we die this afternoon, that too is just part of the perfection of reality.
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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