50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion Read Online Free PDF Page A

…).
     
    What these lovely stories seem to teach us is that clearly freedom of religion is not a biblical value. What we have, instead, is the beginning in Western religions of the theology of “holy war” that would eventually spawn all the Crusades, Inquisitions and 9/11s in history.
     
    But, wait. I’m a little confused. Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments about not going around killing people?

09 HOW A FAILED SIEGE SHAPED THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS
     
    Since a story whose lead characters are named Sennacherib and Hezekiah, and happened almost three thousand years ago is not exactly what people talk about at parties, it took a top historian such as William H. McNeill to write an essay shedding light on why we should care. This event, after all, dramatically shaped the course of history as we know it. Our world would be radically different if things between these two guys had gone another way.
     
    The tale we'll play with today takes us back to a time when Jewish monotheism was still in its infancy and required frequent diaper changes. A new Jewish king named Hezekiah had recently renewed a push to impose monotheism among his less than enthusiastic subjects. Polytheism was still running strong among vast numbers of Jews back then, so the jury was still out to decide which side would come up on top. After cracking down on polytheism within his own society, Hezekiah—perhaps emboldened by the thought that the one and only God was on his side—decided to challenge Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, by refusing to deliver any longer the tributes that Jews had customarily paid.
     
    Sennacherib had a funky name, but was a bad dude. His people, the Assyrians, were the undisputed masters of that part of the world. And it's safe to say that they didn't come to rule over so many nations by being polite. These guys didn't mess around. Twenty years earlier, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel had pissed them off. After the Assyrians were done with them, they were to be forever known as the “lost tribes of Israel.” The Assyrians, in fact, had promptly run them over with overwhelming military force, invaded them, captured them, and deported whomever they hadn't impaled along the way. Scattered throughout the Assyrian empire, the people from the ten tribes lost their Jewish identity and disappeared from the pages of history.

     
    So, when in 701 BCE the Assyrians took notice of the Jewish rebellion, they immediately set in motion to crush them in the same way they had crushed their cousins a couple ofdecades earlier. Hezekiah had counted on receiving Egyptian help in the coming war, but the Egyptians decided they had better things to do than being in the path of angry Assyrians. Without further ado, the Assyrian army began putting on the usual rape and pillage show throughout the southern Jewish state of Judah. One by one, all the Jewish towns fell into the hands of the Assyrians. And Hezekiah's gesture of rebellion was looking more and more like a suicidal move by a delusional religious fanatic. By now, only Jerusalem still stood, but probably not for long. The remaining Jews had retreated within the walls of their capital for one desperate last stand. But if there were bookies back then, they certainly wouldn't have given very good odds for the survival of the Jewish people. Fresh from all their victories, the Assyrian army reached the walls of Jerusalem ready to finish up the job and go home. Hezekiah tried to reassure his terrorized people by saying that God was on their side, but this only made the Assyrians laugh. Everywhere we have gone—they told the Jews—we heard people telling us their gods would protect them … well, go ask them now how well that has worked for them … if you can find any of them alive. Hezekiah, realizing he had angered the wrong guys, tried to throw a bunch of gold at them, but by now the Assyrians were out for blood, so they didn't lift the siege.
     
    With Judaism just one