The descendants of Rehodoam continued the civil war with Israel. It lasted for 50years. It was in the reign of King Asa (913-873 B.C.) that the King of Israel began to fortify the town of Ramah. It lay on the main road from Jerusalem to Israel and it would make a strategic fortress. Judah’s army was not strong enough to attack. Instead, King Asa bribed the King of Syria enough to attack northern Israel, and the troops of Israel had to abandon Ramah. Asa took their building materials and used them to strengthen his fortresses at Geba and Mizpah. But bribe the Syrians he had to give them the gold and silver treasures which remained in the Temple and Palace of Solomon.
Friendship between Judah and Israel was made by Jehoshaphat (873-849 B.C.). He married his son to Athaliah, the daughter of King Ahab and the wicked Queen Jezebel of Israel. Now Judah and Israel were friends and allies in both peace and war. Jehoshaphat was a good and wise King. He put down the worship of the gods and goddesses of Baal religion. He sent men of God to teach in the towns and villages of Judah. He set up law court throughout the land, and won the respect of neighbouring peoples.
Trouble came when Jehoshaphat died, and his son became King. Now Athaliah was Queen of Judah. She encouraged the worship of the Baal god, just as her mother Jezebel had done in Israel. When her husband died, and her son was killed in battle, she seized the little grandson was hidden away and saved. When he was old enough he was brought out in public and proclaimed King. Athaliah was put to death, just as her mother had been.
Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms of ancient Canaan. The earliest known reference to the name Israel in archaeological records is in the Merneptah stele, an Egyptian record of c. 1209 BCE. By the 9th century BCE the Kingdom of Israel had emerged as an important local power before falling to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Israel's southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah, enjoyed a period of prosperity as a client-state of the greater empires of the region before a revolt against the Neo-Babylonian Empire led to its destruction in 586 BCE and the deportation of the elite. There is no definite answer to the question of when Judah emerged, although it seems to have occurred no earlier than the 9th century BCE. In the 7th century BCE Jerusalem became a city with a population many times greater than before and clears dominance over its neighbours, probably as the result of a cooperative arrangement with the Assyrians, who wished to establish Judah as a pro-Assyrian vassal state controlling the valuable olive industry. Following the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire to the Persian Cyrus the Great, 539 BC, some Judean exiles returned to Jerusalem during the Persian period, inaugurating the formative period in the development of a distinctive Judahite identity in the Persian province of Yehud. Yehud was absorbed into the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, but in the 2nd century BCE the Judaeans revolted against the Hellenist Seleucid Empire and created the Hasmonean kingdom. This, the last nominally independent Judean kingdom, came to an end in 63 BCE with its conquest by Pompey of the Roman Republic.
