Russia, in brutally terrorising Ukraine, has committed crimes all-too-familiar in Jewish history. It has turned cities to rubble, made standard military practice of torture, mutilation, rape, theft, murder, and mass destruction, and undertaken massive “ethnic cleansing” of millions of Ukrainians who face “resettlement” far from home. All of this contains echoes of the Hebrew Bible in the age of the great Near Eastern empires, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia.

Assyria, the first extended empire in history, sprawled across the entire Fertile Crescent, from the Persian Gulf to the Nile Delta. It conquered the kingdom of Israel in 721 BCE and two decades later nearly did the same to the kingdom of Judah, where dozens of towns — including Lachish, whose siege is portrayed on reliefs in the British Museum -— were besieged and subjected to atrocities that prefigured the 2022 Russian invasion.

Assyrian pictorial art and literature contain graphic war images, such as people flayed alive, chained in cages, immured, tongues, eyes, and genitals cut off and fed to dogs, burned, impaled, heads and corpses in piles.

The Bible gives vivid glimpses of Assyrian psychological warfare, notably an episode repeated three times in the Hebrew Bible (in the books of Kings and Chronicles, and in Isaiah): In the failed siege of Jerusalem, north of Lachish (c. 701 BCE), the Assyrian spokesman outside the city walls argues — in fluent Hebrew, aimed at demoralising the Judeans on the ramparts — that God is on the Assyrian side.

To disorient the survivors, to make use of them as slaves and neutralise them within the empire, the Assyrians deported them to Mesopotamia. This was the start of the Jewish galut (exile).

The Jews consequently rejected imperial violence and greed, and war generally: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalms 122: 5). They came to respect good governance based on justice, to sympathise with other defeated nations and their refugees, to preserve their national culture and survive as a people in exile.

The policy of mass deportation and slavery adopted by the Mesopotamian empires helped change the course of civilisation, by breaking down ethnic barriers and opening the way for the future expansion of prophetic influence and of Judaism (and through Judaism, Hellenism and, later, Christianity and Islam) as a universal religion.

But at the time, deportation was catastrophic. Israel was exiled by the Assyrians in the late-8th century BCE and Judah by the Babylonians in the early 6th century BCE.

The biblical book of Lamentations, recited on the Ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, is an eyewitness account of the Judean defeat and humiliation:

Women in Zion raped, virgins
in the towns of Judah.
Our princes hung by the hands.
Old men abused.
The young made to slave at the mill,
to stagger under piles of wood
The old abandoned the city gate;
the young, their song.
And we — our joy is gone.
Our crown is fallen.
Oi na lanu — we have sinned! …
Remember, Lord, what befell us,
see our shame!
Our land and homes in strangers’ hands…
Orphans we became, our mothers — widows.
Silver we paid for water.
…On the waste of mount Zion
jackals prowl.

Through the spread of the Hebrew Bible, the Jews became the archetype of defeated, uprooted peoples, vulnerable in exile to defamation and persecution. Psalm 137, recited in Jewish custom on weekdays prior to the Grace after Meals, is set in the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE:

By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
On willow branches we hung our harps
when our tormentors mocked us,
‘Sing us a song of Zion.’
How can we sing a song of the Lord
on foreign soil?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
let my right arm go limp.
Let my tongue stick to my mouth
if I do not remember you.

The Hebrew Bible evolved in opposition to imperial rule, in the Jewish national determination to survive the havoc wrought by exile. It is dissident in asserting the power of slaves to rebel, to create their own laws and national culture, to return to their ancestral homeland and achieve independence; and in its conception of a universal faith, based on law applicable to everyone, rich and poor, aristocrats and common people, the powerful and powerless alike.
Critics of monotheism such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens tend to overlook its political significance in the biblical age and after, politics and religion being inseparable prior to modern times.

Jewish monotheism was an answer to imperialism, teaching the fallibility of mortal kings, and the hope of building a society based not on ruthless imperial power but on justice, truth, and compassion for all.
War might be unavoidable at times, but the prophetic ideal, writes the Bible scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, is pacifism, the “negation of war and of dominion acquired by warfare. This ideal implied the negation of world rule generally, of empire”.
Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah set faith above military force, truth above lies, justice above social chaos. This was the ethical basis of Judaism and, later, of Christianity and Islam.

The unique ferocity of the prophets’ attacks on idols and idol worship reflects their hatred of cruel, destructive empires odiously identified with the false gods and the magic and superstition associated with them.

Over-extension, internal discord and the natural hatred engendered by tyranny weakened the empires. Defeated in war, they collapsed and vanished from history — Assyria in 612 BCE, Babylonia in 539 BCE — and their languages and cultures were not rediscovered until the 19th century.

The most memorable images in ancient Mesopotamian art — lions caged and trapped, pierced by arrows and spears, convulsed in dying agony — may be taken in the end as a symbol of empire, violent and unloved, lacking spiritual direction, turning upon itself in a Götterdämmerung of despair.

In modern times, Soviet Russia followed dead empires in the use of terror and exile as instruments of control, making human life cheap, and degrading itself morally.

As Anne Applebaum writes in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, after the allied victory in 1945, Soviet authorities “carried out policies of mass ethnic cleansing, displacing millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians and others from towns and villages where they had lived for centuries… Disoriented and displaced, the refugees were easier to manipulate and control than they might have been otherwise”.
More recently, the Uyghurs, deported en masse by Communist China, face a similar challenge of religious-cultural survival.

The Hebrew Bible speaks to the many peoples who, to the present day, have endured systematic policies of mass ethnic cleansing.

In its hatred of the cruelty and destructiveness of empires, the Bible has affinities with modern national literature written under the heel of empires: for example, Solomos of Greece in the Ottoman empire or Mickiewicz of Poland in the Tsarist empire.

The 19th century Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, denounces Russia for its despotism and persecution, for enslaving, exploiting, and degrading Ukrainians and other nationalities in its “prison of nations”; and he exhorts Ukrainians to preserve their language and traditions to ensure national survival.

The Jews lost most of the wars they fought, against Assyria, Babylonia, and finally Rome, which in wars of 66-70 and 132-135 CE annihilated their state in the land of Israel, which had lasted in various forms from the time of King Saul (c. 10th century BCE) — longer than England from 1066 to the present.

Yet, even in exile, the Jews never lost their sense of nationhood, their inner independence.
By preserving their religious and literary culture and the Hebrew language, they outlasted the empires that conquered them.

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill University. Montreal, and author of Imperialism and Biblical Prophecy 750-500 BCE