The Kingdom of Judah (Hebrew: מַמְלֶכֶת יְהוּדָה, Mamlekhet Yehudāh) was an Iron Age kingdom of the Southern Levant. The Hebrew Bible depicts it as the successor to a United Monarchy, but historians are divided about the veracity of this account. In the 10th and early 9th centuries, BCE the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[9] Jerusalem, the kingdom's capital, likely did not emerge as a significant administrative center until the end of the 8th century, before this archaeological evidence suggests its population was too small to sustain a viable kingdom.[10] In the 7th century, its population increased greatly, prospering under Assyrian vassalage (despite Hezekiah's revolt against the Assyrian king Sennacherib[11]), but in 605 the Assyrian Empire was defeated, and the ensuing competition between the Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt and the Neo-Babylonian Empire for control of the Eastern Mediterranean led to the destruction of the kingdom in a series of campaigns between 597 and 582, the deportation of the elite of the community, and the incorporation of Judah into a province of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
