=9. The captivity of Manasseh.= In this connection there is another captivity merely referred to in one verse in 2 Chron. 33:11. It is the captivity of Manasseh by the king of Assyria. In this verse it is said that this king of Judah was carried captive to Babylon, and for a time it was thought by some critics that this was an incorrect statement, since the king of Assyria was at Nineveh. But among the inscriptions at present in the British Museum were found those of the history of Esar-haddon, who reigned from B. C. 681 to B. C. 668. In this history it is stated that he went to Syria and conquered and destroyed Sidon and held court at Damascus, summoning twenty-two kings to meet him there; and second among the names is that of “the king of Judah.” This was in the year B. C. 672.[101] It is recorded that he rebuilt Babylon, and we find that both he and his son held their courts and judged vassal princes like Manasseh at Babylon.[102] Esar-haddon gathered men from Babylon and other places and planted them in Samaria, and hence we have the account given us in Ezra 4:2, 9, 10. =10.= Although the “=seventy years=” of captivity pronounced against Judah by the prophet Jeremiah (25:12; 29:10) are supposed to begin B. C. 606, yet the destruction of Jerusalem and the last deportation of Judah, B. C. 588, closed up the list of captivities both of Judah and of Israel. Both communities now existed, but, with small exception, only as captives in Assyria or as exiles in various other lands. CHAPTER II. THE COMPARATIVE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT. =1. As a people=, the Jews of the northern kingdom never were so warmly attached to the Temple worship as those of the southern, and hence all the Psalms which alluded to Jerusalem[103] and the Temple are supposed to have been written by the exiles of Judah, that is of the southern kingdom, who went into captivity B. C. 588 under Nebuchadnezzar, and were settled in Babylon or its vicinity. For the entire seventy years the people of Judah and those of Israel were separated by several hundred miles of country. =2. During the many years= of captivity, Israel, that is the ten tribes, probably mingled with other nations in their midst and became very largely estranged from the father-land. There were fewer of the ties of religious faith with them than with Judah. Even the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, when they returned from the captivity and entered into their city Jerusalem and into the cities and lands surrounding, brought wives from the heathen about them,[104] the very priests and Levites being also guilty, Ezra 9:1, although the Mosaic law prohibited such marriages.