The political importance of the people of Jehovah was reduced to a minimum when Judah only was left.  Already at an earlier period in that kingdom the sacred had come to be of more importance than the secular; much more was this the case under the suzerainty of Assyria.  The circumstances of the time themselves urged that the religion of Israel should divest itself of all politico-national character; but Isaiah also did his best to further this end.  It was his most zealous endeavour to hold king and people aloof from every patriotic movement; to him the true religious attitude was one of quietness and sitting still, non-intervention in political affairs, concentration on the problems of internal government.  But he was compelled to leave over for the coming Messiah (xi. 1 seq.) that reformation in legal and social matters which seemed to him so necessary; all that he could bring the secular rulers of his country to undertake was a reform in worship.  This was the most easily solved of the problems alluded to above, and it was also that which most closely corresponded to the character of the kingdom of Judah.  Thus it came about that the reform of the theocracy which had been contemplated by Isaiah led to its transformation into an ecclesiastical state.  No less influential in effecting a radical change in the old popular religion was Isaiah’s doctrine which identified the true Israel with the holy remnant which alone should emerge from the crisis unconsumed.  For that remnant was more than a mere object of hope; it actually stood before him in the persons of that little group of pious individuals gathered around him.  Isaiah founded no “ecclesiola in ecclesia” indeed, but certainly an “ecclesia in civitate Dei.”  Now began that distinction between the true Israel and the Israel according to the flesh, that bipartite division of the nation which became so important in later times.  As head and founder of the prophetic party in Judah, Isaiah was, involuntarily, the man who took the first steps towards the institution of the church.

The catastrophe which befell the army of Sennacherib had no very great effect upon the external affairs of Judah.  Sennacherib indeed, being busy in the east, was unable to retrieve the loss he had sustained, but his son Esarhaddon, who succeeded him in 681, resumed the Egyptian war with better success.  He made himself master of the Nile valley, and brought the Ethiopians into submission.  That the petty kingdoms of Palestine returned to the old relations of dependence is to be taken as a matter of course.  Judah appears to have resumed the yoke voluntarily, but the Samaritans only after force had been applied; they were afterwards deported, whereupon the deserted country was occupied by foreign colonists, who, however, accepted the cultus of the god of the land.