in which Yahweh replaced the Assyrian king. By the end of the 7th century BCE Assyria had been replaced by a new imperial power, Babylon. The trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the exile which followed, led to much theological reflection on the meaning of the tragedy, and the Deuteronomistic history was written as an explanation: Israel had been unfaithful to Yahweh, and the exile was God's punishment. By about 540 BCE Babylon was also in rapid decline as the next rising power, the Achaemenid Empire, steadily ate away at it. With the end of the Babylonian oppression becoming ever more probable, Deuteronomy was given a new introduction and attached to the history books as an overall theological introduction. The final stage was the addition of a few extra laws following the Fall of Babylon to the Persians in 539 BCE and the return of some (in practice only a small fraction) of the exiles to Jerusalem. Deuteronomistic works Deuteronomy Deuteronomy was formed by a complex process that reached probably from the 7th century BCE to the early 5th. It consists of a historical prologue; an introduction; the Deuteronomic Code followed by blessings and curses; and a conclusion. The law code (chapters 12–26) forms the core of the book. 2 Kings 22–23 tells how a "Book of the Law", commonly identified with the code, was found in the Temple during the reign of Josiah. According to the story in Kings, the reading of the book caused Josiah to embark on a series of religious reforms, and it has been suggested that it was written in order to validate this program. Notwithstanding, it is generally accepted that at least some of the laws are much earlier than Josiah. The introduction to the code (chapters 4:44–11:32) was added during Josiah's time, thus creating the earliest version of Deuteronomy as a book, and the historical prologue (chapters 1–4:43) was added still later to turn Deuteronomy into an introduction to the entire Deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy to Kings). Deuteronomistic history The term was coined in 1943 by the German biblical scholar Martin Noth to explain the origin and purpose of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. These, he argued, were the work of a single 6th-century BCE author/compiler seeking to explain recent events (the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile) using the theology and language of the Book