Judaism
Judah in Babylonian Times
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
The Exile of Judah
The Babylonian occupation of Judah is a mystery. Nothing is said in the bible about the Babylonian occupation except Gedaliah’s brief reign and death, and that Judahites were deported to Babylon. So called “exile” was not just a Jewish experience. Many other peoples in the region were treated the same way. Nebuchadrezzar took away captives from Phœnicia, Syria and Egypt, besides the Judahites. The Babylonians called the Levant “the land of the Hatti” (Hittites) and all the kings of the land of the Hatti were forced to pay tribute to Nebuchadrezzar around 600 BC, including the kings of Ammon, Moab and Edom.
Archives unearthed at Babylon and published by E Weidner imply that the people exiled from Jerusalem and Judah by the Babylonians went to Babylon itself. It suggests they were nobles and possibly tradesmen with skills that would be useful to a rich and cosmopolitan imperial capital. The skilled men would have had the chance of using their skills in a wealthy metropolis, the Babylonian kings quite blatantly using their tribute and colonial gains to glorify the central cities of the empire, especially the capital and its surroundings. The question is whether the nobles all remained in Babylon or some were deployed as colonial administrators, for they would have been useful to the conquerers for such duties but otherwise must have been a burden. In apparent contradiction is the allegation that the Judahites were settled by the Khabur river, a river within the Babylonian empire but not in Babylon itself. What is curious about this is that, 150 years before, the Israelites were also supposed to have been deported to the Khabur river by the Assyrians.
Archaeology
When it comes to archaeology, the mystery deepens. The half century of Babylonian rule has left scarcely any trace in the ground at all. It is hard to imagine that the Assyrian and Babylonian armies differed much in their technology, yet there are lots of signs of the seige of Lachish by the Assyrians and little of the seige of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. All that remains of it are a few arrowheads, both Babylonian and Judahite, found by N Avigad in the ash of a destroyed wall of the north city. In other places in Jerusalem, the destruction layers have no arrowheads. Moreover, there were later occasions when the damage could have been done. According to Nehemiah’s story in the bible, Jerusalem was still in ruins 140 years after the Babylonian seige, and almost a century into the Persian era. Is it credible that the city was left derelict for so long? The Persians might have razed the city again in response either to an uprising or to a brief occupation by Egyptians. There were such uprisings, and the Egyptians did rebel, though not a lot is known about them. The excavations by Y Shiloh of the City of David exposed large houses full of destruction rubble. The arrowheads found there were of “Irano-Scythian type”. Babylonians were not Scythians though they did use this sort of arrowhead. But then so did the Persians!
No certain finds of the Babylonian period have been found in the regions of Samaria and Galilee. Excavations at several places such as Dan, Beth Shean, and so on, show that these towns destroyed by the Assyrians were not rebuilt until the Persian occupation. At Hazor, stratum IV is Assyrian, stratum III consists of a single fortified building that seems to have been abandoned, and stratum II was dated by coins of Artaxerxes III (358-337 BC). If the building in stratum III was Babylonian, then it was abandoned, but it could have been early Persian. Megiddo, Tel Qiri, Jokream and Tel Chinnereth were the same, apparently deserted in Babylonian times except sometimes for a fort, then restored by the Persians. At Megiddo, the fort did seem to be Persian from some sherds of Persian pottery found there, though it had not been devastated by the Assyrians, but presumably must have been by the Babylonians. Settlements in Galilee also remained small after the Assyrians, and did not recover until Persian times. Some tombs were used apparently continuously from the Judahite age into the Persian age with little to show any Babylonian period between. All too commonly, Assyrian strata are followed by Persian strata, any signs of Babylonian occupation being lacking.
Finding from the Phœnician coast were similar. Acco showed “scant remains” in the Babylonian period followed by prosperity under the Persians. The town that was stratum 4 at Tell Keisan seemed to have been destroyed in the mid-seventh century (taken to be 643 BC when Ashurbanipal campaigned against Acco), but in a re-examination, Greek ware noted there were dated to the end of the seventh century. It meant the city had been destroyed by the Babylonians not the Assyrians. Stratum 3 is a flourishisng Persian town. Nothing existed in the supposed Babylonian period. At Tell Abu Hawam and Shiqmona, there was no settlement in the Babylonian period or for a long time before, but they flourished under the Persians. Even Dor, once supposed to be a Judahite city, had no clear Babylonian stratum. The few Babylonian and Greek artefacts found could better be attributed to the Persian period. The confusion arises because the Persians eventually were partially adapted to Babylonia culture, and Babylon was practically the capital of later Persia. To the south, many important sites such as Mikhmoret, Tell Qasile and Apollonia were all deserted under the Babylonians, and some before, but were resettled under the Persians. The Sharon plain area, inland from these seaports and presumably supplying them, was also settled under the Persians and thereafter grew rapidly.
Extensive excavations in Philistia produced equivalent results. Prosperous under the Egyptians and Assyrians, it was derelict under the Babylonians. Ashdod stratum VI was a destruction of the Babylonian army in 604 BC. Stratum V is Persian. There is no Babylonian layer. The nearby fortress of Mezad Hashavyahu seems to have been occupied by Greeks, some think Pharaoh Necho’s mercenaries. The Babylonians destroyed it. Another Greek fortress, at what is thought to have been Migdol, was also destroyed (604 BC). Another fortress at Ashdod Yam, occupied successively by Assyrians and Egyptians, was destroyed at the same time. The fortress at Rishon le Zion had two Assyrian strata, a fallow interval then a Persian stratum. Ekron was untypical in that there is evidence of occupation in the Babylonian era, but then the site was abandoned until Roman times. Timnah also followed this pattern. Sites to the south from Tell el Hesi to Ruqeish were similar in having nothing in the Babylonian gap except occasional traces of a squatter camp, building reappearing under Persian rule. L Stager, who excavated Ashkelon, found it was derelict in the Babylonian period but revived under the Persians.
Samaria was a province of Assyria, not an independent kingdom in vassalage, and evidently became Babylonian with the submission of Assyria. There is no sign of wastage or destruction with the coming of the Babylonians. Even so, excavations at Tell Dothan, Tell el Farah, Gezer and the city of Samaria itself unearthed no stratum that is clearly Babylonian. There are finds that could have been Babylonian but they could also have been Persian, and the absence of Babylonian strata elsewhere makes it more likely:
Even if these finds originated in Babylon, we have no assurance they do not date to the Persian period, as is the case with most Babylonian finds in Palestine.E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
At Shechem, Stern highlights some of the jiggery-pokery of the biblicists. Stratum VI is plainly Assyrian, and Stratum V equally plainly Persian. There is no stratum where the Babylonian town should have been, but the excavators attributed stratum V to both the Babylonian and Persian periods, 600-475 BC, though this contrivance “had no solid basis in the finds themselves”. The report on Tell el Farah (N) recorded a sacred site in the Assyrian period. A fractional stratum (VIIe1) was attributed to the time after the Assyrian period when the site was a farm which was abandoned within a few decades. Gezer showed the familiar gap after the Assyrians left, and nothing until the Persians. Surveys had shown that the Assyrians had settled the site with non-native people, culturally different. Settlement began again in the Persian period. Babylonian remains cannot be positively identified anywhere.
Archaeology of Judah in the Babylonian Period
Israel has little, if any, trace of Babylonian occupation. What of Judah and Idumaea? Judah was a Babylonian colony from 604 to 538 BC. Some excavators claim Judah was not deserted in the time of the “exile”. They say deportation of Jews by the Baylonians only affected few among the population of the hill country. There was no “empty land” as postulated by Chronicles and other biblical literature. It was a myth. Archaeology shows some of the towns and villages around Jerusalem actually faired better out of the Babylonian conquest than they had done before. Nor were all the people left behind poor. Some of the tombs of the surrounds of Jerusalem have rich grave goods in them during the Babylonian period. Gabriel Barkay excavated the Jewish tombs at Ketef Hinnom, overlooking the Hinnom Valley, and concluded that the wealthy families that owned the tombs continued to live in Jerusalem and bury their dead in these caves throughout the period when the city was supposed to have been destroyed and deserted. Barkay thinks they lived in the suburbs, which were not destroyed. Either, some of the wealthy class remained or they were quickly replaced by new ones.
These conlusions come from digs in the tiny region of Benjamin. Excavators have been digging at Bethel, Gibeon, Gibeah and Mizpah, as well as two other sites at Mozah and Nabi Samuel, but the reports of these two are among those that have not been published. The published reports are extraordinary in revealing allegedly Babylonian remains offering the basis of the claims outlined in the previous paragraoh. So, these cities remained active under Babylonian rule, but… they have no Persian strata! At Mizpah, supposed to have been the capital city of Gedaliah, governor of Judah under the Babylonians, according to the bible, four roomed houses were dug out, and the plan of the town was found to be different from the earlier plan, assigned as Judahite. Mizpah was confirmed as capital in the Babylonian and the early Persian Periods, when it briefly flourished.
In fact, W F Bade excavated five of the eight acres that Mizpah covered—an utterly irresponsible act, especially as he completely misinterpreted the signs in the ground, and failed even to understand his own work… but he found no Babylonians! Though Bade had ruined the site for more advanced archaeologists, we do not have the benefit of his own report on his excavations. It has never been published. Archaeological vandals like him just want to dig, hoping to make amazing discoveries, but they do not bother about the important detail in the small finds. Yet professional archaeologists are in the usual good pal’s club, and rarely criticize each other for their negligence, failings and sheer vandalism. This is anything but science.
It is time archaeologists were banned in the field until all their outstanding reports are published and the countless shelves full of relics in museum basements have been properly inspected and catalogued, dated and published by several experts, not just one. Indeed, tyro archaeologists ought to check these standard entries, as part of their training, so that there might be a chance that misdated artefacts can be discovered. There is little specific in the Holy Word that can be upheld by archaeology. Believers and biblicists have to make an excuse for almost everything that is found, but do it without a qualm. Chaos suits biblicists in particular because nothing certain can then rock their leaky little coracles. They never wonder at the apparent perversity of God, or consider that men who were cleverer than they are have fooled them.
G Zorn, six decades later, noticed that some of Bade’s drawings made no sense. Features from different strata had not been distinguished, so that a gate opened on to a blank wall, and such absurdities. Making an attempt to sort out the confused layers, Zorn found a stratum of grand architecture had been confused with earlier lesser stuff. He decided it was the Babylonian period that Bade had missed utterly. It turned out that Mizpah was so prosperous as an administrative center in less than fifty years that it had already spawned its own suburb.
So, we have to believe from the excavators’ reports—when we have them—in these instances, the towns remained prosperous throughout the Babylonian occupation but were wasted in the Persian period! Everywhere else the situation was reversed. In all honesty, nothing stops any of these finds from being Persian. Impressions of the word “moshah” or “mwsh” are found on the body of some vessels, and “msh” on the handles of others. A cuneiform script from a bracelet in a presumed neo-Babylonian language is assigned to the Babylonian period. Seal impressions are also found at Gibeon with “gbn” and “gdr” two of the words found, together with what seemed to be personal names often theophoric in “iah”. Just as interesting is that the inscribed word “mwsh” is Moses, the local rendering of the Persian “Mazda” (rendered by the Assyrians, for example as “Mazas”). Since Moses is actually Ezra, the historical law bringer misnamed as his own God, these finds are logically Persian, and even the name Mizpah might be a different local rendering of “Mazda”.
Attic pottery is said to date the destruction of these towns exactly to 480 BC, but no historical reason for the wastage of these cities at this time are known. However, the rebellion of Megabyxos happened about 30 years on, and could have involved them, but nobody knows. So, the towns could have been early Persian, then flattened by the Persians in response to rebellion, or even occupation by rebellious Egyptians, Egypt being troublesome to the Persians about that time. If the neo-Babylonian assignments hold up, then Judah in Babylonian times was nothing more than part of Benjamin. Otherwise here was where the earliest Persian colonists settled.
Sites to the west and south of Jerusalem, including Lachish, were also not resettled until the Persian period. At Beth Shemesh, only one tomb could arguably have been considered to have Babylonian remains. In the south, at the Beersheba valley, Arad, Aroer and other places as far as Kadesh Barnea, were destroyed and not resettled until the fourth century, toward the end of the Persian occupation (based on ostraca), when the people resettled were Idumaeans and Arabs. Fortresses accepted as having been Edomite at Hazera and Tell el Khaleifeh were also destroyed, and only the latter was later resettled with Canaanites, Idumaeans and Greeks, by the Persians.
In Judah, the evidence is that the Babylonians wasted the country leaving the survivors living a “rudimentary existence”:
It has proved extremely difficult to find its traces in the material remains.E Stern
The cities ceased to exist, and tiny settlements at anonymous sites were founded at a low economic level, perhaps what might have been expected of survivors if the cities had been disease ridden. Some of the small settlements yielded up “material believed to date from the sixth century BCE” (E Stern). Judah seems to have been depopulated and impoverished during the Babylonian conquest.
In Jerusalem, deep destruction layers were excavated in the City of David’s eastern Slope where dozens of clay vessels and bullae bearing names mentioned in Jeremiah were found. Destruction in the upper city on the Western Hill was also dug out. Here it was that the Babylonian arrow heads were found along with local ones. Though Jeremiah 41:5 says there was some resettlement of Jerusalem, the archaeology does not support it. While shanty dwellers cannot be absolutely excluded, archaeology has no evidence of a functioning city until the Persians established it! G Barkays’s claim of tombs at Ketef Hinnom used during the Babylonian occupation is questionable. The evidence far better suits the usual gap in usage in the Babylonian occupation until the Persians came. All of the lesser sites south and east of Jerusalem attest to a gap in settlement when the villages were destroyed and apparently not used at all except as occasional shanties. It remained thus until the Persians re-settled the land. Even towns like Engedi and Jericho were the same.
Some places excavated—like Khirbet el Qom and Tell Beit Mirsim—never even recovered under the Persians. Ramat Rahel and Beth Zur eventually recovered in the Persian or Hellenistic ages. In the hills south of Jerusalem, the abandonment seemed to be complete. Edomites settled there under the Persians, though no one can be sure Edomites did not live there before the destruction. The Babylonians left the country utterly destroyed and destitute, with some poor shanties being the only signs of continuing life, except for a very few apparently privileged towns. According to A Mazar, Khirbet Abu Tuwein, Beth Shemash and Tell Rabud did continue in occupation and use under the Babylonians.
East of the Jordan, some settlements north of the Jabbok river did not exist to be destroyed by the Babylonians for they had already been destroyed by the Assyrians and were not resettled. Pella, though, was rebuilt by the Assyrians, then destroyed again by the Babylonians. What rebuilding was done thereafter was mainly Persian, but some were left derelict until the Greeks arrived. At Rabbath Ammon, nothing survived into the Babylonian era except a few tombs. One of them, even W F Albright accepted, was Persian. Similar nearby tombs at Kilda, for example, were dated by Attic pots to the Persian era. A cemetary at Tell Mazar in the Jordan valley was dated in one stratum to the Babylonian period, but sites at Tell Nimrin, Tell Deir Alla and Tell es Sadiyeh showed the familiar hiatus in use between the Assyrian and Persian periods.
Babylonian structures have been claimed at Tell el Umeiri, but although an ostracon in the foundations is dated to 550 BC, a bulla, also in the foundations, advertises the property as being of “Malkiot, servant of Baal Yasha”, assumed by the excavator L Herr, to be Baalis, the last king of Ammon (Jer 41). If either Jeremiah is wrongly dated or the identity assumed is wrong, the building could be Persian. Herr says other settlements also continued in use in Babylonian times. Maybe! It is hard to imagine that everything ceased in Hatti in the Babylonian era. What is certain is that most urban activity did, and rural activities only continued at a subsistence level. Moab and Edom have no Babylonian remains, except at Bozrah where C Bennett claims there is a Babylonian stratum.
Summarising the textual evidence, of the three inscriptions that could have been Babylonian, two are Persian Babylonian not neo-Babylonian, and the other is of dubious provenance anyway. Of two Babylonian seal inscriptions, one is Persian and the other of no known context, and so useless. Babylonian cylinder seals were common but only two have been found in Palestine, both Persian. One depicts Ea as a goat fish facing a bird man with a scorpion’s tail. Besides these, seal stamps are relatively common in Palestine. Their motifs are typically Babylonian, but they could have been from neo-Babylonian or Persian times, their contexts being inadequate to distinguish them, but the general absence of neo-Babylonian contexts suggests that these will be Persian. So, some of them could have been relics of the Babylonian occupation, but those with a clear context have always been Persian.
Burial Goods
The many tombs of the period are said to continue an Iron Age tradition of being cut into rock, with benches for laying the dead and a pit in the center for old bones, though features peculiar to them advertise them as being “transitional” between Iron Age and Persian—the Persians were particular to have rock tombs for purity reasons. It is essentially the type of tomb that Jesus was said to have been laid in. The tombs often have a bowl or a jar placed in them, a widespread practice in Persian times, but not in the Iron Age, so the “transitional” forms suggest Persian not Iron Age. No typically Babylonian objects have been found in them. Of course, such tombs, once cut, could be used continuously thereafter, and so could span eras, but E Stern concludes from their similarities “it seems likely that all these tombs are contemporaneous”. Moreover, he argues, they have all been dated too high! Many of the richest are obviously Achaemenid, from the Persian Jewelry and Greek pots found in them. In one case, at Ketef Hinnom, a unique Greek coin from Cos can be dated to 570 BC. If the coin had travelled fairly quickly from Cos to Palestine, the tomb could have been Babylonian. More usually, coins travel slowly and remain in circulation for a long time, especially when they become a treasured object like this one evidently was rather than merely currency. The balance of probability suggests that, once again, this tomb was Persian rather than Babylonian. Rock tombs can span long periods of usage, but the weight of evidence in these cases suggests they were Persian.
The gradation in pottery types is from Late Iron Age to Persian with nothing being characteristically Babylonian. Around 600 BC, the pottery is Iron Age. It continues in use to mid-century with new types slowly appearing that continue into the Persian period. Mostly they are found in cemetaries, helping to explain what seems to be a gradation, depending on the proportion of old (Iron Age) and new (Persian) tombs. The absence of Babylonian pots is striking:
There are almost no pottery vessels from Palestine that may be exclusively attributed to the Babylonian period.E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Tomb 14 at Beth Shemesh is exceptional in having three types of oil lamp, Iron Age ones, Persian ones, and unusual Babylonian ones. It suggests a date when all three could have been equally valued, and that is about the last quarter of the sixth century. At Ketef Hinnom, 250 complete pots were found, mostly classified as Babylonian, though Persian and Iron Age pots were present in the collection. The pots of the Persian period show the collection was deposited then, and not by anyone in Babylonian times. Though Persian rule began in 538 BC, it seems that no extensive colonization of Judah occurred until many decades later, in the fifth century, so much of this collection of Babylonian pots could have been Persian in fact. Indeed, many of the curious pots and lamps said to have been Babylonian can be shown to be later than the Babylonian occupation. A Tomb at Shechem included all of these characteristic wares and other artefacts of the Babylonians, but the presence of three Attic lekythoi dated it unequivocally to 400 BC or later. In fact, there is a gap in Greek pottery in the sixth century caused by the devastation of the Levantine ports by the Babylonians, and the resulting impoverishment of the region. Greek pots appeared in serious numbers only in Persian times when the shahs opened up the Phœnician ports.
Metal artefacts such as utensils, bowls, dippers and strainers are of Mesopotamian designs, but mostly from the Persian period. Combs, mirrors, pins, boxes and jewels were the same, and arrowheads found in some men’s tombs were either locally made or of the Irano-Scythian type considered as markers of Babylonian conquests such as those at Jerusalem, Engedi, Ashkelon, and so on.
The various types of metal vessels, jewelry, and weapons, only begin to appear in the Babylonian period, but their main period of distribution is during the Persian period.E Stern
Nothing can be considered exclusively and so definitively Babylonian. No sanctuaries or cult objects ever found in Palestine are Babylonian. The crude clay figurines that used to be made ceased. Figurines were made under the Persians but by a new method. Not a single document pertaining to the occupation has ever been found. What was supposed to have been Babylonian is overwhelmingly Persian. Overall the evidence of a Babylonian presence in the region between 600 and 540 BC is so slight that it is tempting to question what evidence there is as being wrongly attributed. Scientific caution means it is impossible to exclude all the Babylonian finds from the Babylonian period, but not one of them is certain. The difference in the quantity of finds of the Babylonian period and the preceding Assyrian one is immense, though both were of a similar length. No one could doubt that the Assyrians were in Palestine, but the Babylonians left no sure traces of themselves. The Assyrians deported rulers and destroyed the facilities of opponents, but moved in rulers from elsewhere with instructions to restore society and its culture. The Persians did the same. The Babylonians simply destroyed and deported, leaving economies in ruins, and people to starve.
To judge by the bible and archaeology, Babylonians had no interest in their colonies. They seemed not even to appreciate their value as cash cows, simply robbing them and leaving them desolated. If so, it was foolish and short-sighted, and it is hardly surprising that the new Babylonian empire was short lived. The only other explanation is that the region was devastated by plague towards the end of the Assyrian occupation. Herodotus and the bible, even more so, hints at the Assyrians being plagued. A plague could have weakened the Assyrians enough to force them to withdraw, and given the Babylonians the chance to succeed them. Plague would also explain the exit of those wealthy enough to travel to safer lands. Perhaps, in this instance, they were not deported. If plague had become endemic in the region, the new conquerors would have had every incentive to leave the blasted lands unattended.
The trouble is that no one has investigated it as a possibility because the bible does not suggest specifically there was any such epidemic. Maybe the original divine punishment for apostasy was disease, but after the colonization of Yehud by the Persians, the Jews invented the “exile”—really nothing more than a few thousand nobles fleeing the disease—to account for their “return”! There is no doubt that the ancient world was struck by epidemics, and the bible makes an issue of them in the case of the Egyptians, but to highlight any instance of the Chosen People being hit by a devastating epidemic might have been thought to be unfortunate propaganda for the biblical authors, who therefore found a secondary explanation of the Babylonian desolation.
Anyway, the Babylonians left all the towns of Judah in ruins. It is one of the excuses the biblicists had for adjusting the archaeology of Judah to their own expectations. Another excuse was that the culture of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians was so alike that they were allegedly difficult to distinguish. The trick worked like this. Everything was dated to the Assyrian period when most of the Jewish scriptures are set, confirming Judah as a thriving literate country, when the bible required it, but 300 years before it was. It left nothing for the Babylonian and Persian periods, the excuse being Judah was in ruins. Neat, eh? Of what is allowed to be Babylonian, much is Persian, many seal impressions for example.
