The archives of some Judeans deported to Babylon

30 December 2015

Some written sources — other than the Bible — document for the first time the lives of the Judeans exiled to Babylon in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. About a hundred cuneiform tablets inscribed in Akkadian (originating from a private collection) were made the subject of a temporary exhibition titled ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem.

These texts, published in 2015, very likely originated from illegal excavation sites in the south of Iraq.

Inscribed between 572 and 477 BCE, the tablets constitute the archives of a community of one or two thousand people who were deported to various places in southern Mesopotamia. The prophet Ezekiel recounts: ‘Now it happened in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, I was among the captives, by the river Chebar’ (Ezekiel 1:1). The river Chebar (Kebar) is mentioned several times on the cuneiform tablets. Part of the aforementioned community lived at al Yahudu, ‘the City of Judeans’, the name given in the Bible and in Babylonian sources to Jerusalem (Chronicles 25:28). Al Yahudu, corresponds, in this context, to the place where the deportees of the Kingdom of Judea had been installed in Babylonia a few years after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. In fact, following the revolt in Judea in 589 BCE and its alliance with Egypt against Babylonia, Nebuchadnezzar II invaded Judea and placed Jerusalem under siege in 587. The city was sacked, the great temple razed, and the population deported to Babylonia. The Judean community of al Yahudu did not represent an isolated case; other populations deported to Babylonia were assembled in places that were given the name of their city of origin: hence there existed an Ascalon and a Gaza in Babylonia.

The archives are chiefly composed of literature dealing with economics, sales and rental contracts, contracts relating to the price of grain, and even include wills and a marriage contract. The texts describe the everyday life and activities of a rural community over several generations — their cultivation of the land, payment of taxes, the construction of houses and their compliance with military service obligations. Some of the members of the community built wealth; they owned houses, plantations and slaves, and subsequently became integrated into the Babylonian bureaucratic hierarchy. This banished, albeit free, community seems to have fully adapted itself to local ways. Nevertheless, it also preserved a certain cultural and religious identity which can be discerned in the number of proper nouns one encounters that are linked to the Jewish religion (e.g. Natan-Yâma/Nathaniel). One also comes across the names of Babylonians, Arameans and Egyptians, and some of the texts belong to some other western-Semitic exiles, whose history is similar to that of the Judeans. This fusion of proper nouns bears witness to a mixing of cultures; indeed, it demonstrates that a degree of acculturation took place between the different communities through the formation of names integrating, for example, the name of the god of the Judeans with a Babylonian construction (Yahû-šar-uṣur ‘God protect the King’, also voiced as Bēl-šar-uṣur).

Certain tablets bear on their left-hand edge an alphabetic inscription in Aramean (text 41) or Palaeo-Hebrew (text 10), where one can read the proper noun Shalemiyahû. These references on a tablet’s edge would have served for the storage of cuneiform tablets standing upright, precisely like today’s books, whose titles can be read on their spines.

These cuneiform tablets therefore cast light from a new angle on the life of the Judeans exiled to Babylon. Given that they have originated from illegal excavations, their provenance is unfortunately unknown, in common with many others sold today on the antiquities market, often to the financial gain of the ISIS jihadists. If they had been discovered during official excavation work, no doubt it would have been possible to pinpoint with a high degree of confidence the location of the town of Yahudu, to reconstruct the architectural characteristics of the exiles’ dwellings, to analyse their furnishings and everyday objects, and to assess the extent of their integration into the local environment.