Judeans in Babylonia also known as “Judean Exiles”

The term ‘Judean’ refers to people with origins in the southern kingdom of Judah, which, along with the northern Israelite kingdom, occupied a strategic position between the imperial powers of Mesopotamia (Assyria, and later, Babylonia) and Egypt. Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) vanquished the northern kingdom, and deported the vast majority of Israel’s population throughout locales in Mesopotamia and North Syria. Although he also deported a significant portion of the Judean population, as illustrated in wall reliefs depicting the siege of Lachish and recorded in 2 Kgs 18:14-16, Sennacherib maintained Judah as a political identity, albeit as a vastly reduced vassal state. The scattered redistribution of deportee populations across the landscape complicates the identification and study of Israelites and Judeans in Assyrian sources, as the few distinctively Israelite or Judean names stand in geographic and social isolation from others of the same background; it is thus difficult to trace their history and/or social and economic location. The documentary situation is different with the population of Judah, deported to Babylonia in several waves: in 597 BCE, following Nebuchadnezzar’s capture of Jerusalem, which resulted in the deportation of the 18-year-old king Jehoiachin and his family (2Kgs 24:12-16); in 587 BCE, after destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; and in 582 BCE. Unlike their Assyrian predecessors, Babylonian kings (primarily Nebuchadnezzar) resettled their deportees as largely intact groups and resettled them in single locales, in many cases, in new settlements named for their places of origin. Some deported Judeans were settled in a town called Yahudu (“Judah”). Cuneiform administrative texts (promissory notes, receipts, business ventures, lists, etc.) from Yahudu and nearby locales, preserve personal names containing the name of YHWH in their construction, marking those individuals’ Judean background. The Yahudu texts date from 572-477 BCE, and predate the archives of the entrepreneurial Murašû family (454-405 BCE), which also include evidence of participation of Judeans in the land-for-sector economy, a system by which the crown granted lands to individuals in exchange for performance of military service and/or payment of taxes. Judeans identified as royal merchants appear in a small number of business documents, as well as in a few documents attesting to their service in or proximate to the royal court. As all of the cuneiform sources recording a Judean presence in Babylonia belong to the economic and administrative sector, direct information that they provide on the religious experience of this deportee population is limited.Non UBCUnreviewedFacult