Babylonian captivity

The Babylonian captivity, or Babylonian exile, is the name given to the deportation of many people from the Kingdom of Judah to Mesopotamia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the early 6th century BC, and to the decades they spent there. It followed two sieges of Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar II, the second of which, in 587 BC, destroyed the city and the First Temple. The exile ended after the Persians took Babylon in 539 BC, and it left a deep and lasting mark on Judaism.

Late in the 7th century BC Judah was a small client kingdom caught between Egypt and the rising power of Babylonia. After Babylon beat the Egyptian army at Carchemish in 605 BC, King Jehoiakim of Judah began paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar, and some young nobles were taken to Babylon. When an attempted Babylonian invasion of Egypt failed in 601 BC, Jehoiakim stopped paying.

Nebuchadnezzar answered with a siege of Jerusalem that began in late 598 BC. Jehoiakim died during it and his young son Jehoiachin, also called Jeconiah, surrendered the city in March 597 BC. The king, his court and many leading citizens, among them the prophet Ezekiel, were carried off to Babylon; one account puts the number at about 7,000. A Babylonian chronicle confirms the capture of the city and the installation of a new king, and ration tablets found in Babylon list supplies for the captive king of Judah and his sons.

Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah king, but he too rebelled, relying on an alliance with the pharaoh Hophra. The Babylonians returned in 589 BC, devastated the towns of Judah and again besieged Jerusalem. In 587 BC the city fell. Its walls, the Temple and the houses of the leading families were destroyed; Zedekiah was blinded after watching his sons executed and was taken to Babylon with further captives. Excavations show that almost the whole walled city was burnt. Judah became a Babylonian province, and after the governor Gedaliah was murdered many refugees fled to Egypt, with perhaps one more deportation around 582 BC.

Archaeologists estimate that Judah's population fell from roughly 110,000 to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000, through deportation, war, famine and flight. Some settlements outside Jerusalem nonetheless carried on without obvious disruption.

The deportees were settled in farming communities in Mesopotamia, such as Tel-Abib near Nippur. Some scholars think they lived not much worse than at home, though there is also evidence that exiled leaders were reduced to labouring. Cuneiform tablets displayed in 2017 trace the business affairs of one Judean family across four generations. Without the Temple, worship moved into homes, and practices such as Sabbath observance and circumcision gained new importance.

After Cyrus the Great captured Babylon in 539 BC, the biblical Book of Ezra says he allowed the exiles to go home in 538 BC. Judah became the Persian province of Yehud, and the Second Temple was built, probably between about 520 and 515 BC. Many historians doubt that a specific decree for Judah existed, seeing instead a general Persian policy of letting deported peoples return, and archaeology suggests the return was a slow trickle over decades. Many Jews chose to stay in Mesopotamia, where a large community survived into modern times.

The exile is often seen as a turning point in Jewish history. In this period the Aramaic script that became the Hebrew alphabet was adopted, much of the Hebrew Bible, including the Torah, is thought to have been edited, and scribes and sages rose as leaders. It also marks, for many historians, the start of a permanent Jewish diaspora.

Our 700 BCE map shows the region before the Babylonian conquest, and our 500 BCE map shows it as part of the Achaemenid Empire after the return. See also the fall of Babylon and modern Israel.