Datasets on Judeans in Babylonia

2020

In Judeans in Babylonia, Tero Alstola presents a comprehensive investigation of deportees in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. By using cuneiform documents as his sources, he offers the first book-length social historical study of the Babylonian Exile, commonly regarded as a pivotal period in the development of Judaism. The results are considered in the light of the wider Babylonian society and contrasted against a comparison group of Neirabian deportees. Studying texts from the cities and countryside and tracking developments over time, Alstola shows that there was notable diversity in the Judeans’ socio-economic status and integration into Babylonian society. Tero Alstola (2020). Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 109. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004365421.

This contribution offers a framework for studying the deportations to and from the southern Levant during the Age of the Mesopotamian empires. It begins with a brief sketch of the importance of deportations as an Assyrian colonial means: the interests of the empire in both the imperial heartland and the southern Levant. The second part is dedicated to an overview of the various available sources, written and material alike, on the lives of the deportees, focusing mainly on their interaction with the hosting society. Concluding this contribution are musings on the fate of the deportees following the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and the destructive Babylonian conquest of the southern Levant.

Today, a colossal body of evidence serves as common ground for archaeologists, historians, and philologists who jointly discuss the deportations of this period and bring to light new aspects of their multifaceted character. This was the aim of the conference held at Tel Aviv University in January 2020 upon which this issue is based: to explore the multifaceted aspects of the deportations to and from the Levant which occurred during the eighth to the sixth centuries bce. The papers presented at the conference vividly illustrate the interdisciplinary character of the discourse by integrating material remains and textual sources of a variety of genres, and the employment of sociological and anthropological models in the study of forced migration and involuntary resettlement. Nine of these conference papers are published here in this special issue of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel.

The paper sketches the life conditions of the captives in rural Babylonia, their chances for social mobility and intercultural interactions (marriages, joint ventures etc.)

2013

Exile was always considered a major factor causing population decline in Judah following the Babylonian conquest. Thus, scholars who believes that not much changed following the conquest claim that not so many could have been exiled, hence most of the population remained in the land. But was exile such an important demographic factor? The article traces the development of this view over the years, and reexamines the various factors leading to demographic decline following wars in the Ancient Near East in general, and in 6th century BCE Judah in particular, in order to arrive at a better understanding of the demographic reality in Judah at the time.

BASOR, 2020

Assyrian imperialism is closely associated with the practice of mass deportation. This practice has been explained by recourse to many different motivations. But can we hope to pinpoint the logic informing deportation rather than merely identifying its advantages? This paper surveys the evidence of deportation in the Levant in the period 745–620 b.c.e. Focusing on deportation in this circumscribed time and place enables a more concentrated account of its use. Deportation is generally argued to have served three broad ends: bolstering the supply of human resources in the Assyrian heartland, meeting particular strategic needs, and dealing with dissent. This paper finds that despite the many uses of deportation, it was first and foremost a punitive instrument intended to curb resistance to Assyrian hegemony. This punitive dimension constituted the foundation of Assyrian deportation in the Levant in the age of Assyrian hegemony.

Dissertation Abstract: The lived experience of deportations and their aftereffects drastically reshaped the socio-cultural milieu of Mesopotamia during the mid-first millennium BCE. This dissertation develops a social history of deportation as implemented and experienced by various social hierarchies in southern Iraq and across Mesopotamia during this era. Reassessing our conceptions of empire, religion, the colonial and post-colonial experience of the subaltern and / or colonized, I present a nuanced depiction of the lived experience of the first millennium BCE by focusing on the social history of deportation. By grounding my research in the period's geographic and climatic limitations before approaching the relevant texts, I illustrate how the use of deportation changes from the Middle Assyrian period until the beginning of the Persian period. This strategy was used for a multitude of reasons in which the oft-touted for " god / king and country " stood as a unifying call to the empire's elite. I therefore present deportation (that is, the colonial practice of moving a people from X to Y) from multiple viewpoints: from that of the royal / elite, of tribal elements often blamed for imperial difficulties, and of those who were deported to the region of Nippur, Iraq (mod. Nuffar / Niffur, SE of Baghdad). The site of Nippur was selected due to its being the likely provenance of a recently published collection of texts relating to exiled Judeans (CUSAS 28). By utilizing a method developed

In sum, archaeology has great potential to aid the investigation of migrations and deportations. However, further basic research must take place before establishing whether the potential cases would produce positive results for the study of the Assyrian deportations to Palestine. What can be established with certainty is that the deportees brought with them certain knowledge and cultural traditions, rather than physical artefacts. Upon settling in the land, they began applying this knowledge and cultural traditions to their new environment. Thus, the artefacts they produced in their new homeland might indicate such migrants’ presence and sometimes even their origin. In this respect, the Assyrian deportees do not differ from other groups of migrants in the history of Palestine whose behavior in the new land was dictated by their ancestral tradition and the way they adapted it to their new homeland.