So what can we say about the conditions in Judah after the Babylonian conquest? A number of scholars have insisted that the land was not empty. And by this, they intend to take issue with a naive interpretation of the biblical text. According to which, the Babylonians deported most of Judah's inhabitants, and Judah remained in a condition of ruins until the Persian rulers who conquered the Babylonians empire, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. Now this view is sharply rejected by other scholars and rightly so. First of all, one must be quick to point out that even the Biblical texts do not present the exile in such a facile way. And secondly, in denying the radical discontinuities that the Babylonian conquest introduced, these scholars have overstated their case. Almost every urban and major military installation from the 7th century in Judah was destroyed or abandoned. With few exceptions, they remained unoccupied until well into the Persian period. The urban sector in Judah is marked by a major break, or a gap, or what we call discontinuity. And everyone seems to agree on this point with regard to the urban sector. The difference of opinion relates not to the urban sector where the cities are, to the major sites, but rather these smaller sites, these ones on the countryside, the rural sites. Which was the countryside was dotted by many farmsteads and hamlets and villages and they're un-excavated and they're more numerous and much smaller. And in contrast with the major urban sites and archaeological tills, they have not been subjected to the intensive excavations that really require us to do in order to study them and to know what has happened to them over the course of the centuries. Yet still some insist that the rural sector in Judah experienced minimal destruction. And since a large part of Judah's population before the Babylonian onslaught lived in the rural sector, these scholars claimed that Judah high society is characterized by more continuity than discontinuity. Now, there are many problems with this view. First, is that the small sites in the rural sector in most cases did not continue into the Persian period. Second, the rural sector depended on the urban sector in many ways and it's likely it could not have persisted in the same way when the major sites were destroyed. The whole infrastructure was gone and these small sites depended on them for their existence. Third, there are a number of items in the material culture from Judah during the late Iron Age that did not continue into the Persian period. Thus, in the Iron Age II period, in the late Iron Age, we see a new type of burial that emerged in Judah. And these are tombs that were hewn into rock with benches, these bench tombs. And we can count hundreds of these benched Judah height tombs all over the area that is the Kingdom of Judah. And they were probably used by extended families or clans for generations and became important spaces for kind of the clan identity. Now this type of burial disappears in the Persian period. And the same goes for the four-roomed house. The four roomed house was that common kind of a house that we noticed throughout the Iron Age, within Israel and Judah. They are common up to the Babylonian destruction, but are not attested in the Persian period. Now, similarly with the Judahite pillar figurines, the next subject of my conversation with Eran Derby, and the video from last week. They're very widespread, as Professor Darby points out, in Judah during the late monarch period. And they go all the way up to the Babylonian conquest. And they are so widespread, and so proliferated throughout the Judahite territories, that they are understood to represent some kind of Judahite identity. They're very different, one can tell, differences in style and shape and so forth was in Judah and then beyond the borders of Judah, there's a sharp demarcation there. And the presence of these Judah high pillar figurines indicates to archaeologists that an occupational layer of a site is older than the Persian period, for example. So, it's so clear that the Judah pillar figurines are from the late monarchic period that one can use them as a dating indication. So, all this goes to show that something in the material culture had drastically changed. The epigraphic and linguistic evidence clearly changes, also, with the Babylonian destruction. And then there's the elaborate and fascinating system that we can't really go into right now, the measuring weights, they're widely attested likely Judean pillar figurines. They're widely attested throughout Judah. But they disappear with the Babylonian conquest. And the reason for this is that there was the collapse in the economic structure that the Babylonian onslaught brought. Further attesting to the collapse is, and the economic collapse, is that we don't really see any Greek pottery. These international wares that are brought from the East Aegean and throughout the Mediterranean, all of that, really is not widely attested after the Babylonian conquest which shows that life had radically changed and there was no longer a market or a demand for expensive international prestige objects. Now the demographic and settlement trends from the late Iron Age to the Hellenistic age is highly debated. It seems safe to say that the level of prosperity that Judah achieved in the 7th century sank precipitously with the end of the Iron Age and the Babylonian destruction. The recovery was extremely slow and gradual. It was not until the late Hellenistic period that comes out of the Persian period that thing return to the way they once were. The population at the lowest point after the Babylonian destruction was probably only one-tenth of what it was during the monarchy period. Across the span of Judah's history the 7th century was a time of great prosperity. Only in [INAUDIBLE] that area that is right between the coastal area and Judahean Highlands, only there was the better of and the reason for that is that the ruler at the end of the 8th century during the reign of king wiped it out and really a lot of havoc there. If the devastation brought by of Babylon was far greater than that brought by Assyrian ruler. Where as Judah recovered from their Assyrian campaigner and quit quickly actually it was crushed demographically, and administratively, and economically and politically, and in many other ways by the Babylonians. And it never really recovered. All these things that we see in the material culture are probably matched, also by ideological changes that the population underwent. Things just radically shifted with the Babylonian destruction and it took many centuries to recover from that devastation.
