Part 1: Judah After the Babylonian Conquest

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The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future

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Emory University

The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future

124 оценки

With its walls razed to ground by Babylon’s armies, Jerusalem joined a long line of ancient vanquished cities—from Ur and Nineveh and Persepolis to Babylon itself. While some recovered from the destruction, others did not. But none responded to political catastrophe by fashioning the kind of elaborate and enduring monument to their own downfall that we find in the Bible. Most conquered populations viewed their subjugation as a source of shame. They consigned it to oblivion, opting instead to extol the golden ages of the past. The biblical authors in contrast reacted to loss by composing extensive writings that acknowledge collective failure, reflect deeply upon its causes, and discover thereby a ground for collective hope. Working through colorful biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts, and drawing on an array of comparative examples, the course illustrates the thoroughgoing manner with which biblical authors responded to defeat by advancing a demotic agenda that places the community at the center. The aim of the biblical authors was to create a nation, and they sought to realize this goal via a shared text, which includes stories and songs, wisdom and laws. This corpus of writings belongs, without a doubt, to humanity’s greatest achievements. Whereas the great civilizations of the Near East invested their energies and resources into monuments of stone that could be destroyed by invading armies, the biblical authors left a literary legacy that has been intensively studied until the present day. More important, these authors’ visionary response to defeat brought to light a radical new wisdom: the notion that a people is greater than the state which governs it, and that a community can survive collapse when all of its members can claim a piece of the pie and therefore have a reason to take an active part in its collective life.

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The Making of the Bible as a Response to Defeat

In this module, we dive into the question of why the biblical authors created the Bible. We begin by looking at various depictions of how Judahites were living after the fall of Judah. These depictions provide us with insight into what the biblical authors were facing after the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. We then turn our attention to the biblical writings as we deconstruct and reconstruct the text in order to discover what drives the biblical project. By engaging the text critically, we begin to see how the biblical authors creatively combined sources to create a pan-Israelite history. Upon completion of this module, learners will be able to: 1) Differentiate between extrabiblical and biblical depictions of Judahite communities living in various locations after the fall of Judah, 2) Identify distinct traditions or sources within the biblical text and distinguish between core narratives and supplements or links, and 3) Compare and contrast the dominant theories concerned with the composition of the Bible.

Introduction2:18

Part 1: Judah After the Babylonian Conquest7:26

Part 2: Factors Leading to Depopulation9:15

A Judahite Community in Egypt9:46

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Dr. Jacob L. Wright
Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible
Candler School of Theology and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies

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.

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