So how should we explain the radical demographic decline in Judah after the Babylonian conquest? Where did everyone go? Were they all deported to Babylon? I'll pick up this question in a later video segment this week. But, right now, I want to discuss some of the factors leading to depopulation. And what I say here goes for both Judea and Israel. Now, the first thing we need to recognize is that the death toll in wars in Antiquity was usually quite high. This was due to problems of evacuation, medicines, sanitation, contamination, and pollution and all of that. And since the battles with the great imperial armies that Judah and Israel fought were usually a matter of the population from the countryside taking refuge behind the municipal fortifications in the capital cities and just waiting it out, what we call siege warfare, all these factors played in, in an even more more drastic role. Now contributing to the death toll in a major way was also famine and epidemics. Long after the enemy army had returned home, the subjugated population was still struggling to sur, to survive. I discuss this in an article that you guys can read this week. And as I discussed there, you can see how an invading army sought to destroy the life support systems, what I call life support systems, of an enemy city. It did this through both intentional destruction, that is cutting off or polluting the water sources, laying the fields to waste, or cutting down fruit trees and orchards that took many years to grow, some salt in the ground, and all kinds of different other things like this. And what it did not intentionally destroy was often inadvertently ruined. If the fields were not regularly plowed, locust eggs could grow, could hatch and, and locusts could grow, and it become, it could become a, a catastrophic plague. And that is the case that, even to the present day in times of warfare. Also, protracted fighting or years of siege interfered with the delicate balance of tilling, planting and harvesting, so that when an army left the scene, the population had to struggle for years thereafter. Rib-Adda is a ruler of Byblos during the late Bronze Age, and he writes in one of these Armana Letters that we discussed in the first couple of weeks of the course to the Egyptian pharaoh. And he says there how he's trapped in his own city like a bird in a cage and with the enemy at his doorstep, planting was impossible. He says, for lack of cultivation, my field is like a woman without a husband. This, in turn, he says, had, has as having catastrophic consequences. His own people have sold not only their household object but also their children in order to to buy provisions, and the escalation of hostilities had made field work impossible; they couldn't go out and take care of their field. And threat of starvation during the winter led to the depopulation of the region even for months and years thereafter. Even if the inhabitants of Byblos could hold out against their besiegers, famine was inevitable and would continue to inflict losses long after the military conflict had ceased. So, if the enemy army managed to conquer the city, the collapse of the administration, the social, political infrastructure would of brought about many problems for the surviving population. Once the administration was eradicated, safety was seriously undermine. Conditions of lawlessness and lack of security lead to deaths and voluntary, involuntary migrations to neighboring areas where conditions were better. Finally, after a population had capitulated, the imperial army would often perform public executions. The ones selected for these punitive rituals were often elites and administrative officials and people in the palace. But the numbers could be very high. the, these executions could also be indiscriminate, killing both men, not only men but also women and children. And we have attette, ast, attestations of the burials, in a couple of places like Lachish and Ashdod, from the eighth century. These are during the wars with Assyria. At Ashdod for example, in one locus, we have, 2,434 human beings that were, the remains of these humans were unearthed, and 22% of them were less than 15 years of age at the time of death. In another locus, other remains of another 376 people were found, and the majority of them were also under 15 years of age, and this goes on and on in all these different loci that we can find around Ashdod. And that Lachish had about mass burials for 1,500 people were discovered in the surrounding caves, and many of them were or have their heads severed from their body. So these are not just people who had happened to die, but rather they were executed in very graphic ways. So de, deportations may, may have played a significant role in demographic de, decline, that is the Assyrian, Babylonian armies forcing them through exile to leave their land. But there are many other factors that I've just listed here that both directly and indirectly contributed to the depopulation of Israel and Judah in major ways. In the book of Jeremiah and some other Biblical sources are, offer some glimpses of these larger social dynamics. For example Jeremiah depicts Judahites fleeing across the Jordan to Ammonite territory during conditions of lawlessness in the years after the Babylonian conquest. Eventually a large number make their way down to Egypt, which we noted in the first week of the course, had always been a place which, to which refugees fled in times of both political turmoil and natural catastrophes. Remember how Abraham leaves in the 12th chapter of Genesis, how he immediately goes down at a time of famine to Egypt after he had just arrived there from Mesopotamia. And it's important to realize that the primary reason we even hear about the incidents such as these in the Bible, is that the biblical authors regard Israel's abandonment of its own promised land as one of the worst things imaginable. Finally a note about forced migrations, about deportations. The Assyrian Empire practiced so-called two way deportations. This means that they moved subjugated populations around their empire, uprooting them from their homelands and transporting them or, and transplanting them in regions that they wanted to develop. Thus, we are told in the book of Kings, chapter 17 from 2 Kings 17, that the Assyrians, after conquering Samaria, brought in populations from the east and settled them in Israel's territories. They likely did this in the northern regions of Israel that they had conquered earlier as well. So in the Galilee, remember that Samaria is conquered at the end, but many of the northern regions that had belonged to the king of Israel had been conquered in the years prior to that and were not told about them. And they may have done the same later in, around the area of Judah when they wiped out they [UNKNOWN] and went to war against Hezekiah. Now the reason Biblical authors do not tell us much about the case of Judah, whether they brought in foreign public populations and planted them there, is because the Judai authors in Jerusalem who are responsible for our Biblical sources were in competition with the community in Samaria. That was the people that came to be known as Samaritans. And by claiming that much of the population up there in the north were really foreigners without any long standing ties to the people of Israel, they could deal an ideological blow to their competitors in Samaria. The rivalry between Jerusalem and Samaria is really one of the major communal challenged the biblical authors face. And so, they look for any chance to, kind of, deal with the relationship between Israel and Judah, and by saying that the population of Israel were actually foreigners, and then they can say that these really are not true Israelites. That's just one view, and it's the book of Kings. And, you can find it a bit in Ezra and Nehemiah but not everywhere. So, even if the Assyrians practiced deportations on a much larger scale than the Babylonians, we should not imagine that they deported even more than 20% of the population. And when they did deport them, they kept families intact and moved ethnic groups together, rather than dispersing them. So why is this important? First, because it means that we must imagine many communities that persisted in the former territory of the Kingdom of Israel, who contributed substantially to the formation of the biblical writings, okay? And second, the deported Israelite families and communities most likely maintained their identity over generations and came into contact with Judahites, who had been deported to various places in Mesopotamia. Later, both from the Assyrian deportations but also the Babylonian deportations, they must have come into some kind of contact. In many cases, we can identify deported Israelites and Judahites in the same region or city. What role this played in the formation of a pan-Israelite national identity and the composition history of the biblical text is a difficult question to answer, but one that should be kept in mind as we proceed.
