Part 2: Factors Leading to Depopulation

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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

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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 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.

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