What was babylonian exile

Jewish history was permanently altered by the destruction of the First Temple, and the exile that came afterwards. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you. Wood engraving after a painting by Eduard Bendemann Museum Kunstpalast. Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily. Sign Up. Excavations in Mesopotamia have revealed a few traces of the Judahite exiles.

Firstly, excavations at Babylon have surfaced a variety of so-called assignment lists. These texts list names of prisoners at the Babylonian court who were allowed rations of food. The king was kept alive as diplomatic spare change for a future situation.

Their role was to supply food for the population in the urban nucleus of Babylon. The documents make clear that the Judaeans lived together in an ethnic group. They were not treated as slaves. A majority remained living there even after the change from Babylonian to Persian rule.

These are indications that life in the exile was not as dreadful as suggested by Ps In a few decades the Persians had occupied an area stretching from the Indus River to the Nile. The famous Cyrus Cylinder is often seen as extrabiblical evidence for the historicity of the decree of Cyrus in Ezra 1. Recent rereading has shown, however, that the text concerns the return of divine images from cities surrounding Babylon, from where they were exiled by Nabonidus.

This passage has nothing to do with Judaeans, Jews, or Jerusalem. The return from exile was a long process of waves of returnees. Bob Becking taught for thirty years Hebrew Bible at Utrecht. Did you know…? The deportation from Jerusalem in is reported in the Hebrew Bible 2Kgs as well as in the Babylonian Chronicle.

Evidence on the march of the Babylonians to Jerusalem in is found in the Lachish Letters. These inscribed ostraca date from the period just before the conquest of Jerusalem. They contain letters written by the officer in command at Lachish expressing his fear of the foe.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the land of Judah was not uninhabited during the Babylonian exile. Some biblical stories are set in an exilic context Ezekiel; Daniel. Excavations in Mesopotamia have revealed traces of the Judahite exiles in Babylon. An extensive Greek settlement took place, Greek military colonies were established, and the character of the ancient cities underwent a change.

In fact the vast majority of the Hellenistic cities were ancient ones which were now organized according to the politico-social pattern of the Greek cities. Within a short time the members of the upper classes among the local population joined the ranks of the settlers who had come from Greece, particularly prominent in this respect being the Phoenicians who became the standard bearers of Hellenism.

Among its most notable centers were Gaza and Ashkelon on the southern coast and Ptolemais Acre to the north. Cities bearing a Hellenistic stamp were also established in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee and in Transjordan. The Jews were required to teach Greek in their schools and with it, of course, Greek philosophy. There was a yearly tribute to the Ptolemys, and this tax was always considered too high.

However, the Torah was officially recognized as the binding law of the country. The Jewish High Priest still led the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem, collected the taxes, and basically controlled the government. He was assisted by a council of wealthy elders called the gerousia. Under this system, both priestly families and a number of lay families became extremely wealthy. They had both political and social influence and they were quite content with being under Ptolemaic rule.

This new upper class was satisfied enough that they gradually assimilated Greek thought and customs, similar to Jews in the United States over the past century.

They changed their names, they set up gymnasia though not in Jerusalem where the men played sports; they became involved in Greek art, literature, mathematics, and science. Most important, they changed the basic financial structure of the people. Until Alexander the Great, the Hebrews lived by a barter system.

People exchanged one produce for another, and the process of acquiring was actually taking the object. Under Greek influence, the major form of purchase was with money.

The utilization of money encouraged different kinds of trades and increased the benefits of city life. Seeing the financial advantages, more and more Jews moved into cities rather than staying on farms. City life and farm life were very different, and the rules and regulations created for farm life had to be adapted to meet the realities of city life.

The group that began this interpretive, adaptive process within the Jewish world were the Pharisees. Although Greek thought had not become the norm on the Judean farm, by the third century BCE, it had become part of Jewish life. This was especially clear in Alexandria, where the Jews had become so Hellenized that they needed a Greek translation of the Torah. The Greek version of the Bible known as the Septuagint probably owes its name to a story related in the Letter of Aristeas, according to which 72 scholars, summoned from Jerusalem by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, achieved a perfect Greek translation of the Pentateuch, which was deposited in the Alexandrian library.

This story was embellished with time until the 72 interpreters were credited with the translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. It is widely accepted that what the Letter of Aristeas relates about an official translation of the Pentateuch, made in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century B. However, it is assumed that the project was initiated by the Greek-speaking Jewish community itself, which needed a version of the Torah for worship and instruction.

This version, which was undoubtedly a collective undertaking, perhaps based on previous written or oral attempts, was hailed with enthusiasm by the community. It was followed by translations of the other books of the Hebrew Bible. In the third century Ptolemaic rule in Judea was on the defensive against the Seleucid kingdom which governed Syria and which also laid claim to the Land of Israel. For most of that century the Ptolemies generally kept the upper hand, but the constant fighting within the country took its toll on the people and their lifestyle.

The Seleucids took over control of Judea. Antiochus III didn't change much. The Seleucid king confirmed the existing regime in Judea and even gave its inhabitants additional privileges: the Judean population was exempted from all taxation for three years and thereafter granted a reduction of a third in its taxes.

The priests, the freedmen, and the members of the Gerousia were given complete exemption from taxes. Similar relations continued also under Antiochus' son, Seleucus IV This made the Greek-oriented Jewish community very happy. With Seleucid encouragement, some Jews even challenged the need to keep the dietary laws and Shabbat.

There was some intermarriage. Many of the wealthy Jews viewed Greek culture as being more sophisticated than traditional Hebrew life. This view was sometimes held by the High Priest himself.

Some Jews refused to have their children circumcised. There was a small group of nationalists who struggled to keep the people within the religion of their ancestors, but they were a minority and not very popular.. Jews would have become even more assimilated if it had not been for the reign of Antiochus IV, the king in the Chanukah story.

Chanukah celebrates an historical event. In B. Although the holiday focuses on the specific victory against King Antiochus's army, the story of Chanukah begins long before that specific event. He didn't force anyone to participate in that culture, but he lowered the taxes for any group willing to accept this way of life.

When Alexander died, his Middle Eastern kingdom divided into two groups: the eastern kingdom including modern-day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon was called the Seleucid kingdom; the western kingdom including Egypt was the Ptolemaic kingdom. These two groups fought one another for political control, and Judea was caught between them.

The Jews of Judea didn't care which group ruled them. They had their Temple, their sacrifices, and their High Priest, who governed the country. It didn't matter to whom they had to pay vassal taxes; the taxes were always too high anyway. The major political center of Greek life was the polis, the city, and the wealthier Jews succeeded in having Jerusalem recognized as a polis. They changed their dress, their names, and their life-style to those of the Greeks.

He lost. Word got back to Jerusalem that Antiochus was dead. A former High Priest, Jason, saw this as an opportunity to wrench the priesthood from Antiochus's lackey, Menelaus. He set up a revolution in Jerusalem.

Antiochus, of course, was still alive. Furious, he slaughtered a large number of Jews, declared martial law, and banned certain practices of Judaism as capital crimes, specifically Shabbat and circumcision. In addition, he profaned the Temple by introducing foreign worship. Antiochus was supported by some Jews.

The prohibitions established by King Antiohcus were intolerable to a group of Jews called the Hasidim not related to the modern-day Chasidim. They fought against these decrees, but they needed leadership. They found this leadership in a priestly family, the Hasmoneans. The head of the Hasmonean clam was Mattathias. We don't know much about him personally. The First Book of Maccabees reveals that he was a priest who moved from Jerusalem more than thirty miles to Modi'in. Therefore, he probably was not part of the big-power priesthood.

When a Seleucid ordered Mattathias to participate in a foreign sacrifice in Modi'in, he refused and slew a Jew who cam forward to obey the command. After slaying a Greek officer as well, Mattathias and his followers fled to the hills, and thus began the Hasmonean revolt. He successfully united the people under his authority.

Judah, called Maccabee, the Hammer, was one of Mattathias's five sons. There is a tradition stating that Judah inscribed on his shield the Hebrew letters mem chaf bet yod, which are the first letters of the words, "Who is like you among the gods, Adonai. Antiochus sent down an army to wipe out the revolt. In addition, there were rivalries between the two groups of Jews. It is clear that the wealthy and professional Jews in Babylon regarded themselves as the true Jewish people.

The salient feature of the exile, however, was that the Jews were settled in a single place by Nebuchadnezzar. While the Assyrian deportation of Israelites in BC resulted in the complete disappearance of the Israelites, the deported Jews formed their own community in Babylon and retained their religion, practices, and philosophies.

Some, it would seem, adopted the Chaldean religion for they name their offspring after Chaldean gods , but for the most part, the community remained united in its common faith in Yahweh. They called themselves the "gola," "exiles" , or the "bene gola" "the children of the exiles" , and within the crucible of despair and hopelessness, they forged a new national identity and a new religion. The exile was unexplainable; Hebrew history was built on the promise of Yahweh to protect the Hebrews and use them for his purposes in human history.

Their defeat and the loss of the land promised to them by Yahweh seemed to imply that their faith in this promise was misplaced. This crisis, a form of cognitive dissonance when your view of reality and reality itself do not match one another , can precipitate the most profound despair or the most profound reworking of a world view. For the Jews in Babylon, it did both.

From texts such as Lamentations , which was probably written in Jerusalem , and Job , written after the exile, as well as many of the Psalms , Hebrew literature takes on a despairing quality. The subject of Job is human suffering itself. Undeserving of suffering, Job, an upright man, is made to suffer the worst series of calamities possible because of an arbitrary test.