Cuneiform Sources for Judeans in Babylonia in the Neo‐Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods: An Overview

Abstract

Cuneiform Sources for Judeans in Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods: An Overview Cuneiform documents written in Babylonia provide valuable evidence for the experience of the Judeans who came there during the Exile and who remained throughout the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods. Recent publications add significant data to the corpus previously known. The article describes and summarizes the relevant cuneiform evidence that informs an understanding of the Judeans' role in the social and economic history of Babylonia. Comparanda make clear that the Judeans occupied a place in the Babylonian economy and social order similar to that of other deportee populations in Babylonia.The Bible preserves historical narratives of, as well as prophetic and literary responses to, the Babylonian Exile and its aftermath; these, in turn, ref lect on events that catalyze the transformation of Judean deportees and their descendants into adherents of the nascent Jewish identity and faith. Scholars recognize the need to incorporate a wide variety of documentation in order to assess the full range of Judean experiences in the early Second Temple period. Recent studies introduce new perspectives to the analysis of archeological, historical, and textual evidence for economic and social history in Judah (see, e.g., Miller, Ben Zvi, and Knoppers 2015). With regard to the sources produced by the Babylonian Empire, scholars have had to contend, until recently, with a corpus of limited size and scope that constrained contextualizing social and economic experiences of Judeans there. The picture began to change with the publication of an administrative text written in 498 BCE ( Joannès and Lemaire 1999; Lemaire 2005) in āl-Yāḫūdu, "Judahtown." This previously unknown settlement in southern Babylonia offered concrete evidence for the existence of a settlement populated largely by Judeans nearly a century after the first exilic wave (597 BCE). In 2014, Pearce and Wunsch published another 100+ administrative and legal documents written in āl-Yāḫūdu and environs; editions of another collection of nearly equal size and contents are due to appear (Wunsch forthcoming). The date of the earliest āl-Yāḫūdu text now known, 572 BCE, confirms a Judean presence on the Babylonian landscape in the first generation following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. The latest āl-Yāḫūdu text dates to 477 BCE; thus there exists nearly continuous documentation of Judeans in Babylonia to and beyond the period of the construction of the second Temple. These sources (to which add Joannès and Lemaire 1996; Abraham 2005 Abraham -2006 enrich the investigation of social and economic forces that shaped the experiences of the exiles' descendants and that provided a foundation for an enduring Jewish community in Babylonia. The present study reviews and summarizes the Babylonian cuneiform evidence for Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods.Although they all refer to aspects of the topic under consideration here, the terms Neo-Babylonia...

Planting gardens: Mesopotamian influence on a Hebrew trope in Jeremiah 29

“… 25. Laurie E. Pearce, “Cuneiform Sources for Judeans in Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods: An Overview,” RC 10 (2016): 234–35; I. Ephʿal, “The Western Minorities in Babylonia in the 6th–5th Centuries B.C. : Maintenance and Cohesion,” Or 47 (1978), 81–82. …”

New research trends concerning the historical relationship between Egypt and Mesopotamia

“…about the identification of the jews in these sources and their problems, see, especially, Pearce 2015.22 For example,Pearce 2006; Magdalene & Wunsch 2011; Wunsch 2013;Bloch 2014;Pearce 2014Pearce , 2015Pearce , 2016 Berlejung 2017; Hackl 2017, etc. 23 see, especially, the bibliographic notes of rohrmoser 2014, 115.24 For a full range of attestations, seePearce & Wunsch 2014, 19-26.…”