The Babylonians had a major impact on ancient Israel, especially the neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, at the beginning of the sixth century BCE.
The northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians more than a century before. The Assyrians had themselves succumbed to the combined might of the Medes and Babylonians in 605 BCE, at the Battle of Carchemish. By 597 BCE, the Babylonians had moved in on the surviving southern kingdom of Judah, destroying the fortress city of Lachish in the process.
Lachish has been excavated by archeologists a number of times. Two of these excavations stand out. One was the British excavation of the late 1930s whose director, James Starckey, was murdered by Arab bandits in 1938. The other excavation was conducted by the renowned Israeli archeologist David Ussishkin, the head of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.
One of the amazing finds of the excavators was the Lachish Ostraca. The ostraca are pieces of pottery inscribed with writing. In addition to being among the oldest examples of Hebrew writing to be discovered, they also bear vivid testimony to the plight of the hapless defenders who were pleading for help from Jerusalem that would never come.
The excavations reveal the depth of the destruction that Lachish sustained, first at the hands of the Assyrians and then more than 100 years later at the hands of the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. But it was Jerusalem that would be the final target of the Babylonians.
For five years, in the late 1970s and early ’80s while participating at the City of David Excavations in Jerusalem under Yigal Shiloh, I got to see first-hand the destruction caused by the Babylonian siege and its aftermath. The debris was almost a metre thick in places, and Babylonian arrowheads turned up amid the rubble. Ironically, a toilet still retained its unmistakable odour some 26 centuries later.
We even found some of the reasons why the prophets foretold the destruction of Jerusalem. There amid the destruction debris in the shadow of the Temple, in the households of Jerusalem, we found idols. There was even a tophet (a place where children were sacrificed to pagan gods) found in the nearby Hinnom Valley. Indeed, Jerusalem was a desperate place in those years before its final destruction at the hands of Babylonian troops.
Ironically, Babylon would not prove to be as inhospitable a place for our captive ancestors as they had feared. Archeologists have even found a ration list belonging to the last king of Judah during his captivity in Babylon.
More importantly, it was in the multicultural crucible of Babylon that important elements of nascent Judaism would emerge. It was the greatest, and arguably, the most important city of the world in mid-sixth century BCE. Babylon was the Big Apple of the ancient world.
It was in Babylon that our ancestors created a meeting house, or beit knesset, what the Greeks would call a synagogue. It was a place where our ancestors could pray, meet and educate their young in their faith. In order to properly do this, they wrote down the stories that had been passed down to them orally by their ancestors.
Scholars even believe that certain Mesopotamian (Mesopotamia is the name given by the Greeks to the land between the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates) stories such as that of a great flood even crept into our ancestors’ writings.
The work of writing down our collective history and religion was completed by the great scribe Ezra, whom some have called the second Moses. It was in Babylon that the groundwork was laid for resisting assimilation during future trials and tribulations. We went into Babylon as Judeans, but came out as Jews.
