In giving an account of the fall of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BCE, the Bible leaves us in no doubt that the country was destroyed and the absolute majority of the Judahite population were deported to Babylonia to live. What other interpretation could we give to the words of the book of Kings that “Judah went into captivity, away from her land” or to the still more categorical assertion in the book of Chronicles that “he [Nebuchadnezzar] carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword” (2 Kings 25:21; 2 Chronicles 36:20)? However, the evidence available to us does not, in fact, support this historical myth, which has only gained in strength over the millennia. Above all, the Bible itself contains evidence of the opposite. For instance, the prophet Jeremiah, who was a witness to and a participant in this tragedy, states that “Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard left behind in the land of Judah some of the poor people, who owned nothing; and at that time he gave them vineyards and fields” (Jeremiah 39:10). Yet these so-called ‘poor people’ made up the majority of the population in all countries in the ancient Near East. The same fact is acknowledged by the book of Kings, although the latter adds that in Judah the Babylonians left only “some of the poor people”. But the book of Kings says absolutely the same thing following the first fall of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, when it states that the King of Babylon “carried all Jerusalem into exile […] Only the poorest people of the land were left” (2 Kings 24:14). As we already know, these ‘few poor people’ who remained at that time in Jerusalem included the court of King Zedekiah, his army, wealthy citizens, and the entire mass of people whom Nebuzaradan took to Babylonia following the second siege of the capital. Evidently, the phrase ‘some of the poor people’ is a clear exaggeration or dramatization of the onerous consequences of the fall of Jerusalem. It should not be forgotten that the Babylonians’ appointment of Gedaliah as their governor in Judah was in itself evidence suggesting that a considerable part of the population had remained in Judah. It was not the custom in ancient times to appoint governors, and especially governors from among the local population, to rule over land which was desolate and unpopulated.
The book of Jeremiah contains a further extremely interesting fact: many Judahites fled, for the duration of the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar’s army, to neighboring countries, returning to Judah when the Babylonians left; “When all the Jews in Moab, Ammon, Edom and all the other countries heard that the king of Babylon had left a remnant in Judah and had appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, as governor over them, they all came back to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mizpah, from all the countries where they had been scattered. And they harvested an abundance of wine and summer fruit” (Jeremiah 40:11-12). This means that we have reliable evidence of the fact that only a fraction of the Judahite people was deported into Babylonian exile, while the majority was left where they were by the Chaldeans themselves and a part returned to Judah when the war there came to an end.
We can try to calculate the total number of people taken off to captivity in Babylonia in 597 and 586 BCE. As we know, the book of Kings speaks of 10,000 people who went into exile together with the young king Jehoiachin following the first siege of Jerusalem. The book of Kings does not indicate the number of those imprisoned following the second siege, giving us to understand that this fate befell all or almost all of the country’s inhabitants. The missing information is to be found in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: “This is the number of the people Nebuchadnezzar carried into exile: in the seventh year, 3,023 Jews [in 597 BCE]; in Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth year, 832 people from Jerusalem [in 586 BCE]; in his twenty-third year, 745 Jews taken into exile by Nebuzaradan the commander of the imperial guard [in 582 BCE]. There were 4,600 people in all” (Jeremiah 52:28-30). As we can see, even the total number of captives given by Jeremiah is far smaller than the number indicated by the book of Kings for 597 BCE alone.
One of the most likely explanations of this divergence is that in the number of captives for 597 BCE Jeremiah fails to include 7000 soldiers – possibly because there were many foreign mercenaries among them. Notably, the well-informed historian Josephus Flavius likewise preferred not to include soldiers in the total number of those carried off to Babylonia in 597 BCE and, like Jeremiah, limited himself to giving a total of 3000. As for the figures given by Jeremiah for 586 BCE, it is unlikely that there is any reason to doubt them as he was in the best possible position to know the situation: initially, he was himself among the crowd of captives and together with them made the journey in chains from Jerusalem to Ramah, where he was set free in accordance with an order given by Nebuchadnezzar II in person. But even if we suppose that Jeremiah’s figures are for some reason substantially lower than the real numbers and that the total of those carried off into captivity in Babylon in 586 BCE was not less than in 597 BCE, and even if we then include the figure of 7000 soldiers on both occasions, the total number of those removed into captivity will still not exceed 20,000. At the same time, calculations carried out by archaeologists Finkelstein and Silberman put the population of Judah at the end of the 7th and beginning of the 6th centuries BCE as, at the very least, 75,000. Accordingly, approximately one quarter of the people of Judah were taken to Babylonia – and perhaps significantly less, considering that we have compared the maximum number of prisoners with the minimum size of the population. If, on the other hand, we base our calculations solely on biblical figures, then the percentage of Judahites taken into captivity will be utterly insignificant. For instance, we could use the numbers for captives given by the prophet Jeremiah, whom we have no reason not to trust, and compare them with the results of the census of the population of Judah conducted by King Amaziah in the 8th century BCE. As we know, this census produced the figure of 300,000 men of more than 20 years in age. Even if we suppose that Jeremiah likewise counted only adult males and took no account of women and children, then the Babylonian captives would still have constituted a negligible percentage. So we have a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, the myth that the entire people of Judah were taken into exile in Babylon continues to exist on the strength of statements made by the authors of the Bible; on the other, the same biblical books contain information which not only does not support this myth, but actually refutes it.
The book of Kings tells us of one more circumstance which makes it extremely unlikely that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were deported into captivity en masse. This is that a whole month passed – “between the ninth day of the fourth month” and “the seventh day of the fifth month” – between the initial seizure of the capital of Judah and the arrival of detachments of Nebuzaradan’s soldiers charged with the task of sending the Judahites into captivity (2 Kings 25:3-4,8). During this interval many inhabitants were able freely to leave the famine-struck and epidemic-ravaged city and to flee to safer regions of Judah or to neighboring countries. It was this that the prophet Ezekiel had in mind when he wrote of the inhabitants of Jerusalem: “The fugitives who escape will flee to the mountains. Like doves of the valleys, they will all moan, each for their own sins” (Ezekiel 7:16).
Finally, according to A. Mazar, we today have available to us incontrovertible archaeological evidence showing that a number of cities to the north of Jerusalem suffered no war damage and that their populations remained where they were. These were cities belonging to Judah and situated on the land of the tribe of Benjamin – for instance, Mizpah, Gibeon, and Gibeah. It is not surprising that Mizpah became the residence of the Babylonian governor Gedaliah; it had been left practically untouched by Nebuchadnezzar’s army. It cannot be ruled out that their Hivite and Benjaminite provenance led the local rulers to decide to surrender voluntarily to the Babylonians. But the most surprising development has been the discovery of rich burials from the time of the Babylonian exile in the region of Jerusalem itself.
Thus the Babylonian captivity was not a catastrophe from the demographic point of view – for the absolute majority of the Judahite population remained where they were and Judah itself was not desolated, as we might think when we read the Bible. Moreover, some of the country’s towns and cities – in the north, for instance – were not even destroyed. From the point of view of culture and politics, however, the Babylonian exile was indeed a disaster since those who shaped the country’s politics, history, and culture and who managed its defense – i.e. the more professional, wealthy, and economically and politically active part of the population – ended up in captivity in Babylon. In the present case what happened was the same as when the Israelites were deported to Assyria following the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE: the people’s ‘head’ went into exile, while its ‘body’ remained where it was. We know almost nothing of what happened in Judah itself during the half century of the Babylonian captivity because most of those who wrote the country’s history (the Levites and the Aaronites) or shaped its politics (the royal court and army) and those whom the Bible calls ‘the people of the land’ (its wealthy citizens and landowners) were at this time outside the country’s borders. The Babylonian captivity was not the first time that the Judahites had found themselves in exile; it was preceded by the Assyrian captivity of the time of Sennacherib and by imprisonment by the Arameans of Damascus during the rule of Rezin. The latter imprisonments were on a much larger scale and were more serious tragedies for the people of Judah than the famous Babylonian exile. The Assyrian chronicles tell us of the unprecedented number of Judahites – 200,000 – who were seized by Sennacherib’s army; admittedly, this captivity did not affect either the royal family or the courtiers and, even more importantly, it left untouched the Aaronites and Levites, whom Hezekiah seized on this occasion in Jerusalem. The Assyrian captivity at the end of the 8th century BCE left Jerusalem untouched, affecting only the Judahite provinces and, above all, the inhabitants of Shephelah. But the Bible makes almost no mention of this event given that the captives did not include the keepers of the tradition, i.e. those who might have been able to give an account of what had happened. All this is a further reminder that we know only that part of the history of the Israel and Judah in which the Levites and the Aaronites were directly involved. There is nothing surprising in that the early history of the northern tribes has disappeared from our field of view and we know of them only what happened after they were joined by the Levites. In just the same way – because the keepers of the tradition were not among their number – we have absolutely no information concerning the Israelites who were deported into captivity in Assyria following the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE. The priests of non-Levite origin from Bethel were never able to become a true alternative to the Levites and Aaronites. In this respect the Judahite captives in Babylonia were in luck: they had with them the keepers of the tradition, including the famous prophet Ezekiel. And although the Babylonian captivity was only short-lived, we know about it incomparably more than we do about all the other periods of captivity suffered by the Judahites and the Israelites taken together.
In spite of the apparent similarity, the Babylonian deportation of the Judahites was very different from the Israelites’ exile in Assyria. First, it was much shorter, lasting for less than half a century – at least, in the case of those who were taken to Babylon in 586 BCE – while we know absolutely nothing of the Israelites’ return to their country of origin. Secondly, unlike the Israelites, who were taken to three different locations at a great distance from one another, all the Judahites were settled in one and the same region near Babylon itself. And thirdly and finally, if new settlers from Mesopotamia and Syria were brought to Samaria to take the Israelites’ place, Jerusalem remained empty and the lands of the captive Judahites were not occupied by people from other countries.