From the Series: Extra-Biblical Testimonies to Biblical Events

Many doubt the Bible is a genuine reliable record of history.

For example, do we have testimony to an exile of Jews from Judea as a result of an Assyrian conquest in 585 BCE?

Well ---

There are the Āl-Yāhūdu tablets. "Āl-Yāhūdu" is Akkadian and means "Town of Judah" or "Village of the Judeans."  There was a settlement in Babylonia where deported Judeans and their descendants lived after the exile that followed the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.

The tablets found numer about 200 cuneiform, including fragments. They were written in Akkadian on clay tablets. Most date from approximately 572–477 BCE, spanning the late Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. They were salvaged from the antiquities market and were later studied by scholars.

These are ordinary administrative and legal documents, including land leases, tax records, loans, labor obligations, property transactions and court-related documents.

They show that the Judeans, aka Jews, retained their identity, bore clearly Yahwistic names, such as Ahikam, Gedaliah, Shelemiah, Yashuv-Tzadok and...Netaniah. They contain references to the God of Israel (Yahu/Yah) and prove the exiles did not just disappear into Babylonian society but retained their national ethnic identity.

As Ariel Kopilovitz has observed:

“It will be a long time” (Jer 29:28). These words, allegedly sent to the Judean exiles in Babylonia, were meant to suppress expectations that existed among them, and possibly also among some of those remaining in Judah, that the exile would end soon (Jer 28:1–4). Jeremiah declares that the opposite is true: the exiles must prepare for a long stay in Babylonia and therefore should build houses, plant gardens and do as much as they could to improve their living conditions until their long-awaited restoration.

As Lauire Pearce has written:

The term ‘Judean’ refers to people with origins in the southern kingdom of Judah, which, along with the northern Israelite kingdom, occupied a strategic position between the imperial powers of Mesopotamia (Assyria, and later, Babylonia) and Egypt. Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) vanquished the northern kingdom, and deported the vast majority of Israel’s population throughout locales in Mesopotamia and North Syria. Although he also deported a significant portion of the Judean population, as illustrated in wall reliefs depicting the siege of Lachish and recorded in 2 Kgs 18:14-16, Sennacherib maintained Judah as a political identity, albeit as a vastly reduced vassal state. The scattered redistribution of deportee populations across the landscape complicates the identification and study of Israelites and Judeans in Assyrian sources, as the few distinctively Israelite or Judean names stand in geographic and social isolation from others of the same background; it is thus difficult to trace their history and/or social and economic location. The documentary situation is different with the population of Judah, deported to Babylonia in several waves: in 597 BCE, following Nebuchadnezzar’s capture of Jerusalem, which resulted in the deportation of the 18-year-old king Jehoiachin and his family (2Kgs 24:12-16); in 587 BCE, after destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; and in 582 BCE. Unlike their Assyrian predecessors, Babylonian kings (primarily Nebuchadnezzar) resettled their deportees as largely intact groups and resettled them in single locales, in many cases, in new settlements named for their places of origin. Some deported Judeans were settled in a town called Yahudu (“Judah”). 

The tablets cover more than a century, showing families across multiple generations. This helps explain why many Jews remained in Babylonia even after Cyrus the Great allowed exiles to return to Judah in 538 BCE.

The Āl-Yāhūdu documents provide direct contemporary evidence of the lives of ordinary Judeans in exile.

The tablets 

help confirm that large numbers of Judeans were indeed deported to Babylonia, that they formed recognizable communities and maintained distinct identities while adapting to Babylonian rule.

The Babylonian exile was not simply a literary or theological concept but a documented historical reality reflected in everyday records.

The standard scholarly publication is the book Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer by Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, which first brought many of these texts to broader academic attention. Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer.

One scholar wrote:

"The documents published in the present volume are of immense importance for the study of Judeans in Babylonia... The new evidence from Āl-Yāhūdu and its surroundings corroborate...that exile did not equal enslavement, but Judeans had rights, responsibilities, and even opportunities to prosper. From now on, the study of Judean communities in Babylonia is to be primarily based on cuneiform sources, not only on the sporadic pieces of information found in the Hebrew Bible."

And most importantly, from this community that retained and preserved and cherished its identity, Jews returned to the Land of Israel.

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Judea, Samaria and...Tahpanhes, Egypt

In a recent academic archaeological article you can read of Judean Jews who are soldiers arriving in Egypt. The article is "Judeans and Samarians at Tahpanhes: Speculating on the Identity of the King in Papyrus Amherst 63" by Marshall A. Cunningham in Advances in Ancient, Biblical, and Near Eastern Research  4, no. 1 (Spring, 2024).

Cunningham highlights similarities between the story in the Papyrus record and the story of  the prophet Jeremiah’s forced flight to Egypt in Jeremiah 40–44.  Finally, he suggests that the two accounts are similar enough to use the Jeremianic version.

He thereby provides another ex-Biblical source that could possibly confirm the truth of Biblical history. He identifies the unnamed king as Apries, the fourth pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, and the royal outpost of  Tahpanhes as the site where he receives the Judean and  Samarian caravan.

Excerpts:

Papyrus Amherst 63, a scroll featuring a collection of Aramaic compo-sitions written in Demotic script, features a short narrative concerning the arrival of a group of Judean and Samarian refugees to an unnamed royal outpost. At this outpost, they are received by an  unnamed king who welcomes them into his kingdom with an offer to sustain them...The narrative of the Judean and Samarian caravan occurs in col. xvii of P. Amh. 632...the text opens with narration in the first person...When asked their place of origin, a spokesman for the caravan answers:ʾ[n(h)] ⸢mn⸣-[y]hwd ’t(h) [I] come from [Y]ehud. ’ḥy mn-šmry⸢n⸣ m{m}y⸢t⸣(y) My brother is brought from Samaria. pkʿt ʾdm ⸢m⸣sq ’ḥty myrwšl{l}m And now a man is bringing my sister up from Jerusalem.

...In a recent article on when the Judean garrison at Yeb was established, Kahn (2022, 154)  has  connected this scene with the description of the Elamite jackal causing chaos in Rash’s temples in the preceding column, suggesting Rash as the caravan’s point of origin...

...While the details surrounding the scene are vague, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Judean and Samarian caravan is to be understood as a group of refugees: displaced soldiers and their families fleeing war and seeking shelter. First of all, the narrator identifies the band of Samarians as a gys, [גיס] a “troop” (l. 1).

... a comparison with a similar account of migration to Egypt may allow us to fill in some of  the omitted details. Jeremiah 40–44 narrates the prophet Jeremiah’s forced flight from Judah in the aftermath of a political assassination of the Babylonian-appointed governor, Gedaliah, and his supporters. While the traveling party in that narrative is primarily composed of Judeans fleeing  Babylonian reprisal, it does include a group of Samarians that had been taken captive by the rebel Ishmael outside Mizpah. Notably, the group includes men of fighting age alongside their families (41:16; 44). Finally, according to Jeremiah 43:7–9, the Judeans and Samarians in  Jeremiah’s  caravan made their first stop at the Egyptian city of  Tahpanhes (תחפנחס). Once there, the prophet received an oracle that began by identifying the city as the site of a royal palace  (בית פרעה) before performing a sign-act and announcing Pharaoh’s (and the caravan’s) impending devastation at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army (43:8–12)...

Impressive.

And another study there, posits that the Damascus Document, in existence before its earliest copy 4Q266 was produced in the first half of the first century BCE, employs a rhetorical use of  the terms “Israel,” “Ephraim,” and “Judah”.

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Palestine - or Judah?

Judah.

As reported by a "Correspondent With the British Forces In Palestine":

Within the country, the English advance is taken almost as a matter of course . The Jewish people have been counting on it for a year, and they show no exuberant enthusiasm now that their expectation has been fulfilled. They are more excited abou the formation of the Jewish regiment, of which tidings have reached them in a somewhat distorted form. They regarded it is a striking manifestation of the national spirit which is their peculiar pride, and they inquire anxiously when it will arrive in the country* to help drive the Turks from Galilee.  

Many imagined it was to come out under "General Jabotinsky, " the "general" being a prominent Russo-Jewish journalist who has had much to do with the promotion of the idea, but who holds in fact a far less exalted position in the unit. Probably many of the young men would be eager to join the ranks when the regiment arrives in the land; until then, the settlers agree that the redemption came just in time to save them and their colonies from ruin. 

*  The first units arrived in June 1918.

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Revolting Jews in Judaea

From a book review in Strata by Tessa Rajak from Reading and Oxford on Gil Gambash's Rome and Provincial Resistance. Routledge,  2015:-

When revolt did occur, the Romans here, as everywhere, reacted speedily. But it was only in 66 CE, after the Jewish rebels against all expectation routed and forced the withdrawal of a force of 30,000 men commanded by Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, which should have nipped their insubordination in the bud, that the Roman attitude ‘changed dramatically’ (p. 144). The trauma was comparable to that of Augustus’s unforgettable Varian disaster of 9 CE. Now Judaea was no longer treated as part of the provincial system, but as a foreign power to be given the full treatment and resoundingly defeated. This now, was a conquest rather than a reconquest. Hence Vespasian’s approach to the campaign: willing to bring his whole army to bear on relatively small engagements such as the sieges of Jotapata and of Gamala. It was in the nature of such a campaign that he operated with caution and he took his time...In the end, then, the Jewish case was special, but not because there was anything special about the Jews, nor about Roman attitudes to them, but because of the particular turn taken by their revolt.

No Palestine there.

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Have A Merry Festive Season

.

"Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, 

during the reign of King Herod" 

- Matthew 2:1

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Why Did She Write What She Wrote?

In her latest op-ed over at The Times of Israel, Sara Hirschorn quotes both Michael Sfard and Shlomo Ben-Ami on the issue of Israel's government decisioin to seek a legal alternative to the embroglio it managed to find itself vis a vis the various Jewish communities the courts have adjudged to be destroyed.

First, Sfard

...the day had arrived where, “this government only now reaches the crossroads, the dilemma: it has to choose between the rule of law and ideology.”

and then Ben-Ami

A normal state is not supposed to settle beyond its legitimate borders...we still continue to behave as if we are a Yishuv. The entire peace enterprise of this government is aimed at leading the nation to choose, once and for all, between being a state or a Yishuv.

and she clarifies herself on the matter:

...the choice between settlement and statehood is a fundamental characterization of the Zionist project.

And asks, a bit ominously ot, to be generous, employing a rather loaded term:

Does the state, in the form of authorizing settlement outposts, continue as an expansionist enterprise?

"Expansionist"?

We have tried concessions, contraction, reducation.  Even pre-state Israel, the "Yishuv" of Ben-Ami, accepted territorial compromoise.

It hasn't worked very well, if at all.  That approach has not elicited moderation either in rhetoric (i.e., halting the incitement) nor action (i.e., stopping terror).  And now, after the fall of Mubarek and the Al-Qeidazation of the Sinai Beduin and the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood, even the Egyptian peace is, at gthe least, shaky.

But beyond all this practical view, are Jewish rights to be demeaned and ignored?

And although we know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Hirschorn applies the adjective to The Times of Israel editor's writing and suggests Israel choose "adult stability" and hoping

that the leadership and people of Israel will chose from this year, ad meah v’esrim and far beyond, to be a state.

Let's get back to the article's opening.  Is there a legal alternative?

There is.

Should Jews be able to live in the area?

They should.

Has the author at least hinted that there are many other problems which affect a future peace?

No.

Does the author know better?

She does.

Is her dependence on those she quoted sufficient to establish a neutral observation and analysis?

No.

Do the Arabs perhaps seek to revert us into the pre-state Yishuv via 1967-then-1947 border with refugee influx?

Yes.

Is the real argument not borders, in any configuration, but Zionism as a nationalism and Israel's existence?

Yes.

So why did she write this oped?

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