Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context

379 Pages·2015·2.1 MB·English

by  Jonathan Stökl

Exile and Return
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift
für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft
Edited by
John Barton, Ronald Hendel,
Reinhard G. Kratz and Markus Witte
Volume 478
Exile and Return
The Babylonian Context
Edited by
Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers
DE GRUYTER
ISBN 978-3-11-041700-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041928-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041952-8
ISSN 0934-2575
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A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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♾ Printed on acid-free paper
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Table of Contents
Introduction | 1
Laurie E. Pearce
Identifying Judeans and Judean Identity in the Babylonian Evidence | 7
Kathleen Abraham
Negotiating Marriage in Multicultural Babylonia:
An Example from the Judean Community in Āl-Yāhūdu | 33
Gauthier Tolini
From Syria to Babylon and Back: The Neirab Archive | 58
Ran Zadok
West Semitic Groups in the
Nippur Region between c. 750 and 330 B.C.E. | 94
Johannes Hackl and Michael Jursa
Egyptians in Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian
and Achaemenid Periods | 157
Caroline Waerzeggers
Babylonian Kingship in the Persian Period:
Performance and Reception | 181
Jonathan Stökl
“A Youth Without Blemish, Handsome,
Proficient in all Wisdom, Knowledgeable and Intelligent”:
Ezekiel’s Access to Babylonian Culture | 223
H. G. M. Williamson
The Setting of Deutero-Isaiah: Some Linguistic Considerations | 253
Madhavi Nevader
Picking Up the Pieces of the Little Prince:Refractions of
Neo-Babylonian Kingship Ideology in Ezekiel 40–48? | 268
VI   Table of Contents
Lester L. Grabbe
The Reality of the Return:
The Biblical Picture Versus Historical Reconstruction | 292
Jason M. Silverman
Sheshbazzar, a Judean or a Babylonian? A Note on his Identity | 308
Katherine Southwood
The Impact of the Second and Third-Generation Returnees
as a Model for Understanding the Post-Exilic Context | 322
Peter R. Bedford
Temple Funding and Priestly Authority in Achaemenid Judah | 336
Abbreviations | 352
Non-bibliographical abbreviations | 358
Index | 359
Introduction
Since the appearance of the first Āl-Yāhūdu tablets a few years ago, there has
been growing awareness among biblical scholars that cuneiform texts from the
Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods might offer useful information that will elu-
cidate questions related to the historical reconstruction of the Babylonian Exile,
its impact on ancient Judaism and its relevance for understanding certain bibli-
cal texts. The Āl-Yāhūdu tablets preserve a unique imprint of an actual Judean /
Jewish community living in central Babylonia during the period conventionally
identified as the era of the Babylonian Exile. It is certainly not the first time that we
find evidence of Judean exiles in the cuneiform record – Weidner’s identification
of king Jehoiachin in tablets from Nebuchadnezzar’s palace comes to mind – but
the Āl-Yāhūdu texts offer the most vivid, most complex and most direct testimony
of life in the Babylonian Exile so far. Indeed, they appear to be the archives of a
Judean community itself. However, the relevance of the cuneiform text corpus for
understanding the Exile is not restricted to its preserving the names and actions
of concrete individuals affected by it – the corpus is so dense and diverse that
it reveals the cultural and social context within which not only the individual
experiences of the individuals in question need to be interpreted but also those
of other deported communities and those of the host society at large. Here,
then, is an opportunity to contextualize a formative era in the history of ancient
Judaism.
Most biblical scholars would agree that the many books of the Hebrew Bible
were either composed in some form or edited during the Exilic and post-Exilic
periods among a community that was to identify itself as returning from Baby-
lonian captivity. At the same time, a dearth of contemporary written evidence
from Judah/Yehud and its environs renders any particular understanding of the
process within its social, cultural and political context virtually impossible. This
has led some to label the period a dark age or black box – as obscure as it is
essential for understanding the history of Judaism. To be fair, such a defeatist
view of the Babylonian and Persian periods in Judah/Yehud is not widely shared
today, especially not since archaeologists have stepped up their effort to look for
and study material remains from the period in recent years. Historians have also
added to the momentum by drawing on the advances in the study of Achaemenid
Persian history in order to integrate the local history of Yehud, the return from
Exile, and the restoration of Jerusalem’s temple more firmly within the regional,
and indeed global, developments of the time. These efforts have increasingly led
to a realization that the story of the Exile and return as narrated in the biblical text
is a construct that replaces a much more complex and socially contested history.
Despite its constructed nature, however, a majority of biblical scholars concedes
2   Introduction
that there is some truth in the Exile–Return ‘myth’ based on the cuneiform and
archaeological evidence for Nebuchadnezzar’s destructive military action in
Jerusalem and its environs, and the mention of at least a small group of Judean
captives (at court) and colonists (in the countryside) in cuneiform texts from the
heartland of Babylonia during and after the sixth century B. C.E.
During the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the time of the Exile,
Babylonia produced extraordinarily rich deposits of cuneiform texts, making it
one of the very best documented epochs of ancient Mesopotamian history. The
archives derive from a variety of settings (private, temple, state) and a range
of different sites, from Sippar and Akkad in the north to Ur and the Sealand in
the south. Literary, scholarly, legal and administrative texts are all represented
in great numbers. For a long time the sheer size of this corpus prevented rather
than invited scholars to take advantage of its potential for historical research.
This was mainly due to the poor state of publication and inaccessibility of the
records but in recent decades this situation has changed dramatically thanks to
a combined effort of many Assyriologists. With these recent advances it is now
possible not only to catalogue and document each individual mention of a Judean
at the time of the Exile but to go further in embedding these occurrences in the
deep social texture of the time and against the backdrop of the large political
transformations of the Babylonian and Persian Empires. The cuneiform mate-
rial allows scholars to study the economy, literary traditions, practices of lit-
eracy and the ideologies of the host society – factors that affected those taken
into Exile in variable, changing and multiple ways – and to conduct compara-
tive case-studies of the experiences of other exiled groups living alongside the
Judeans.
With these new developments in mind, the ERC project “By the Rivers of
Babylon: New Perspectives on Second Temple Judaism from Cuneiform Texts”
invited a group of Assyriologists, biblical scholars, and ancient historians with
the explicit aim of reflecting on the opportunities and challenges of a Babylonian
contextualization of the Babylonian Exile within the context of recent advances
in the study of the Babylonian text corpus and the growing interest in the effect
of the Exile on the identity and theology of second Temple Judaism. The meeting,
held at UCL on 10–12 November 2011, was organized around two topics: sources
and interactions. In the first part of the meeting, we invited papers on the latest
additions to the documentary evidence pertaining to the Judean Exilic com-
munity or other communities of deportees in Babylonia. In the second part, we
invited papers on the interactions between the Exilic community and its Babylo-
nian environment in the broadest sense, e.g. onomastics and other philological
issues, social networks and intermarriage, settlement patterns and interactions
with imperial administrations, religious authorities and ideologies of kingship.
Introduction   3
Alternatively, papers were to look at changes that became visible in the repat-
riated community during the restoration period in Jerusalem. For instance,
changes in social structure, the appearance of the institution of the תובא תיב (beyt
ʔābōt), or developments of a theological nature. Thus, all speakers were tasked
to reflect on the issues raised by the presence of Judeans and other minorities in
Mesopotamia, the presence of Babylonians in the West, and the return migrations
of minorities to their ancestral homelands.
This volume collects most of the presentations delivered at the workshop
in London. Like the workshop itself, it is intended as an invitation to special-
ists in either field to increase their dialogue with the other to better understand
their own data and to provide more context for each other. Given that all fields
are rapidly developing and expanding – we think specifically of Persian period
Judaism, Achaemenid history, and Neo-Babylonian studies – such a dialogue is
important but necessarily preliminary and unfinished in nature.
The essays in this book follow a rough geographical order starting with Meso-
potamia and then moving west. The first six contributions are written by Assyri-
ologists and based mostly on cuneiform data, but occasionally integrating West
Semitic material as well. All of them deal with ethnic minorities in Babylonia,
whether Judeans, Neirabeans, Egyptians or others more. The following three
essays look at biblical texts, in particular Ezekiel and Isaiah, reflecting on how
Mesopotamian traditions may have influenced them. The last four essays in the
volume discuss material and theoretic thinking linked to the Judean returnee
communities and the way in which they remembered their return and organised
their presence in the Persian province of Yehud.
The volume starts with Laurie Pearce’s discussion of hermeneutical issues
involved in identifying Judeans in Neo-Babylonian cuneiform documents on
the basis of the theophoric element of their name or their relatives (‘Identify-
ing Judeans and Judean Identity in the Babylonian Evidence’). One fascinating
example is Yahu-šar-uṣur whose name is once spelled as dEN-šar-uṣur, which
would normally be rendered as Bēl-šar-uṣur. This raises questions as to the under-
standing of the relationship of gods and their epithets to each other. This and
other cases raise important questions for the prosopographer and the historian
alike. Pearce refines our frameworks for understanding ancient identities consid-
erably by questioning the binary division between ‘Babylonian’ and ‘Judean’ that
is often upheld in discussions on the matter.
Kathleen Abraham (‘Negotiating Marriage in Multicultural Babylonia’) looks
at the Āl-Yāhūdu marriage contract that involves a Judean and a non-Judean
party. She compares this to other known Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts and
finds that those contracts in which the man is of West Semitic origin display more
divergence from Neo-Babylonian standard practices. This may reflect different