JEREMIAH AND THE KING OF BABYLON, NEBUCHADNEZZAR II (604-562 BCE)

Only a century after Judean king Hezekiah’s decision to take on the might of the Assyrian empire, in 597 BCE a militant rebel faction within the palace of the southern kingdom of Judah, again began to plot with neighboring kingdoms and city-states against the ruler of the newest Middle East superpower - that of the Neo-Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II. Again, in the spirit of Isaiah, perhaps one of history’s earliest anti-war protesters, another prophetic voice of wisdom spoke up against the evils of military alliances and coalitions. This was the Prophet Jeremiah. He sent sermons and letters to the king of Judah pleading that he follow the path of peace and not challenge the mighty, well-equipped and highly trained armies of Babylonia - a course that could only bring certain destruction and tragedy upon the people of Judah. Jeremiah’s letters to the king were angrily destroyed by this ruler, and the priesthood, the militants of the palace “war party,” and even the people of Jerusalem denounced the prophet as a traitor to his people. At that time, Jeremiah was nearly executed by them. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon removed this rebellious king and replaced him with a puppet ruler named Zedekiah. At this time, the Babylonian king, following the previous tactical examples set by the kings of Assyria, deported a large portion of the population from Judah to Babylonia (modern Iraq). Ten years later, this puppet king, Zedekiah, like his predecessor, also decided to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar II, a monarch who happened to have ruled for a lengthy forty-two years. In 587 BCE, the armies of Babylon came back to the walls of Jerusalem once more and began a siege of the city. The prophet Jeremiah advised King Zedekiah to surrender and save his people, but the king responded by beating, jailing, and starving the prophet because of his words of peace.(9)

After holding out for two and a half years against the forces of the Babylonian king, Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple of Yahweh was burned to the ground, and much of the citizenry of Jerusalem was deported to Mesopotamia. Five years later, in 582 BCE, the Babylonian governor of Judah was assassinated by Jewish militants. Nebuchadnezzar II then invaded for the third time in fifteen years, and finished the deportations of Judah he began back in 597 BCE.(10) Thus began the Biblically famous “Babylonian Captivity and Exile.” Although they do not get mentioned as often as the deportations to Babylon, deportations into Mesopotamia of citizens of the northern kingdom of Israel, as we have seen, first occurred one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier, back in 724 BCE, with the rebellions of the kings of Israel against the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V.

This deportation of the citizens of conquered lands was done to prevent rebellions in the newly conquered territory, and this tactic also served as an empire’s “human resource” supply of agricultural workers, builders, craftsmen, and domestic slaves, as well as scholars, scribes, and administrators. As an example of “human resource” usage by the Babylonians, the scholars, scribes, and royal administrators deported from Judah in the 6th century BCE were not working in the fields and crying by the rivers of Babylon. They were comfortably employed within the administrative apparatus of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a power that had in fact, with the help of the Medes of Iran, brought about the end of the hated Assyrian control of the Middle East, with the 612 BCE sacking of the royal Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northeastern Iraq.

Although the experience of deportation and exile at the hands of conquering empires was common to many of the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East, the Israelite scribes and scholars have nonetheless mythically transformed their own people’s experience of this type of trauma into an almost historically singular and unique experience. The Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform administrative documents of the time, however, reveal that basically everybody in the ancient Middle East, at one time or another, suffered some type of deportation or exile from their original homelands. This deportation strategy used by emerging empires in the ancient Middle East was common, and its practice is seen as far back as the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia of Sargon the Great (2334-2193 BCE), whose popular birth story, written in Akkadian cuneiform, seems to have been adopted by the later Hebrew authors of the Book of Exodus as a model for the birth story of Moses. This Hebrew model, based on the Akkadian, then seems to be later employed by the Greek authors of the birth story of Jesus. But I digress. See footnote for story.(11)