The Jewish Diaspora

Forced deportation

Babylonian exile of Judah

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597–582 BCELand of Israel → Babylonia (Mesopotamia)

Why it happened

Judah's King Zedekiah, relying on Egypt, rebelled against his Babylonian overlord.1 Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem for roughly eighteen months; when the wall was breached in 586 BCE his army burned the Temple and city and deported many surviving inhabitants, including members of the elite.12

The migration

The exile unfolded in stages: in 597 BCE Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and deported King Jehoiachin with the court, warriors, and craftsmen—"ten thousand" by one biblical count.2 After Zedekiah's revolt the city fell in 586 BCE, the First Temple was destroyed, and more Judeans were carried off; a third deportation followed in 582.213 Jeremiah tallies 4,600 deportees across the three waves (3,023; 832; 745), while other counts run higher.23 The exiles were resettled in rural Babylonia near Nippur along the Chebar canal, in places such as Āl-Yāḫūdu, the "city of Judah," where cuneiform tablets show them farming, trading, and paying taxes.45 They "did not fare badly" and preserved their clan structure; the Sabbath and festivals continued under prophets such as Ezekiel.1 When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon (539 BCE), he permitted return (538 BCE), yet many stayed, founding a community that endured millennia.164

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomal (genome-wide SNP)Sampled Iranian and Iraqi Jewish populations form distinctive clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry.77 These genome-wide results do not identify the Babylonian deportation as the date or mechanism of that ancestry.
  • autosomal (genome-wide SNP)Genome-wide analysis traces the origins of most sampled Jewish communities to the Levant.8 The result does not distinguish an eastward Babylonian deportation from other ancient movements or later shared ancestry.

Sources

  1. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Exile, Babylonian. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (via Encyclopedia.com) link
  2. BHebrew Bible. 2000. II Kings (Melakhim II), chs. 24–25. Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), JPS translation via Sefaria link
  3. BHebrew Bible. 2000. Jeremiah (Yirmeyahu) 52. Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), JPS translation via Sefaria link
  4. BPearce LE. 2006. New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia. Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. O. Lipschits & M. Oeming) 399–411. link
  5. BAlstola T. 2020. Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Brill (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East) doi:10.1163/9789004365421
  6. BHebrew Bible. 2000. Ezra 1. Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), JPS translation via Sefaria link
  7. AAtzmon G, Hao L, Pe'er I, et al.. 2010. Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 850–859. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015
  8. ABehar DM, Yunusbayev B, Metspalu M, et al.. 2010. The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature 466 238–242. doi:10.1038/nature09103