Home Alone in Judah: Hints of How the Babylonian Empire Administered an "Empty" Land

Most scholars, past and present, have regarded the Babylonian "exilic period" of the^6th century BCE as a "Dark Age" in the history of Judah - a period when the vast majority of Judeans were deported to Babylon, when the production of local pottery ceased, and when the economy collapsed. Nowhere in the archaeological record was there even a suggestion of the existence of a Babylonian or local administration.

New discoveries, new studies, and reevaluations of known material have been causing a new light to shine on this "dark" Babylonian period. Images are emerging of the Judahite economy and administration from the period when King Jehoiakim was enslaved by Nebuchadrezzar and Judah became a Babylonian vassal kingdom (604 BCE); from the period when Judah was a Babylonian province (586-539 BCE); from the early days of the Achaemenid rule in the land, when Judah was a Persian province.

In the last 10 years, a clear demographic picture has emerged of the population that lived within the boundaries of the kingdom of Judah during the century before its demise (701-586 BCE). It seems there were 110,000 people in pre-exilic Judah, and of these, more than a third were not among those carted off to "cry in a strange land." About 40,000 people were left in the land of Judah during the^6th century BCE, most of them in the region of Benjamin to the north of Jerusalem or in the northern Judean Hills to Jerusalem's south.

In this paper, I will shed new light on the wine and oil industries and on local pottery production centers following the exile. I will look for indications of continuity in the production of wine and oil in the area of Benjamin, and in the area to the south of Jerusalem, in the same production centers that functioned prior to the exile. I will do the same in search of continuity of the local pottery production in Judah. Wine, oil and pottery are the best examples of rural economy production that continued to develop from the late^7th to the late^6th centuries BCE, and continued to the ^5th-4th centuries.

Local administration in the Babylonian period can be detected mainly in the continued status of Ramat Rahel as the local administrative center under Imperial rule, especially for collecting agricultural products as tax, as well as in the continuation of the system of stamping jar handles for collecting, storing and distributing wine and oil. New petrographic, typological and archaeological studies of the lion-stamped jar handles, as well as a comparative research of the symbol of the lion, indicate that it was in use during the^6th century BCE, as part of the Judean administration under Babylonian rule. This is a continuation of the late^8th and^7th century BCE stamped jars (the so-called lmlk and rosette stamp impressions). The system continued to develop in the Persian period with the yhwd stamp impressions on the same types of storage jars.

The local administrative center for collecting agricultural products as tax, where the wine and oil jars were collected as part of the Judean tax for the empire, had already been built at Ramat Rahel in the period when Judah was an Assyrian vassal kingdom (the last third of the^8th to the last third of the^7th century BCE) and afterwards Babylonian vassal kingdom (604-586 BCE), when Jerusalem was capital of the kingdom and its cultic and religious center. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Mizpah replaced Jerusalem as the Judahite capital and probably continued to be the capital until the middle of the^5th century BCE. During all this period Ramat Rahel continued to serve as the local administrative center under Babylonian rule and it remained in this capacity when Judah became a Persian (Achaemenide) province between 539 and 333 BCE.

This paper outlines the following scenario: At the beginning of the^6th century BCE there is a marked destruction of the Judean urban centers, especially in Jerusalem and the cities of the Shephelah, followed by the collapse of the eastern and southern periphery of the kingdom. There are, however, clear indications of demographic continuation in the area close to Jerusalem in the north (Benjamin area) and in the south (northern Judean Hills). The rural economy in these regions continues unchanged; the large central agricultural production centers continue to cultivate and market their crops, the same pottery centers continue to produce their wares, and the same administrative system responsible for stamping jar handles for tax collection purposes continues to do its job. The Judean autonomous capital moves from Jerusalem to Mizpah, but the main Imperial administrative center at Ramat Rahel continues to function as the main collection center for agricultural products. No clear changes are detected at the end of the^6th century BCE, and only in the^5th century are the first changes introduced by the Persian authority - but this subject is beyond the scope of the current paper.

The implications of this new understanding of Judah and the Judeans - of the social, economic, religious and administrative developments in the "exilic period" as well as in the time of the "return" - are enormous. Some of them will be discussed in this paper.