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.
