The Babylonian Captivity
- stephenstrent7
- 1 day ago
- 13 min read
So, I will continue to post chapters from my book, Noah’s Flood and the Philosophies of Men, which has not as yet been published. If you want the blogs that fit the current Come Follow Me lessons, they are on my website at trentdeestephens.com, toward the back of the blogs.
We are told in 2 Kings 24:11-14 [that in 598/597 BC], “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city [of Jerusalem], and his servants did besiege it…And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces [and probably melted down] all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the Lord…And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.”
We read in Daniel 1:1-7, “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it…And the king spake unto Ashpenaz the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel, and of the king’s seed, and of the princes; Children in whom was no blemish, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans…Unto whom the prince of the eunuchs gave names: for he gave unto Daniel the name of Belteshazzar; and to Hananiah, of Shadrach; and to Mishael, of Meshach; and to Azariah, of Abed-nego.” So, the Babylonians replaced the names of the Israelite elite with Babylonian names and taught them “the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans”, not to learn from the Israelites, but to better subjugate them.
According to the “Israel My Glory” website, “Nebuchadnezzar took the Judean nobility to Babylon, not as slaves, but as hostages and future administrators to be ‘pampered’ and educated in Babylonian culture…in an attempt to induce them to adopt Babylonian culture so as to better serve Babylon.”1 Apparently, the Babylonian plan was quite successful with the Israelite captives, because of the some 10,000 taken to Babylon2, only four: Daniel, given the name Belteshazzar; Hananiah, named Shadrach; Mishael, named Meshach; and Azariah, named Abed-nego; held out against the diet of meat and wine prescribed by the king.3
Even though it is highly likely that Moses wrote a portion of the Pentateuch, most of his original papyrus manuscripts probably became lost or degraded long before the Babylonian captivity, which occurred some 700-800 years after Moses lived. But there were probably a certain number of copies circulating within the Israelite community (such as the Brass Plates), as well as the writings of later Hebrew prophets. For example, Isaiah, who lived around 100-200 years before the Babylonian captivity, likely wrote his prophesies in proto-Canaanite upon papyri and/or metal plates, most copies of which would have been destroyed in the sack of Jerusalem. As a result, copies of his writing, like those on the Brass Plates, would have become very rare and very valuable.
Among Hebrew scholars, memorization apparently was viewed as much more important than writing. Such behavior may have been exacerbated by the second Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC, when most of the extant Hebrew documents of the time were destroyed. The scholars may have realized that if the history was in their minds, it could not be destroyed as long as one scholar survived. Even today, many orthodox Jewish students have memorized the complete Torah (all of the first five books of the Old Testament, even Leviticus!) by the age of ten. Imagine how the story the ancient scholars memorized might have changed through time, becoming more codified and, thus easier to memorize, with each passing generation. Imagine how much changing philosophies and paradigms, as well as the Babylonian captivity itself, may have influenced those stories—especially with the Babylonians purposely ingraining (brainwashing) their learning and culture into the minds of the Israelite elite.
The Babylonian captivity lasted from 597 BC until 538 BC. However, Ezra, who lived in Babylon around one-hundred years after the captivity officially ended, led some descendants of Jewish exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem during the reign of King Artaxerxes I (464–424 BC) or Artaxerxes II (405/4-359/58 BC).4
We are told in Ezra 7:11 and 25, “Now this is the copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave unto Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and of his statutes to Israel…And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that are beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not.” There were obviously two groups of Israelites: those who knew God’s laws and those who did not.
Then we read in Nehemiah 8:7-8, “Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law [read by Ezra]: and the people stood in their place. So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” Matthew Poole’s Commentary on the Holy Bible states for those verses: “…the words, which being Hebrew, now needed to be translated into the Chaldee or Syriac language, which was now and henceforth the common language of that people, who together with their religion had also in a great part lost their language; as also the sense and meaning of them; they expounded the mind and will of God in what they read, and applied it to the people’s present condition, as they saw fit, as the manner of the prophets generally was.”5 The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary for those verses states, “Commentators are divided in opinion as to the import of this statement. Some think that Ezra read the law in pure Hebrew, while the Levites, who assisted him, translated it sentence by sentence into Chaldee, the vernacular dialect which the exiles spoke in Babylon. Others maintain that the duty of these Levites consisted in explaining to the people, many of whom had become very ignorant, what Ezra had read.”6
However, we learn in Nehemiah 8:13-15, “And on the second day were gathered together the chief of the fathers of all the people, the priests, and the Levites, unto Ezra the scribe, even to understand the words of the law. And they found written in the law which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month: And that they should publish and proclaim in all their cities, and in Jerusalem, saying, Go forth unto the mount, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths, as it is written.” These verses seem to indicate that even the priests and Levites didn’t know all of the Law of Moses—even though they could translate Hebrew to Chaldee.
Rebecca Wollenberg, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has stated, “In the 3rd century C.E., Porphyry of Tyre, a Greco-Roman philosopher, wrote a scathing critique of the Jewish biblical corpus in his (now lost) work Against the Christians…He claimed that the Mosaic Pentateuch had been lost to the ravages of war when Nebuchadnezzar II razed Jerusalem (586 B.C.E.), and the loss had been covered up with a pseudepigraphic forgery: ‘Nothing Moses wrote has been preserved for all his writings are said to have been burnt with the temple. All those written under his name afterwards were composed anew one thousand one hundred and eighty years after Moses’ death by Ezra and his followers’…Porphyry accuses Ezra the Scribe and his followers among the Israelite elite of fabricating the Pentateuch now circulating in the name of Moses to cover up the irretrievable loss of the original Torah…It would be easy to dismiss Porphyry’s claim as the invention of a well-known pagan polemicist, except that pious Jewish and Christian authorities of the period circulated a strikingly similar story about the Torah’s loss. But they believed that Ezra reconstructed the Torah faithfully through divine inspiration.”7
In my opinion, the truth lies somewhere between fabrication and divine inspiration. I agree that most, if not all copies of the Torah, were destroyed during the second sacking of Jerusalem, but it is my opinion that the Oral Torah, that committed to the memory of the priests and Levites, survived. After nearly two hundred years, perhaps “Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and of his statutes to Israel”8, was one of a very few who still had the entire Torah committed to memory; “For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”9
The Israelites had a flood story, that of Noah, apparently dating from Moses’ vision and writings. The Babylonians also had a flood story. In the Gilgamesh Epic, Utanapishtim’s ark was around 120 cubits (200 feet) long. Did Moses see the length of Noah’s ark in his vision when he was on the high mountain, or was the length of Noah’s ark, at 300 cubits long (510 feet; over twice as long as Utanapishtim’s ark), added to the memorized stories passed down during and after the captivity to remind the Hebrews that their God was over twice as powerful as the Babylonian gods?
The Gilgamesh Epic originated in oral traditions of the Mesopotamian Sumerians, and was written down around the 3rd millennium BC. The Sumerian civilization is the oldest known civilization in the Middle East; the first to develop a complex society with writing, cities, and advanced agriculture; established between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers sometime around the sixth or fifth millennium BC. The world’s earliest known texts, including the Gilgamesh Epic, the oldest known written story, date from the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, between around 3350 – 2500 BC.10
The name “Sumer” was given to the people of southern Mesopotamia by the Akkadians, the East Semitic-speaking people who later conquered the Sumerian city states, around 2340 BC. The Akkadian empire, in turn, was succeeded by the Akkadian-speaking Babylonian empire. The Sumerians called themselves “Sag-giga”, “black-headed people”, their land “Kengir”, the “country of the noble lords”, and their language “Emegir”.11
The Sumerians, as a people, were unknown to the modern world until the French-German Assyriologist, Jules Oppert, delivered a lecture before the ethnographic and historical section of the French Society of Numismatics and Archeology, on 17 January 1869, wherein he proposed that the people being discovered by archaeologists be called Sumerian, based on an Akkadian inscription he had translated. Excavations of Sumerian cities began in 1877 at Girsu by the French archeologist Ernest de Sarzec, and were continued between 1889 and 1900 at Nippur by John Peters from the University of Pennsylvania, and in Shuruppak by the German archeologist Robert Koldewey in 1902–1903.12
In the 1850s, some 15,000 fragments of Assyrian cuneiform tablets had been discovered in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and W. K. Loftus. In the late 1860s, the British Museum hired the Assyriologist, George Smith, to translate the tablets, who published his work during the 1870s. During the late nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, other experts; such as Paul Haupt, Peter Jensen, R. Campbell Thompson, and Samuel Noah Kramer; expanded on Smith’s initial work.13 In Tablet XI, The Story of the Flood, Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who with his wife, were the only survivors of the Flood caused by the gods. The following is part of that story:14
Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:“I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a thing that is hidden,a secret of the gods I will tell you!Shuruppak, a city that you surely know,situated on the banks of the Euphrates,that city was very old, and there were gods inside it.The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the Flood…O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu:Tear down the house and build a boat!Abandon wealth and seek living beings!Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings!Make all living beings go up into the boat.The boat which you are to build,its dimensions must measure equal to each other:its length must correspond to its width…On the fifth day I laid out her exterior.It was a field in area,its walls were each 10 times 12 cubits in height,the sides of its top were of equal length, 10 times 12 cubits each.I laid out its (interior) structure and drew a picture of it.I provided it with six decks,thus dividing it into seven (levels).The inside of it I divided into nine (compartments).I drove plugs (to keep out) water in its middle part.I saw to the punting poles and laid in what was necessary.Three times 3,600 (units) of raw bitumen [like tar] I poured into the bitumen kiln,three times 3,600 (units of) pitch...
I butchered oxen for the meat,and day upon day I slaughtered sheep…The boat was finished by sunset.The launching was very difficult.They had to keep carrying a runway of poles front to back,until two-thirds of it had gone into the water.Whatever I had I loaded on it:whatever silver I had I loaded on it,whatever gold I had I loaded on it.All the living beings that I had I loaded on it,I had all my kith and kin go up into the boat,all the beasts and animals of the field and the craftsmen I had go up.Shamash [the Mesopotamian sun god] had set a stated time:‘In the morning I will let loaves of bread shower down,and in the evening a rain of wheat!Go inside the boat, seal the entry!’That stated time had arrived.In the morning he let loaves of bread shower down,and in the evening a rain of wheat.I watched the appearance of the weather--the weather was frightful to behold!I went into the boat and sealed the entry.For the caulking of the boat, to Puzuramurri, the boatman,I gave the palace together with its contents.Just as dawn began to glowthere arose from the horizon a black cloud.Adad rumbled inside of it,before him went Shullat and Hanish,heralds going over mountain and land.Erragal pulled out the mooring poles,forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow.The Anunnaki lifted up the torches,setting the land ablaze with their flare.Stunned shock over Adad's deeds overtook the heavens,and turned to blackness all that had been light.The... land shattered like a... pot.All day long the South Wind blew ...,blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,overwhelming the people like an attack.No one could see his fellow,they could not recognize each other in the torrent.The gods were frightened by the Flood,and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall…Six days and seven nightscame the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding,the flood was a war--struggling with itself like a woman writhing (in labor).The sea calmed, fell still, the whirlwind (and) flood stopped up.I looked around all day long--quiet had set inand all the human beings had turned to clay!The terrain was as flat as a roof.I opened a vent and fresh air (daylight!) fell upon the side of my nose.I fell to my knees and sat weeping,tears streaming down the side of my nose.I looked around for coastlines in the expanse of the sea,and at twelve leagues there emerged a region (of land).On Mt. Nimush the boat lodged firm…
When a seventh day arrivedI sent forth a dove and released it.The dove went off, but came back to me;no perch was visible so it circled back to me.I sent forth a swallow and released it.The swallow went off, but came back to me;no perch was visible so it circled back to me.I sent forth a raven and released it.The raven went off, and saw the waters slither back.It eats, it scratches, it bobs, but does not circle back to me.Then I sent out everything in all directions and sacrificed (a sheep).
I offered incense in front of the mountain-ziggurat…The gods smelled…the sweet savor,and collected like flies over a (sheep) sacrifice…
It is easy to identify several similarities between this account in the Gilgamesh Epic and the account of Noah’s Flood in Genesis. By the time of Ezra read the “Law” to the post-captivity Israelites, the two stories likely had merged in such a way that he was unaware of the fusion. We are told in Ezra 7:1 that Ezra was “the son of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah”. According to 2 Kings 22:1-8 and 2 Chronicles 34:1-14, Hilkiah was High Priest at the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah of Judah (639–609 BC) and the one who discovered the “the Book of the Law” in the Temple in the 18th year of Josiah’s reign (622 BC). Most scholars agree that the book Hilkiah found was the Book of Deuteronomy.
A clay bulla found in 1982, one of fifty-one bullae discovered during excavations in the eastern slope of Jerusalem, dated between Josiah’s rule and the final Babylonian destruction of the city in 586 BC, is inscribed (in pre-captivity paleo-Hebrew): “(Belonging) to Azaryah, son (of) Hilkiah”. “This level [excavation level 10B] was destroyed by the final burning which baked the bullae and provided a better conservation.”15 This bulla helps confirm that Azariah was the son of Hilkiah, as stated in Ezra 7:1.
Seraiah was a son of Azariah and was high priest in 587 BC, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. He was captured and put to death at Riblah by Nebuchadnezzar.16 “He was the father of Jehozadak who was taken into exile by Nebuchadnezzar, and the grandfather of Joshua, the postexilic high priest. Ezra was also a descendant of this Seraiah (1 Chron 6:14f., Ezra 7:1, where ‘son’ means ‘descendant’).”17
The relation between Joshua (Jeshua) and Ezra is not stated in the scriptures. Joshua was born during the exile of the Jews in Babylon and was the first High Priest of the Second Temple after the Babylonian captivity, whereas Ezra, a relative of Joshua’s, arrived in Jerusalem about 60 years later. Joshua and the accompanying priests built an altar to God and restored the practice of offerings. They also began reconstruction of the Temple.18
Ezra, a generation or two after Joshua, was at least four generations removed from his “father” Seraiah, who was executed during the sack of Jerusalem. It is almost certain that Ezra, who was probably born about the time of or shortly after the Babylonian captivity ended, never heard the pre-captivity Noah Flood story, but only heard, and memorized, the Israelite story, several generations later, which had probably been mixed with the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh. Therefore, the oldest, and perhaps the only, surviving Flood story given to the Israelites after the captivity was the already combined story carried back to Jerusalem by Ezra. This story was likely the original story of Noah’s Flood fused with the precepts of Babylonian men.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
2. 2 King 24:14
3. Daniel 1:5-21
4. Frevel, Christian, History of Ancient Israel, SBL Press, Williston, VT, 2023
5. Bible Hub: Nehemiah 8:7-8
6. Ibid
7. Wollenberg, Rebecca Scharbach, Did Ezra Reconstruct the Torah or Just Change the Script? The Torah, thetorah.com/article/did-ezra-reconstruct-the-torah-or-just-change-the-script
8. Ezra 7:11
9. Ezra 7:10
10. Hallo, William W., The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt College Pub., New York, 1971, p. 29
11. Ibid
12. Kramer, Samuel Noah, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp 20-26
13. George, Andrew R., Shattered tablets and tangled threads: Editing Gilgamesh, then and now, Aramazd. Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 3:7–30, 2008
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh; ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/Gilgamesh
15. Shiloh, Yigal, and David Tarler, Bullae from the City of David, Biblical Archaeologist 49:196–209, 1986; Shiloh, Yigal, A Group of Hebrew Bullae from the City of David, Israel Exploration Journal, 36, 1988, 16–38
16. 2 Kings 25:18-21; Jer 52:24-27