Yahudu: At the Centre of the Babylonian Exile and at the Heart of the Persian Empire

Ort: Bibliothek Altorientalistik, Residenz, Südflügel, III. Stock
Zeit: Do, 20. Juni, 16 Uhr ct

At the start of his book Israel in Exile, Rainer Albertz described the exilic period as “the most profound caesura and the most radical change” in Israel’s history (Albertz 2001, p. 1). He also noted that despite the Hebrew Bible being shaped by the exilic experience, it offers very little historical information on the time spent by the Judean deportees and their descendants in Babylonia. This lacuna now seems to be filled by a large archive of cuneiform texts that describes transactions between Judeans and other ethnic groups in and around the settlement of “Yahudu” near the Kebar river on the eastern plain of Babylonia shortly after their deportation from Jerusalem. The tablets, looted from Iraq in the early 1990s, seem to put a camera directly on the community whose experiences were foundational to the redaction of biblical books like Ezekiel. In this lecture I will turn our camera on the tablets themselves and ask a most basic question: “Why does this archive exist?”. Informed by the archival turn, I will argue that the archive can be read along the grain to reveal the progressive efforts of two successive empires to control the eastern plain of Babylonia for their own purposes.