Published: 21 December 2018
Last updated: 5 March 2024
“IN THE 70TH year in the month of Kislev the king of Akkadia mustered his soldiers and marched into the land of the Hittites and laid siege to the city of Judea. In the month of Adar on the second day he occupied the city and captured the king. He installed a king after his own heart, imposed a harsh tax and sent [it] to Babylon.”
This Akkadian chronicle of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II from the year 598 BCE is a major piece of extra-Scriptural evidence of the first Judean exile – the Jehoiachin exile.
In 2 Kings 24:8-17, we learn that Jehoiachin was the king who was taken captive and sent into exile along with “all the commanders and all the warriors — ten thousand exiles — as well as all the craftsmen and smiths… and the king’s mother and the king’s wives and officers and the notables of the land were brought as exiles from Jerusalem to Babylon.”
Eleven years later, the same Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, killed King Zedekiah – the one “after his own heart” – and exiled a large part of the population of Judea and Jerusalem, in what is known as “the Babylonian Exile,” which put an end to more than 400 years of rule by the House of David in Jerusalem.
FULL STORY The forgotten biblical exile that laid the foundation for Jewish life in the Diaspora (Haaretz)
Image: Jehoiachin by Michelangelo
