ackack....In a recent article "The Babylonian Gap: The Archaeological Reality" (JSOT 2004:273-277), Ephraim Stern makes the following claims which he says are fairly secure:
- Even before the Babylonian campaigns of 605 BC onward, Judah had experienced ongoing devastations by the Assyrian and Egyptian armies and there were also regional conflicts between Judah and Edom and Judah and Philistia which led to devastation at sites.
- Before the Babylonian campaigns in the Levant there were a total of ten kingdoms in the land: Two were controlled by Assyria (Samaria and Megiddo), and the rest were independent (Judah, Ammon, Edom, Moab, and the four kingdoms of the Philistines). All these kingdoms had ceased to exist by the Persian period, as indicated by discontinuities in material culture.
- In Judah, Philistia and Edom, most Iron Age II sites end at destruction levels of the Babylonian conquest (e.g. Babylonian arrowheads embedded at destruction levels in Tel Malhata in Edom, Jerusalem in Judah, and En-Gedi) and are immediately followed with Persian levels. Some cities that had been devastated in the seventh century BC in Assyrian campaigns, such as Megiddo III, Dothan, Beth-shean, Tel Rehov, etc. were resettled and rebuilt in the Assyrian period (and thus have Assyrian pottery), but these levels are similarly followed by dramatically different Persian levels. The Assyrians appeared to have tried to rebuild and resettle cities in conquered territories, while the Babylonian military strategy was the destroy them and not rebuild.
- In the Persian levels, there is evidence that Phoenicians had moved into the previous Philistine cities and Edomites had moved into previous Judean cities. In the Babylonian conquest, "the land was not 'emptied' but its great harbor cities in the north and south were totally destroyed, and the population, some of which was killed and some deported by the Babylonians was sharply reduced" (p. 274). Substantial resettlement did not occur until the Persian period, and then largely by non-Judeans.
- There is however a notable exception: the land of Benjamin in Judah, which shows evidence of continuity throughout the Babylonian period to the Persian period, and Rabat Ammon and central Samaria (p. 276). These are areas where Judean and Samaritan/Israelite culture continued.
Blenkinsopp in another article (JSOT, 2002) has engaged Stern on some of these issues and believes that there was more continuity than Stern admits; Stern however claims that Blenkinsopp is not an archaeologist and has misinterpreted the data. For specific details on the various sites, I believe a good source would be Stern's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: Volume 2, The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 732-332 BCE (AB Reference Library; New York: Doubleday, 2001). The main point however is that neither Stern nor Blenkinsopp support pseudo-scholar's claims of a complete and total devastation and depopulation of Judah. The "Babylonian Gap" is based on evidence from urban centers, allowing for continuity in rural areas and especially in the land of Benjamin which Stern notes had continued settlement through the Babylonian and Persian periods. Another recent article, "The Rural Settlement of Judah in the Sixth Century B.C.E." by Oded Lipschits (Palestine Exploration Journal, 2004:99-107), focuses on the evidence from the land of Benjamin. Here is a quote from the abstract:
"The present paper claims that the major and most conspicuous archaeological phenomenon in Judah after the destruction of Jerusalem is the sharp decline in urban life, which is in contrast to the continuity of the rural settlements in the region of Benjamin and in the area between Bethlehem and Beth Zur. These archaeological investigations demonstrate that a new pattern of settlement was created in Judah, in which the core settlements were destroyed or abandoned while, at the same time, the surrounding region continued to exist almost unchanged. The differences between the various regions of this small kingdom should be understood as the outcome of a planned Babylonian policy of using some of the rural highland areas as a source for agricultural products. The settlement in those areas became a place of specialized wine and oil production, and was used both for paying the taxes and supplying the basic products for the Babylonian administration and forces stationed in the area. A similar situation is detectable in the area south of Rabbath-Ammon, around Tell el 'Unieiri and Tell Hesban, and perhaps also in the Baq'ah region, north of Rabbath-Ammon" (p. 99).
Later in the article, Lipschits contrasted "regions known to have been destroyed at the beginning of the sixth century B.C.E. and that had had no settlement continuation in the Persian period (the Jordan valley, the Negev, the southern Shephelah, etc.)" with the region of Benjamin and "the northern Judean hills" were there was clear continuity throughout the period (p. 102). As far as depopulation is concerned, Lipschits estimates the following:
"[D]uring the Babylonian period there was a demographic and settlement crisis -- a decline of approximately 70% in the size of the population (Lipschits 2003, 356), The sharpest decline occurred in Jerusalem and its environs (around 90%), which were the focus of the Babylonian activities (Lipschits 2001, 129-42). A similar rate of decline also took place in the Judean desert, Jordan valley, the western littoral of the Dead Sea, and in the Shephelah (Lipschits 2000, 31-42; 2003, 334-46), However, in the Benjamin region, there was a more moderate decrease (approximately 60%) in the size of the settled area between the end of the Iron Age and the Persian period. As will be discussed further, to judge from the results of the excavations of the main sites in this region, one may assume that this decrease took place gradually at the end of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth centuries B.C.E, (Lipschits 1997, 196-245; 1998, 8-32; 1999, 155-90; 2003, 346-51), Furthermore, throughout the region between Jerusalem and Beth-Zur, there is marked settlement continuity, with an impressive increase in the number of small sites, as can be concluded from comparison between settlement patterns of the end of the Iron Age and those from the Persian period (Lipschits 1997: 276-99; 2003: 351-55)" (p. 102-103).
Regarding the fate of the cities in Benjamin:
"In the region of Benjamin, there were four important, central cities that were not destroyed by the Babylonians and that even flourished during the sixth century B.C.E. (Lipschits 1999a, 155-178; 2003, 346-48; Carter 2003, 307-10): Mizpah (Tell en-Nasbeh), Gibeah (Tell el-Ful), Bethel (identified in the village of Beitin), and Gibeon (identified in the village of el-Jib). At the end ofthe sixth century B.C.E. and during the Persian period, there is a marked process of depopulation and settlement decline in those four sites (Zorn 1993, 184-85; Stern 2001, 321-22; Lipschits 2003, 348-49)" (p. 104).
The decline in those sites may have been connected with the restoration of Jerusalem as an administrative and cultural center. However, the author also notes that even into the Hellenistic period, the overwhelming majority of the population continued to live in rural settlements.
In summary, some parts of Judah became uninhabited, especially important cities and towns. This is not unusual; throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages, sites not infrequently became abandoned for a generation or two (or longer) following devastation and war, as archaeological evidence shows. This is what Ephraim Stern shows in the case of Judah in the sixth century BC; the evidence is striking that in many cities and towns, there is an abrupt break between destruction levels dating to Nebuchadnezzer's campaigns and levels dating to the Persian period. However, if this evidence is to be accepted (as Rolf Furuli has done in his recent tome, p. 91), it is dishonest to omit the caveat that Stern has pointed out that there were places in Judah that remained inhabited throughout the exilic period. The evidence is unambiguous of cultural continuity in the land of Benjamin (cf. Lipschits, Blenkinsopp), and it is inconceivable that the Babylonians who acquired the land had no interest in exploiting the land for its natural resources and did not themselves enter it for 50 years....
