The Ancients - Babylon and the Bible

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

When looking at the Hebrew Bible, the city of Babylon plays a prominent role - especially in the Old Testament. A city famed for it's architectural beauty and gardens, also holds stories of suffering and captivity. Travelling back to the 6th Century BCE, the Babylonian Captivity was a defining moment in both Judaean history, and faith. With enormous numbers of the Judaean elite banished to Babylon, there was a religious, and social, overhaul for all involved. So what happened in this pivotal moment in history - and what sources can we use to examine this event?In the final episode in our Babylon mini-series, Tristan welcomes Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones back to the podcast to look at Babylon within the Bible. Looking at surviving art and archaeology, cuneiform texts and biblical passages - what can we learn about this moment in ancient history, and the legacy that can still be felt today?If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, as we wrap up our special Babylon miniseries this May, where we're talking all about the role of Babylon in the Hebrew Bible. I did not realise just how huge a role the city

of Babylon played in the Bible story, particularly in the Old Testament. And today we're focusing in on a particular event. We're going to the 6th century BC to an event called the Babylonian captivity, when a large number of Judeans, particularly the elite, were sent into exile, were sent to Babylon, where they created new lives following the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. It's an event that is mentioned in the Bible but also one that we have archaeological evidence for too in the form of cuneiform texts. It's one of these wonderful times from ancient history where we have literature and archaeology to support an event. But what is all of this information revealing about the Babylonian

captivity? How were these Judeans treated? How did they fare in Babylon? And why is this event so important in the history of the Jewish people? Well, to explain all about this, I was delighted a few weeks ago to head over to Cardiff to interview a good friend of the podcast, a professor who's been on the podcast several times since the ancients was born a few years ago. His name is Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. Always a pleasure to catch up with Lloyd, and I really do hope you enjoy. Lloyd, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast today. Well, I am delighted to be back on it. Thank you very much for inviting me. You're more than welcome. And this is the first time that we're doing it face-to-face too. I know! Look, you're a real flesh-and-blood person. It's brilliant. It's really nice.

And for quite a topic, Babylon and the Bible. Lloyd, I did not realise just how big a role this city plays in the Old Testament story. It's a massive role. It's huge. And I think it's fair to say without the experience of being in Babylon, the Jews would never have created the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, as we know it. It was a definitive moment in the creation of Holy Scripture, but more importantly, it was the definitive moment in which Judaism came into being. Judaism proper as a kind of a faith, as an identity of a people as well. It comes out of the trauma of being dragged away from your homeland into an alien environment and trying to keep some kind of

identity going during this years of wilderness, if you like. So it's very important, yes. It's very important. Well, let's delve straight into it. So we're going back to the 6th century BC. I'm going to take you back a little bit further, actually. I think we need to go back to the end of the 7th century BCE, when we're seeing the rise of what we call now the Neo-Babylonian Empire. So Babylon, of course, had been a major political player in the ancient Near East since 3000 BCE. And certainly in the second millennium under Hammurabi and so forth, people will know about that. But what we're seeing in this late 7th century is the rise of an imperial sort of ideology of Babylon, drawing extensively on what the Assyrians who had gone before them had already created. So essentially taking over the previous colonial territories of the Assyrian Empire.

And under kings like Nebuchadnezzar II, very famous, of course, we see the beautification of the city. The famous Ishtar Gate is made at this time. This is when Babylon really is enjoying its heyday. This is its glory days more than anything else. And it has quite an aggressive foreign policy that comes with that, of course. This is what empires are all about, of course. It's land grab and people grabbing. That's what it's about.

And very often, the Babylonian kings of the Neo-Babylonian dynasties, they look at the Assyrian forerunners and they say, OK, we'll have a bit of that, essentially. And they undertake the same kind of policies that the Assyrians did too. So the Assyrians were absolutely obsessed with the idea of tribute kings. So tributary empires, essentially, is what Assyrians were absolutely obsessed with the idea of tribute kings. So tributary empires essentially is what Assyria was, demanding of conquered peoples the wealth and produce of these lands of conquest. And the Assyrians pretty much left people alone as long as they paid up their taxes.

Now the Babylonians follow in that league. And the area that they really look at to extract as much wealth as possible is the area that we call the Levant. So that is from modern-day southern Syria throughout the whole of Lebanon into Israel, Palestine, and then down towards the coast of Egypt as well. So this was a very lucrative area. Wealthy city-states are there, of course, being governed by kings and princelings. And the Neo-Babylonian kings thought, actually, there's rich pickings to be had from this.

The first incursion into the land, the territories that we call Israel-Palestine today, but what was known as Judah in the end of the 7th century, occurred in 604 BCE, so right at the end of the century there, when the Babylonians went and terrorized, essentially, this small kingdom of Judah. Now, the Judahites, operating from their capital city, Jerusalem, of course, already knew something of the history. They could remember just a hundred and so years before, when the Assyrians had swept down into a fertile crescent, into the Levant, and had completely destroyed the sister kingdom of Judah in the north. And they had taken captives away to Assyria. The deportation was a big thing, just as it was, incidentally, under Soviet rule, under Stalin, for instance. You know, this depopularization, moving people around so they're displaced and therefore have no kind of loyalty to the lands that they're going to live in. This was part of an Assyrian policy which the Babylonians willingly picked up on. So the north had seen this terrible

disruption of its culture. Many northerners had fled south into Judah, so there were lots of migrants in Judah for this whole century, obviously, you know, becoming more and more culturalized to Judean ways and so forth. But certainly the memory of this Assyrian onslaught was big in the mind of the Judeites at this moment. And so when they see the Babylonians taking over the same sort of policy, they began to sort of gird their loins and think, okay, how do we best deal with this? Well, they didn't deal with it very well because in 604 BCE, the Babylonians do invade Judah and they capture Jerusalem and they take away the king of Jerusalem as booty, together with members of his court, his wives, his daughters, his singing women, and also the chief kind of movers and shakers of the land, the aristocracy, the priests, as well as, of course, goods from the temple and the palaces.

These are all shipped back to Babylon, where actually we have evidence that they're kind of well looked after in a kind of gilded cage if you like but certainly they're removed from their land and the Babylonians replace the king of Judah with a new individual another Judahite from the same family actually a cousin or the uncle of the king and they give him the position of king as a kind of puppet king, really, a sort of, you know, placekeeper more than anything else. Now, that doesn't work out very well at all, because this replacement king, Zedekiah, he does everything that the Babylonians don't want to do, because he cuts off paying the tribute to them, which is really stupid on his part. But maybe he felt as though

help was going to come from Egypt. Certainly they turned to Egypt in the past for help, but it didn't. And so in 587 BC, Nebuchadnezzar, at the head of his army, launches a huge military operation against Judah. And the root of his anger really is the city of Jerusalem itself and Jerusalem is besieged for about something like a year and a half trying to hold out now centuries before previous kings of Jerusalem thinking that the Assyrians were going to invade had tried to stall up the walls of Jerusalem they also did things like create water tunnels by digging deep tunnels underneath the city of Jerusalem so that fresh water could come in. So all this was really certainly helping the Jerusalemites

hold out against the enemies of Babylon. But of course, inevitably, the city did fall. And this time, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had far less truck with the way in which he treated this turncoat Judean king. And he is actually blinded. His sons are executed in front of him. And then all of his goods from the palace and from the temple are taken back to Jerusalem. And the temple itself is destroyed. It is absolutely pulled down brick by brick this great temple that allegedly was built by Solomon but certainly been in operation for some three

four hundred years it was the center of cult in ancient Judah and we need to remember here that the temple was the dwelling place of God okay this is where as in all near eastern temples this is where the great God Yahweh had his home. Suddenly, with that displacement, Yahweh had nowhere to call his home anymore. So the feeling that leaves, is left in Jerusalem when the temple is dead, is gone, is that Yahweh is no longer present with them. So they are a people without a God any longer, which is a trauma in itself. But then, of course, when you see that your royal family has all been executed, all the great and the good have been carted off to Babylonia, and only the remnants remain. And this is the peasant farm workers, the tradesmen. I mean,

not at all the elite, not the great intellectual life of Judah, certainly not the religious life of Judah. That's been decimated entirely. What we're left with, of course, is this scene of desolation completely. Out of this are born some of the most remarkable, what we call city laments in the ancient Near Eastern catalogue. City laments were a genre of poetry that we find from Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria, where the city kind of grieves after terrible things have happened. And this city, Lament, of course, is found in the Hebrew Bible as a remembrance in the Book of Lamentations.

And it's only five chapters, but, you know, it's heartbreaking because here there are scenes of complete desolation, disorder, of women nursing dead babies to their breast, of having to turn to cannibalism to survive because the land has been salted and therefore cannot grow anything at all. So we have this terrible picture of what happened in Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside of Judah where there is a nothingness, there is an emptiness. Now it used to be thought, there is a nothingness, there is an emptiness. Now, it used to be thought, we used to call this the empty land.

Now we know a lot more from the archaeology that there were settlements and so forth. There was nothing on the scale of the previous 200 years, but not everybody was taken into exile. Those behind tried to make the best of things, but they made the best of things without the support and the networking of a kind of civilised operating society, if you like, and certainly without anything to do with the royalty and the priests and therefore the sacrifices, the cult that went on here. So this is a great disruption for the people in the land of Judah itself. But meanwhile, if we look and turn our attention

to what's happening then in Mesopotamia, of course, we've now got two generations of Israelites who are settled in this area. So we've got from the first exile, the first attack, back at the end of the seventh century, people who have been there already for some 20, 30 years, and now this new crop of incomers as well. And it's always been kind of problematic to know what happens to these people. How do they survive? Are they treated as

slaves? You know, is this like a form of bondage that they're in? Well, increasingly, evidence is coming to light to suggest that, by and large, there was a process of kind of assimilation going on in Babylonia at this period, because not only were the Jews there, but there were dispersed people from all over the Babylonian empire. So it was very multicultural kind of society. And by and large, the Babylonians didn't persecute these individuals, and they didn't force them into a slavery particularly either. But what they did want, of course, is for them to settle down, to farm the lands, to repopulate or to continue to populate Babylonia. And what we now find from a myriad of incredible cuneiform documents is evidence for Jewish life in Babylon in the

6th and 5th centuries BCE. So much so that we can now identify that there was actually what we might think of as a Jewish ghetto in Babylon. It was called Yehudia, which means Jew town, Jew suburb, something like that. Yehudia, Yehud was the Babylonian name for ancient Judah. And we have lots and lots of evidence for the use of theophoric names, so Jewish names. So Yahu is often a compound of these names, you know, so Yahuibid, things like that. But also we find that they are intermarrying with Babylonian women. They are working alongside

Babylonians. They're doing all sorts of tasks from farming through to metal working, you name it. But what we get from these documents now is this idea that people are settling down. Actually, they're assimilating really, really easily into Babylonian life, retaining their sort of identity, but pretty much going with the flow and it's interesting to see how this actually coincides with the writings we have from the exilic prophet Ezekiel Ezekiel's book is pretty much the main message in it is pretty much God says settle down here and do your best it's really strange isn't it we never think of that's the message, but that was the kind of, you could almost call it a piece of propaganda in that, you know, God's messenger, God's voice is saying, make the best out of this land. It's a good land. So the idea of the Judean homeland

is almost entirely dismissed by Ezekiel. And it does seem that for many thousands of Jews, life in Babylon was good, and that they were merging and mixing with others. But out of that, clearly amongst the elites, the priests, the scribes, a need was growing not to forget what they were really about. not to forget what they were really about. Because I suppose when your culture is so amalgamated into another, there is obviously the danger that you're going to forget what you're all about. And so what we find in this period is really the origins of what we now think of as the Old Testament being created.

The Old Testament as we know it, the Bible as we know it, is a product of the 4th and 5th centuries CE. It's a very late ancient text. There was no Bible during the Babylonian exile. It didn't exist at all. There were stories and there were elements maybe of written texts. There were hymns, there were songs, laments, but none of these had really been codified into something that we could see as the Bible. So let me give you some examples of how this would

work. Biblical scholars, knowing the development of the Hebrew language, for instance, can identify some of the earliest parts of the Bible. The very earliest bit we have is a section from the book of Judges, which is actually the song of Deborah. She's this kind of warrior queen, sort of warrior princess sort of thing. That has probably been preserved from the Bronze Age because it's in song form. Songs and poems are easy to recall. You know, this is how Homer operated and so forth and so down.

So now we can see that there are, like the Song of Deborah, the Song of Miriam, these kind of things have deep antiquity. And probably both the Israelites in the north and the Judeans in the south had their own histories as well, chronicles, annals, these kind of things which were either written down in chronicle form like the Assyrian and Babylonian chronicles and haven't come down to us and there is evidence for this in the Bible itself or else were just remembered which is a far more practical way of thinking of histories in

this period as well so there was a sense of who they were what their legacy was but none of this really gets formed until this moment of terrible trauma in the Babylonian exile when people were starting to worry about their own identities so what we see happening is the creation essentially of what we can understand as biblical books in this period. Some of the earliest, which might even begin to predate the exile, we're not sure, was probably the book of Deuteronomy. So this is the great law book. This is the book that provides the Jews with the classification of who they are by what they're not allowed to do. Not allowed to wear certain fibers, not allowed to eat certain animals or see fish or whatever. So dietary laws, all of this kind of stuff. the practicality of that in that the Jewish communities in Babylon are trying to say, look,

we need to do these kind of things to make us apart from the Babylonians who are all around us, okay, so we'll know who we are. How successful it was is open to debate, and it kind of suggests, because they're emphasizing it all the time, that people, the Jews, are actually eating whatever food they want to, mixing with whoever they want to as well. So these are kind of laws to provide a kind of ring fence around the Jewish community. What's really fascinating is that when you compare the laws of Deuteronomy with things like Babylonian laws and the Assyrian laws, you can see that they come from the same world. Even this emphasis that's there in the early books of the Bible, genesis which is being written at this period okay the idea of the covenant bear it in hebrew which is so important the covenant

that people have with their god are identical to the royal covenants that a vassal king has to the great king of Babylon. And it's even been claimed that the laws of Deuteronomy and some of the covenant literature was actually founded on a covenant treaty of Esarhaddon of Assyria that was actually located in the Jerusalem temple, for instance.

The story of the flood, the Garden of Eden, the Babylonian influence there is omnipresent, as has been recognised since the 19th century. Irving Finkel's great book on the flood, it reiterates really what was going on there. All of this is happening during this exile. For me, the most fascinating works that are created at this period are the historical works, so the books of Samuel and the books of Kings. This is the history of Israel and Judah, but written well after the events that they purport to tell. And there in the history of Judah and Israel,

the kings are judged as good or bad by how they worship God, how loyal are they to the Hebrew God. And they're judged all on that completely, you know. And it's almost as though the exiles are trying to think, what has brought us here? What has brought us to this situation? Well, there were some good kings,

and if only we'd followed them, it would have been good. But there are so many bad kings that got us into this terrible position, you know. So it's, again, just like these treaty covenants, if you turn your back on what the king wants, then you will be punished, essentially. So this is going deep deep into the psyche of the jews in babylonia at this time and of course also at this period this is

where they're pouring out some of their most beautiful poetry the psalms of course is the most important part of the collection we can identify within the Book of Psalms, 150 psalms are preserved. Some are Bronze Age, much, much earlier, unwritten down, codified in this period. Some are much later, but the exilic psalms are very clear to see because they have a quality to them. Most famous, I suppose, is Psalm 137, which is known, of course, by the rivers of Babylon. We sat down and wept and there the psalmists sing about you know how can we possibly sing the songs of our God in this foreign land when that's all they want to do is mock us so the story of Psalm 137 by the rivers of Babylon

is actually in sharp contrast to what we get in the archaeology of Babylon for this kind of settlement and the vision that we get in Ezekiel of Babylon for this kind of settlement and the vision that we get in Ezekiel as well. So, you know, there's not one sort of narrative here at all. So there's some people who are happy to be in Babylon and making the best of it. And there's probably the elites, the priests in particular, who are longing to go back because that's all they can do is think about going back. And interestingly, you know, in Psalm 137, which is so beautiful. Have you got that Psalm in front of us here? Go on, let's have a look at that.

You've been bigging it up. Oh, yeah, yeah, we should do it. We should. Here we go. By the rivers of Babylon. So incidentally, just to say, that's a really lovely, beautiful phrase. The actual Hebrew would actually be something like by the river canals of babylon babylon was

intersected with dozens and dozens and dozens of like shipment canals essentially but this is nicer by the rivers of babylon we sat and wept when we remembered zion there on the poplars we hung our harps for there our captors asked for us songs our tormentors demanded songs of joy they said captors asked for us songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? And then they lament. This is all about thinking back to their home. If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. i do not remember you if i do not consider jerusalem my highest joy and then it's interesting it turns very bitter this psalm and you know very often when this psalm is used in synagogue or in churches we leave out the bits that we don't like

you know the bits that don't appeal to us so much but this is how the psalm goes on and finishes remember lord what the edomites did and the J Jerusalem fell. So when the Babylonians came down, the Edomites were helping the Babylonians. Tear it down, they cried. Tear it down to its foundations. Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction. Happy is the one who repays you

according to what you have done to us. In other words, an eye for an eye mentality. And the psalm ends on this really horrible note happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks yeah that's definitely not mentioned in church yeah you don't get so much of that you wedding services you know so um but there we are you know there's this anger this bitterness as well so this is very much a multifaceted vision of what it means to be away from the holy land going on in this period the settled and the clearly the unsettled by this but

what's incredible about it is this way in which suddenly the life or a history and an understanding what it means to be jewish is clearly fermenting here. Perhaps one of the most remarkable things that comes out of this is the creation of the stories of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, so the stories of Abraham, who comes from Babylonia originally, of course, and then goes over to the Promised Land, and of the patriarchs,

but in particular the story of Moses and the exile in Egypt. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presto John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in present-day Ashkenazi Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestries we found in these individuals.

And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Matt Lewis and every Tuesday and Friday you can join me to travel the medieval world in search of the stories you haven't heard and to get under the skins of the ones you have.

Gone Medieval from History Hit, twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. There's very little evidence, historically, for any Egyptian sojourn for the Jews. In spite of, you know, films like The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille. It's a great story, but that's what it is. It's a revisit of the exile story. It's probably memories of some tribes or some tribal occupation by the Egyptians.

Certainly in the Bronze Age, the Egyptians were very problematic for the Hebrew, these Hebrew peoples. But then it's given an operatic flavour under these priests and scribes writing in this period. They are in exile and they write about an imagined or at least an amplified exile before when God liberated them, when God sent down his spirit to decimate the populations of the Egyptians. Will this happen again here? So you can see that history is being practiced on a kind of mythical and political level going on here as well. So the Jews are writing a new history of what they are. And I suppose this comes down even to the stories of kings like david and solomon now i believe that there were tribal leaders called david and solomon but they were

certainly not kings of international importance in the way that they are written by the scribes in the babylonian exile and clearly what the jews are doing in this period is thinking about you know there must have been who were our exemplar kings then? Who could we have had? And probably stories of the wisdom of Solomon were operating, stories about David and his exploits were going on there against the Philistines. And so they make them into these kind of national heroes, really. And it's kind of interesting the way in which they're crafted, Solomon in particular. If Solomon had an army of horses and foreign wives and foreign concubines, all of this, of course, is based on Babylonian representations of monarchy. Solomon is essentially a Babylonian or a Mesopotamian style king in a kind of Jewish milieu, I suppose.

So it's the creation of Jewish identity and a form of Hebrew history which emerges clearly out of this exile period. And for me, I find that absolutely fascinating. So I'd encourage you and anyone listening that when you read the Hebrew Bible, certainly these sections that I've mentioned, think constantly of what circumstances caused the writing of these parts of the books. Set them in the world of Babylon and what are the priests and the scribes trying to do with all of this. And that's another interesting point, isn't it? Because you mentioned right at the start how when Jerusalem is attacked by Nebuchadnezzar and the temple is destroyed, he brings those elite figures back to Babylon. So those would have been the figures who could write. Those would have been the scholars. And so that's how you can start piecing together what

you've mentioned, all that stuff, that it is not in Judah that this stuff is written. It is most likely by these people in Babylon. Precisely. And trying to find a way for themselves and their world to continue. And it's really interesting, isn't it? Because it's only in this period do we get the reworking of the conception of God himself. So if you look at Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, we actually have two creation myths. People tend not to realize that Genesis 1 is this invisible God who says let there be light Genesis 2 starts with God walking in the garden

and he creates from there so we have an anthropomorphic God and an invisible God now you see the practice was that this story of the anthropomorphic God walking in the garden creating Adam and Eve is a very ancient, early Bronze Age myth. Now the Jews couldn't just delete that from their story. It's too important, it was still going around. But now in Babylon, they needed to add another dimension to that story because their God was not visible to them any longer.

They couldn't go into the sanctuary of the Temple of Jerusalem and see a statue of God, and there were certainly Bronze Age statues of God, probably in bull form or else in the form of a standing stone. So now they have to think about how can we believe in a god that we can't see? Well, all around us, of course, the Babylonians are worshipping idols of their gods, you know, physical things they can touch and look at. And so I think the priests come up with this incredible theological way out, and that is to say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent through his invisibility, that we don't need now the one temple in Jerusalem all the time,

that God can be with us here in exile as well. So we see, slowly, slowly, slowly growing, and I think it develops into the Persian period afterwards, through Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, I think we see the development of God as a monotheistic deity, a one single God occupying time and space. And I suppose that is the real revolution in theological thought that comes out of the exile. I'd like to quickly turn our attention to, because we mentioned in previous podcasts, we've talked very much heralded the Persian version when talking about the Persians. If we talk to the Babylonian version of the exile, so these cuneiform tablets and the more that we're learning about the Jews in Babylon, you mentioned how it almost seems to be this suburb of ancient

Babylon and these different jobs that they're doing. Do we hear of particular high-ranking Jewish figures or are there any really great stories where it really corroborates either with the Bible story or maybe even really we see some great refutes of it? Well, we certainly know that after the first attack on Jerusalem, the king of Jerusalem carted back to Babylon with his family. They were certainly treated very well. And the king was released after 16 years imprisonment, as it were. So they must have had some kind of clout, like a royal family in exile amongst the elite Jews who were there, who were certainly the nobles, the army officers, the scribes, the priests, they were all there. So I suppose there's this little

quartery of people who are aware of their heritage and aware of their status and perhaps they're not so easy to overcome as the kind of little people who get carted off in the second wave i get the feeling that it's the second wave exiles that really assimilate themselves and what we get in the documents the cuneiform documents is we don't get necessarily images of high ranking individuals but we get in the documents, the cuneiform documents, is that we don't get necessarily images of high-ranking individuals, but we can certainly trace family lines and so forth, and we can trace family occupations as well. So, you know, several generations of exilic Jews

living in Babylon and its vicinity, doing very well for themselves, employing Babylonians in their jobs, marrying Babylonians, doing the things that people do, which is all there, interestingly, as I say, in Ezekiel as well. So we're not getting evidence per se of high status individuals, but certainly well-to-do merchants, bankers, farmers, metal workers, artisans. All of that is emerging from these incredible collections of documents. And also picturing Babylon at that time, you say it's majestic, but it's this capital, this world capital almost with not just Babylonians,

but many other peoples venturing here from the Neo-Babylonian Empire. We've talked very much about the Babylonian influence on this part of the Old Testament story. Do you think there's potentially influences from other cultures that would have ventured to Babylon at that time and these Jews in exile may well have had interactions with? I appreciate that's probably a very difficult question to answer.

It is difficult to answer, but I mean, and while I can't be absolutely specific, I think it's fair to say that no man is an island, right? And I suppose if you are mixing with Harrians or Hittites or Persians or Medians, and if you can communicate, then there's a likelihood that stories are going to be told, ideas swapped. There's going to be wrangles, but there's also going to be jokes. I mean, people just interact that way. And I think that if we're ever looking for a melting pot for antiquity, it's Babylon, the streets of Babylon that gave us that. It really was a truly ethnic

mix. Multicultural centre is exactly what it was. Well, I think in the next episode, we'll focus on when the Jews return from Babylon. But how long does this captivity in Babylon last? Well, in theory, it's about 70 years. So that's a good two, two and a half generations. Don't forget, life was shorter in antiquity. But actually, as we'll go on to learn, there were many, many Jews who never left Babylon. They were very happy there. Thank you very much. And I guess one other thing there, from what you've been saying in today's episode, it is remarkable the importance, the significance of this moment in, well, even down to today, with Western Europe very much still large dominance of Christianity.

How significant this particular moment in ancient Near Eastern Mesopotamian history is in how Christianity, Judaism is today? Absolutely. Well, certainly, I mean, the Jewish faith is founded in Babylon of all places. You know, it's strange that we wouldn't think about that. That's the kernel of what it is. And, of course, out of that comes Christianity. And, you know, Babylon is never forgotten in both cultures in later periods as well. The story of the Tower of Babel in the Hebrew Bible, that's part of it. Babel, of course, is Babylon.

Then we've got in the Book of Revelation, probably written towards the beginning or middle of the second century CE, we get Babylon being upheld as the most kind of wicked place on earth, worse even than Rome, you know, the whore of Babylon and all these kind of motifs come around as well. The idea of the destruction of Babylon has a great resonance amongst early Christian writers, that this kind of, you know, flesh pots of the world, the sinful areas of the world will be judged and will fall eventually. I think it's a very prejudiced and not particularly accurate view of what Babylon was all about. But the city in memory becomes used as this foil, I suppose, for the godly kingdom. And last but not least, as mentioned, we'll go on to the Jews returning from Babylon, some of them returning in the next episode. But you've mentioned the stories, the influence, the origins of so much. Is there anything else you want to highlight in this episode?

I suppose it's worth saying that we shouldn't think of all the Jewish exiles living in luxury or even, you know, making good in their various jobs. There must have been some elements that went into slavery and, of course, disappear completely from the record. So let's not over-egg the idea that everybody was happy to be there. And I suppose the trauma, especially if you were separated from loved ones back home or sold off or moved on to a different part of Mesopotamia, away from your family, was, of course, horrific.

But, by and large, the evidence available to us shows far more evidence for assimilation than for oppression. And is this reflected actually at all in Nebuchadnezzar's portrayal? Sometimes we seem to have this idea of him as the big baddie. But is that really true in the biblical portrayal of him? Well, it's really interesting because Nebuchadnezzar, within the second book of Kings, which is the historical narrative, he does what kings do. You know, he proclaims that Jerusalem will fall and it falls and he takes people away. But of course, he reappears in the book of Daniel.

And Daniel was probably written in the late Hellenistic period. So now we've got sort of three, four hundred years gap between the story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar at whose court Daniel operates. And Nebuchadnezzar comes over there as kind of an interesting sort of philosopher king. He's interested in people's ways, people's ideas. He can be quite ruthless. Of course, you know, throws three young Jewish men into the fiery furnace and Daniel himself into the lion pit. But as God saves them from this, so Nebuchadnezzar is willing to learn.

So he becomes a kind of enlightened despot. And I suppose the ultimate moment is that when he denies the presence of God within Babylon, within his own kingdom, God strikes him with kind of madness and he becomes like an animal the book says that you know hair grows out of him long long shaggy hair his nails grow into talons and he is struck with his madness and it's only when he renounces the other gods of Babylon and

sort of retains or sees for himself the glories of Yahweh the Hebrew God that he's restored to a man so it's kind of interesting to see how later authors think about Babylon being a receptive place for the Jewish God, which is kind of interesting, isn't it? But I think that will be more easily explained after we talk in the future about Cyrus and the Persian use of what goes on in Babylon as well. Absolutely, which we will get to. I mean, it is also fascinating to think, isn't it, maybe in this Jewish suburb of Babylon, that maybe they did create their own temple to gods

as almost a replacement to what had been in Jerusalem before. That's interesting. I mean, there is no evidence for temple building. And while, you know, in a polytheistic world, that would be no problem to the Babylonians I don't think I think it would have been problematic to the Judeans because only Jerusalem could have the temple because the temple was based on the tabernacle the tabernacle was the ancient tent where the holy of holies was where the laws of Moses were allegedly kept all of this has been

created of course at this point as well. But I don't think they could have conceived of a temple outside of Jerusalem. And that's why what happens next becomes so important in the next stage of the Jewish journey. Lovely way to wrap that up. I'm going to stop asking questions now. Not bad. Lloyd, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back. You're very welcome. thank you so much for taking the time to come back. You're very welcome.

Well, there you go. There was Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones wrapping up our Babylon mini series, talking all about Babylon and the Bible, the Babylonian captivity. Don't you worry, Lloyd will be back on the podcast in due course. We're continuing our discussion. We'll be focusing next on the arrival of Cyrus the Great, the great Persian empire, the role of Persia in the Bible and more. That's all to come with Lloyd and that'll be coming out in the next few months. In the meantime, I really do hope you've enjoyed this special mini-series all about Babylon. If you want to help us out in the ancients, you know what you've enjoyed this special mini-series all about Babylon. If you want to help us out in the ancients, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us as we continue our mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible.

But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.