WHAT IS HISTORY?

WHAT IS HISTORY?  

“By the Rivers of Babylon, we wept.”  On Tisha B’Av, the 9^th of Av (July 25, 2015) we will read Lamentations, Eicha.  We will read about OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORY, a day, through the eye of an historic needle, we stitch one day of successive tragedies throughout Jewish history.  Sitting on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and there they wept. 

What happened afterwards, after the losses of 586 BCE, AFTER the destruction of the First Temple, the seat of religious and political governance in Eretz Yisrael?

The answer can be found in new exhibit I saw today at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, “By the Rivers of Babylon”.  I had no idea what happened to those exiled to Babylon.  Unlike the Arch of Titus in Rome, depicting Jewish slaves in chains, pillaging the Temple, the Menorah, the Khatzotzrot (the golden trumpets that announced Shabbat) NOTHING was known of the First Temple exiles.  NOW, WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM!

Nebuchadnezzar, mentioned in the Prophets, and Writings, and sections of the T’N’Ch (Kings 2, Jeremiah, and Chronicles) in 586 BCE destroys the First Temple and brings Jewish exiles to Babylonia.  Nebuchadnezzar has always been the prototype bad guy (i.e. may his name be blotted out, with a short list of other bad guys, you know who).  But today, I learned that he set up numerous villages for these exiles in Babylonia.  These villages were designed by Nebuchadnezzar’s architects to resemble the exiles’ home towns.  They had canals (water was a must), date groves, and agricultural fields to promote independence.   Wealth was determined by three commercial elements: dates, agricultural produce (barley) and silver (which they didn’t have).  When Cyrus King of Persia, remember Esther in Shushan, i.e. Susa), overcame the Babylonians and invited the exiles back to Eretz Yisrael, many didn’t want to return.  Life was good in Babylonia!

The following article by Ilan Ben Zion appeared in the Times of Israel, Thursday, July 16, 2015 (today!).

 “By the Rivers of Babylon” showcases a collection of about 100 rare clay tablets from 6th century Mesopotamia that detail the lives of exiled Judeans living in the heartland of the Babylonian Empire. Through these small Akkadian legal documents written in cuneiform (many the size of a bar of soap), scholars have breathed life back into generations of Judeans who lived in Babylon but whose names and traditions speak of a longing for Zion. 

The Al-Yahudu tablets are part of a private collection that has never before gone on public display. No one knows the when these small documents surfaced, but they likely turned up somewhere in southern Iraq. After decades on the antiquities market they ended up in the hands of a private collector, David Sofer, who offered to loan them to the Bible Lands Museum. 

“It puts a face on the real people who went through these fateful events,” Dr. Filip Vukosavović, curator of the exhibit, told The Times of Israel. The tablets preserve a wealth of Judean names — including the familiar Natanyahu — of the exilic community, and even include a handful of Aramaic inscriptions.
 
Before the Al-Yahudu texts were found and studied, scholars only had an outline of life for Judeans in Babylon, said Dr. Wayne Horowitz, Hebrew University’s professor of Assyriology, who helped prepare the exhibition and the corresponding academic literature.  “We had before this an outline, a tradition, but as historians we couldn’t prove it. And now we’re actually seeing the community living its life, really fleshed out.”

He compared the experience of the exiled Judeans to that of new immigrants to Israel in the early years of the state. They were settled in a region of southern Babylon that had been ravaged by years of war and forced to rebuilt infrastructure and dig canals — the rivers by which they wept when they remembered Zion.

“Once they had built the infrastructure they were allowed to settle and build their lives,” Horowitz explained. Within a short while, the community became more prosperous and secure, a fact documented in the financial documents preserved in clay.

“It’s impossible to exaggerate when it comes to the importance and the amount” of information gleaned from the tablets, Vukosavović said. He called the Babylonian exile the “most important event in the history of the Jewish people.”

Each document catalogs when and where it was written and by whom, providing scholars with an unprecedented view into the day-to-day life of Judean exiles in Babylonia, as well as a geography of where the refugees were resettled. The earliest in the collection, from 572 BCE, mentions the town of Al-Yahudu — “Jerusalem” — a village of transplants from Judea.

“Finally through these tablets we get to meet these people, we get to know their names, where they lived and when they lived, what they did,” Vukosavović said.

The texts help dispel the misconception that the Judeans in Babylon were second-class citizens of the empire, living in ghettos and pressed into hard labor. While some toiled in base drudgery, others thrived, owned property, plantations and slaves, and became part of the Babylonian bureaucratic hierarchy.

“It teaches us that we weren’t slaves, like we were slaves to the Pharaoh,” Vukosavović said. “It teaches us that we were simply free people in Babylon, living not only in Al-Yahudu, but also in a dozen other cities where Jews either lived or did their business.”

WHAT IS HISTORY?  It was discovered, uncovered, and revealed.  This new exhibition in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem tells the story of a formerly unknown period of Jewish history and exile.  It lends new insight into Nebuchadnezzar, the villain and the builder, and the Jewish exiles in Babylonia.

WOW with love and learning from Jerusalem.

Hasha