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Notes on video lecture:
Judahite Communities in Babylon
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on December 28, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
597, Weidner, Babylon, Judenstadt, mix, Mesopotamia, Kings, Jerusalem, foreigners, religion, tax, dregs, Solomon, sanctuaries, million, three, Egypt, captivity, estates, Waerzeggers, Uruk, urban, daily, exciting, unloading, Cuneiform, Judah, market, rations, clans, Sabbath, Yahweh, Jehoiachin, networking, dialects, Davidic, daughters, Philistines, separately, blinded, Tigris, villages
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587 BC: Siege of                   
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Nebuchadnezzar II
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culminated in the destruction of the city
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after Siege of       , Nebuchadnezzar installed Zedekiah as tributary king of Judah at the age of twenty-one
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revolted against               , and entered into an alliance with Pharaoh Hophra, king of Egypt
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Nebuchadnezzar responded by invading           
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siege lasted 30 months
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"every worst woe befell the city, which drank the cup of God's fury to the           "
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after seeing his sons killed, Zedekiah was               , bound, and taken captive to Babylon, where he remained a prisoner until his death
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Babylonian general Nebuzaraddan was sent to complete its destruction
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Jerusalem was plundered and               's Temple was destroyed
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most of the elite were taken into                    in Babylon
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Gedaliah was assassinated two months later, and the population that had remained and those who had returned then fled to            for safety
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after the siege: Judahite Communities in                       
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we have no large body of evidence like the archive of Elephantine that describes            life
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Ran Zadok (Tel Aviv University)
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"The                    Text"
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database of cuneiform texts that mention any Judahites or Israelis
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Laurie Pearce (Berkeley)
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Cornelia Wunsch (Leipzig)
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Kathleen Abraham (Tel Aviv)
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Caroline                        (Leiden)
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most of the research is being done on cuneiform documents and using them to try to reconstruct life of exiled Judahites in the Mesopotamian region around Babylon
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kinds of texts
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               Texts
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relate to King                      of Judah
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a king of Judah who was dethroned by the King of Babylon in the 6th century BC and was taken into captivity
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in these texts he is presented as receiving                from the royal palace
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also know of him from the end of the Book of           
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was probably understood to be the heir to the                throne
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Sippar Texts
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mention Judahite individuals in a              town
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Murasha Archive
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a firm whose task was the management of royal fiefs and               
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land leasing
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       collection
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texts from         , Nippur, Marad, and Isin
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suggest that some Judean individuals lived among Babylonians not only in rural but also in an            contexts
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Al Yahudu Texts
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the most                  body of texts
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translated as "Judahville" or "Jew Town" or in German "                    "
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we have only 5% published so far
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only the tip of the iceberg
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it remains to be seen what new information we can get from these texts
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scholarly work on                      e.g. by Caroline Waerzeggers
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how it can be shown that there was            degrees of separation between rural Judahite and a high-ranking priestly official
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Judahites were settled in regions which the palace wanted to develop
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to increase the agricultural production
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placed on lands on the              owned by the crown
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their job it to develop these lands and pay their taxes
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Judahites resides in new and old                  with foreigners
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they are not being settled alone, they are not separated from others
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they have contact with                     
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many of these foreigners are Phoenicians and                       
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spoke                  which were similar to each other
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the problems of oral communication became less acute as the next generation of children were raised
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involved in daily affairs
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working for business firms, doing tax collection
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social organization and                 
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organized in           
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seem to be clan divisions, e.g. certain individuals do business with some clans but not other clans
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none of the documents were issued on a Saturday or high holiday
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seems to point to their keeping the                holy
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this is different to the Elephantine records where they were                    ships on Saturday
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temple and sanctuaries
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the Elephantine records refer to a temple to Anat-Yahu
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Anat-Yahu: either the wife, sacred consort of             , or as a hypostatized aspect of Yahweh
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there is no reference to a temple in the Babylonian documents
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although it's probable that they have some sort of                        in each of their villages
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in order to practice religious life, they needed something, since they were not part of the temples in the Babylonian cities
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they continued to live                      for generations
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near a                Judahites
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into the Roman times
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a question is why the small population at the beginning is not merging with the Babylonian population society
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the Babylonian elites did not want to        with others
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they may have taken                    of other nationalities for their own sons
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but they would never give their own daughters to other nationalities
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when these communities return to Judah, they continue this tradition of remaining separate

Vocabulary:

synchretism, n. the combining of different, often contradictory beliefs, while blending practices of various schools of thought, the merger and analogizing of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths ⇒ "The Nabonidus Cylinder of Sippar is a long text in which Nabonidus describes how Nabonidus repaired three temples: the sanctuary of the moon god Sin, the sanctuary of the warrior goddess Anunitu in Sippar, and the temple of Šamaš in Sippar, a significant text in that it offers a full syncretism of Sin (moon god), Marduk (patron deity of Babylon), and Nabu (god of wisdom and writing)."
hypostasize, v. to treat or represent something abstract as a concrete reality ⇒ "Anat-Yahu was represented as either the wife or sacred consort of Yahweh, or as a hypostatized aspect of Yahweh."
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