Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

Nehemiah, palace, executions, challenges, worst, writings, Ashdod, locusts, 22, antiquity, undermined, unearthed, water, East, Samaria, burials, children, foreigners, inadvertently, siege, epidemics, intact, Manasseh, develop, planting, salt, Hezekiah, husband, struggling, balance, refugees, capitulated, depopulation, high, heads, Babylonia, identity, winter, Babylon, Byblos, life, municipal, fruit, Kings, Judahites

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how can we explain the demographic decline of Judah after the                   Babylonia conquest

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where did everyone go?

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were they all deported to               Babylon?

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wars in                   antiquity

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death tolls were usually quite         high, due to:

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lack evacuation

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lack medicine

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lack of sanitation

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          siege warfare

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in Judah, wars usually meant people in countryside taking refuge behind                   municipal fortifications in cities

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waiting it out

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contributed to death toll

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famine

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long after enemy had returned home, the population was still                     struggling to survive

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invading army sought to destroy the         life support systems of their enemy city

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cutting off or polluting the           water sources

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laying the fields to waste

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cutting down           fruit trees and orchards that took many years to grow

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sowing         salt in the ground

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what an invading army did not intentionally destroy was often                           inadvertently ruined

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if the fields were not regularly ploughed,               locusts could hatch and become catastrophic plagues

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years of siege interfered with the delicate               balance of tilling, planting and harvesting

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Rib-Adda, example from 14 century BCE

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king of             Byblos during the mid fourteenth century BCE, known from the Amarna Letters

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Amarna letter to Egyptian rule

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he is trapped in his city like a bird in a cage

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enemy was at his doorstep,                 planting is impossible

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for lack of cultivation, my field is like a woman without a               husband

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people had sold household objects and                 children to buy provisions

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starvation during             winter

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once there is collapse of governmental administration

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no police

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chaos

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safety is                     undermined

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voluntary migrations to places where conditions were better

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once city had                       capitulated

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invading army would often perform public                     executions

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usually elites and administrative officials

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people in the             palace

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often indiscriminate

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we have some attestations of such               burials from the 8th century

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Fall of             Ashdod

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successful Egyptian assault on the city of Ashdod in Palestine in around 635 BC

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known of through Greek historian Herodotus

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during wars with Assyria

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2,444 remains of human beings                   unearthed

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    22% of them were less than 15 years of age when they died

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other finds show that           heads were separated from bodies

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deportations may have led to                         depopulation

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but are many other factors as above

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Book of Jeremiah

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                  Judahites fleeing across the Jordan after the Babylonian conquest

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made their way to Egypt

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a place that                 refugees fled in times of political turmoil and natural catastrophes

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the reason that hear these stories in the Bible is that the Biblical authors regard the abandonment of the promised land is one of the           worst things imaginable

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deportations in the Assyrian empire

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moved subjugated populations around their empire

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moving them to regions which they wanted to               develop

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King chapter 17

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Assyrians brought populations from the         East and settled them in Israel's territories

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likely did this in the northern regions of Israel

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they may have done this in Judah as well when they went to war against                 Hezekiah (ruled 715-686 BC)

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the reason the Biblical authors do not tell us whether the Assyrians brought in people into Judah

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the Judahite authors were in competition with the people in               Samaria

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by claiming that people in the north were foreigners, they could deal an deal an ideological blow to their competitors in Samaria

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Samaria: based on the borders of the biblical Northern Kingdom of Israel and especially the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and                 Manasseh

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the rivalry between Jerusalem and Samaria was one of the major communal                     challenges that Biblical authors face

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it was useful for them to say that the population of Israel were actually                     foreigners

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they can say that these were not true Israelites

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this is just the Book of           Kings

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this view is also expressed a bit in Ezra and                 Nehemiah

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even if the Assyrians practiced deportations on a much larger scale than the Babylonians

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we should not image that they deports any more than 20% of the population

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they kept families             intact and moved ethnic groups together

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this means:

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1. we must imagine many communities that persisted in the former territory of the Kingdom of Israel who contributed substantially to the formation of the Biblical                 writings

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2. the deported Israelite families and communities most likely maintained their                 identity over generations and came into contact with Judahites which had been deported into various places in Mesopotamia