There Was No Gap

037

More than half a century ago, the dean of Biblical archaeologists, William Foxwell Albright, pronounced final judgment on the archaeological record for the territory of Judah between the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon’s king Nebuchadrezzar [Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible] in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent fall of Babylon to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. “All, or virtually all, of the fortified towns in Judah had been razed to the ground,” he wrote. “There is not a single known case where a town of Judah was continuously occupied through the exilic period [the Babylonian exile].”¹

We can hardly avoid a sense of déjà vu on reading Ephraim Stern’s version of the same thesis in “The Babylonian Gap,” BAR 26:06: The Babylonians devastated the country and much of the surrounding region, he argues. All Judahite cities were left in ruins. Following the destruction, there was no resettlement and no continuity of occupation. As a result, the territory of Judah was largely depopulated. Hence the title of his article: “The Babylonian Gap.”

The issue is important enough to historians and Biblical scholars to warrant close scrutiny. After all, Judaism itself emerged in this period, after the liquidation of the Judahite state. Many Bible books of first importance—much of Isaiah 40–66 and the final version of Deuteronomy, for example—are dated by many scholars to this time. If Albright and Stern have it right, it is difficult to see how anything of consequence could have happened in this “gap.”

This issue obviously has many ramifications. I will concentrate here on just one aspect: the claim of total or near-total destruction by the Babylonians of settlements in Judah and surrounding regions. Let us check Stern’s conclusions—most of them worded in a very apodictic and unqualified way—against the informed, up-to-date opinion of other archaeologists.²

We may begin, as Stern does, with the important site of Megiddo, which was an Assyrian province (Magiddu) from the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E. until the Babylonian conquest. Stern informs us that the city itself (stratum III), as well as two smaller towns a few miles to the north (Tel Qiri and Yoqneam) were destroyed early on—at the end of the seventh century B.C.E.—by the Babylonians. Yet in his summary of the archaeological evidence for Megiddo, archaeologist David Ussishkin, a codirector of the current excavation of the site, lists no destruction of either of the Assyrian levels (III and 038II). Another prominent archaeologist, the late Yigal Shiloh, described what he took to be evidence for the destruction of stratum II not as a Babylonian destruction but as a destruction resulting from a well-known battle (recounted in 2 Chronicles 35–36) between the Egyptian pharaoh, Necho, and the Judahite king, Josiah, in 609 B.C.E. Likewise at Tel Qiri and Yoqneam, Amnon Ben-Tor, the excavator of these sites, found no evidence for a conflagration in this period.³

Stern next turns to the Phoenician coast, which includes his own site of Tel Dor. In this important area, he tell us, Nebuchadrezzar destroyed the city of Tyre after a lengthy siege.⁴ But he gives no archaeological evidence in support of this claim. Our source for the 13-year-long siege of Tyre is the first-century C.E. historian Josephus⁵, who says nothing about its capture. Stern makes the same claim for the coastal site of Akko, citing its excavator Moshe Dothan in support of his view. But Stern appears to misquote Dothan, who dates the very limited evidence for burning to the late Assyrian period, not to the Babylonian period.⁶ At Tell Keisan, inland and southeast of Akko, a French team found signs of burning which they also dated to the late Assyrian period.⁷ Stern proposes to revise this date downward to attribute the destruction to the Babylonians but once again offers no supporting evidence.⁸ He even calls into question the clear implication of his own finding at Dor—that the city fortifications remained undisturbed from the Assyrian to the Persian period—by positing a purely hypothetical reconstruction during the Persian period following the “gap” inaugurated by the Babylonian conquest.⁹

The situation of the Philistine cities is somewhat different, as several of them were indeed targeted by Nebuchadrezzar during his struggle with Egypt in the first years of his reign (605–600 B.C.E.). But even here Stern overstates his case in claiming that “all the excavations in this area provide clear indications of the total destruction in the seventh century B.C.E. of all the prosperous Philistine cities of Assyrian and Egyptian times.”¹⁰ The evidence of destruction for Ashkelon, Ekron (Tel Miqne), Timnah (Tel Batash) and Gezer is persuasive. But this is not the case with other sites. Stern tells us that Ashdod (stratum VI) was “destroyed by the Babylonian army,” but others have attributed the destruction instead to either Pharaoh Psamtik I of Egypt or King Josiah of Judah.¹¹ Likewise, Stern provides no evidence for his assertion of a Babylonian destruction level at Ashdod Yam or Tell Jemmeh, far to the south. At nearby Tel Haror (Tell Abu Hureireh), identified by some as Gerar, the excavator Eliezer Oren dates the destruction level to the mid-seventh century, and suggests it probably resulted from an Egyptian attack; Stern, on the other hand, dates the destruction of the site’s citadel (in area G2) to the late seventh or early sixth century, therefore bringing it into line with his theory of near-total Babylonian destruction.¹² Here again, the situation is less clear-cut than Stern would have us believe.

There is another problem with such sites as Tel Haror, Tel Jemmeh and Tell el-Hesi. They were well within the Egyptian and Edomite sphere of influence. This raises the question as to who did the destroying. The talisman produced to exclude all but Babylonians is a Scythian arrowhead, but we are still waiting for a precise inventory of finds, and wonder whether the Babylonians indeed had a monopoly on this dangerous piece of equipment.

For example, traces of burning on the floors of the sixth century B.C. citadel at Arad (stratum VI) in the eastern Negev would more likely have resulted from an Edomite than a Babylonian attack, especially because the ostraca (inscribed potsherds) discovered in situ mention a hostile Edomite presence in the region. This would also be true of other alleged victims of Babylonian aggression in that area, including at Horvat Uza, Horvat Radum, Tel Malhata and Qitmit. And anyway, the stratigraphy of Arad is so disputed that no reliable conclusions are possible for this period.¹³

That the Benjaminite district north of Jerusalem was spared during the Babylonian punitive expedition is confirmed by the absence of evidence for destruction at any of the well-known Benjaminite sites (principally Tell en-Nasbeh [Mizpah],^a el-Jib [Gibeon], Tell el-Ful [maybe Gibeah] and Beitin [Bethel]). This suggests that Benjaminite families may have belonged to the appeasement party during the last decade of Judah’s independent existence.

Coming, finally, to Judah: Jerusalem is a clear and well-documented case. It was devastated by Nebuchadrezzar in 586 B.C.E., bringing an end to the 400-year existence of the kingdom of Judah. The destruction of the public buildings, defenses and Temple of that “rebellious city hurtful to kings and provinces” (Ezra 4:15) was a deliberate and 059ideological act, and its effects are clearly inscribed in the archaeological record of Jerusalem. The Babylonian destruction of Lachish, the second most important fortified city after Jerusalem, is also well documented. But the 30 or so other destroyed Judahite locations listed by Stern would need to be reviewed individually to establish whether they were destroyed at all and, if so, when and by whom. For example, the final destruction of Beth Shemesh stratum IIC in 586 B.C., claimed by Elihu Grant and George Ernest Wright and for a time widely accepted, was not confirmed when the site was re-excavated.¹⁴ As for Tell Beit Mirsim, Stern agrees with Albright, who excavated the site from 1926 to 1932, that it suffered “a complete and final destruction in 586 B.C.E.”¹⁵ However, recent stratigraphic studies have come up with poor attestation for the seventh and sixth centuries, and have called the date of its destruction into question. Several prominent scholars (Yohanan Aharoni, David Ussishkin and, most recently, Rafi Greenberg), have opined that the destruction level better corresponds to Sennacherib’s Assyrian campaign in 701 B.C.E. than to Nebuchadrezzar’s Babylonian campaign of 586.¹⁶

Yet Stern has dogmatically asserted elsewhere that “a review of the archaeological evidence from 6th century B.C.E. Judah clearly reflects the literary evidence for the complete destruction of all the settlements and fortified towns by Nebuchadnezzar II’s armies in 586 B.C.E.”¹⁷

The bottom line is that destruction of urban centers, although considerable, was not nearly as complete as the Albright-Stern thesis postulates. We are already witnessing a shrinkage of the data base for destruction that is reminiscent of early, now abandoned claims made for cities destroyed during the Israelite “conquest of Canaan”—a case of déjà vu all over again.

Moreover, most people did not live in cities, and we should not underestimate the resilience of a population to restore some semblance of normality in a relatively short time, despite a destruction.

As the Babylonian army approached, many Judahites no doubt took refuge in one or the other of the inaccessible places that southern Judah and the Jordan Valley liberally provided, only to re-emerge once the dust had settled. Biblical texts indeed confirm that this is what happened (Jeremiah 40:7, 11–12; 2 Kings 25:23).

The “Babylonian gap” is largely a function of the way archaeologists periodize history. In fact, the material culture from the Assyrian period to the Babylonian period to the Persian period is more or less continuous. Stern actually says as much—that “it [is] almost impossible to determine if a certain artifact with Babylonian parallels should be dated to the late Assyrian period, to the Babylonian period, or even to the early Persian period.”¹⁸ The Babylonians probably took over the Assyrian provincial system already in place, with adjustments here and there¹⁹; they had neither the time nor the experience to create their own administrative system.

If we want to understand what life was like after the Babylonian conquest in 586 B.C.E., our understanding must be well grounded in an accurate picture of the archaeological remains. Unfortunately, Professor Stern’s depiction is not.

More than half a century ago, the dean of Biblical archaeologists, William Foxwell Albright, pronounced final judgment on the archaeological record for the territory of Judah between the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon’s king Nebuchadrezzar [Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible] in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent fall of Babylon to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. “All, or virtually all, of the fortified towns in Judah had been razed to the ground,” he wrote. “There is not a single known case where a town of Judah was continuously occupied through the exilic period [the Babylonian exile].”1 We can hardly avoid a […]