BABYLONIA, Our Exodus From and Exile To: Iraq's Land

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

                                              Ur, a city in the Babylonia Empire

Long ago, the family of Abraham (b:1948 BCE) left their city of UR of the Chaldees, which was under Babylonia officially, actually being south of Babylonia on the Euphrates River.                                               

                          Ur, of the Chaldees.

 Babylonia was known by the name of the land of SHINAR or of the KASDIM (Chaldees).   It was an ancient state of Western Asia.  Babylonia was known as the CRADLE OF HUMANITY and as the scene of man's 1st revolt against G-d with the story of the Tower of Babel.  The FLOOD  was in Babylonian literature.                                                                          

 Abraham had left Ur with his father, Terah, and others for Canaan; where he later fought "Amraphel, king of Shinar. (Gen. 14).                                   

Some 136 years later, Babylon was to the prophets, a symbol of insolent pagan tyranny.  It was Nebuchadnezzar II (604-561 BCE) who inherited the Assyrian Empire and after his conquest of Judah in 597 and 586 BCE, exiled many Jews to Babylon, from whence their ancestors had come from so long ago.   Left in Judah were the Judeans and Benjaminites.  They would take on the name of Jews who were the largest population.

                                           

Brought to Babylon, the people wept.  a psalm was written about their feelings by David.  "By the rivers of Babylon" there we sat and also wept when we remembered Zion.  On the willows within it we hung our lyres.  For there outr captors requested words of song from us, with our lyres playing joyous music.  "Sing for us from Zion's song!" 

Considering the past history of the Assyrian who exiled 10 of the 12 tribes of Jacob in 721 BCE, they and Nebuchadnezzar's exiled Israelites they constituted a large Israelite population, many of whom remained in Babylon, even after King Cyrus of Persia permitted a return to Jerusalem later to return and rebuild the Temple, which many did.  

                                              

In the 6th-century BC, the armies of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah. They tore down the city walls, burned the temple, and ran down every person who tried to escape. The few survivors were dragged out of their homeland and forced to live in Babylon as vassals to the men who butchered their children.  And yet, when the Jews in exile won their freedom, most of them didn’t leave. They stayed in Babylon – and kept a thriving community that lasted for more than 2,000 years.

It’s one of the stranger moments in human history. These people were brutalized by an invading army. They were taught to hate so viciously that, for hundreds of years, the word “Babylon,” to the Jews, was synonymous with evil. But most chose to stay right there with their captors, living side-by-side with the men who had made their lives miserable.  Why didn’t they leave? It’s a question that’s plagued historians and theologians alike; but some recently uncovered documents shed a little light on how Babylon created a Jewish community that still lives on today.

Certain towns in Babylonia, such as Nehardea, Nisibis, and Maboza, had an entirely Israelite or Jewish population.  Their position remained favorable during successive regimes.  In the 1st century BCE, a Jewish state was set up around Nehardea by 2 brothers, Anilai (Anilaos) and Asinai (Asinaios) and this lasted for some years.                                            

A wall fresco at a Jewish synagogue in Syria's national museum shows the hand of G-d reaching out to the people. The synagogue was excavated at the site of Dura Europos, a town built on the banks of the Euphrates river around 300 B.C E.  Quite unusual for a synagogue.   

Nehardea was situated at the junction of the Euphrates and the Nahr Malka (royal Canal).  Josephus describes Nehardea as a heavily fortified city, one of the 2 centers in which the Temple offerings were assembled for forwarding to Jerusalem.  The city contained the Shaf Veyativ Synagogue which was said to have been built by the exiled king Jehoiachin of Judah and described by Abbaye of the 4th century CE as the seat of the Divine Presence in Babylonia.                                                  

Papa was a Babylonian amora (lecturer, a title given to Jewish scholars in Babylonia in the 3rd-6th centuries).  A pupil of Rava and Abbaye, he removed to Neresh, near Sura, after the death of the former and established an academy there.  

The town of Nehardea was destroyed by the Palmyrenes of Palmyra  in 259 CE. Palmyra was the Roman name but the Biblical was Tadmor, which was an ancient Syrian city that was founded by King Solomon.  Palmyrenes served in the  Roman armies.  Many Palmyrene Jews are buried in the catacombs of Bet Shearim.   The academy reopened in Pumbedita under Rabbi Judah ben Ezekiel, and a group of scholars called "Nehardeans" continued to exist until savoraic times (500-700)and, for a while, provided heads of the academy alternately with the Pumbeditans.  Nehardea was the capital of the small rebel state set up by the 2 Jewish brothers in 20 CE.                       

Benjamin of Tudela found 2,000 Jews in Tadmor in the 12th century. 

                                                     

The Jews of Babylon remained in constant touch with the Jews of Judah and even supplied some of the leaders, such as HILLEL(1st century BCE).  He was the founder of the House of Hillel, born in Babylonia but settled in Palestine, earning his living by his manual labor while studying with the famous teachers, Shemaiah and Avtalyon.  He became President of the Sanhedrin.  He and his friend and opponent, Shammai, were the last pairs of Zugot of scholars, like debtors.  

                                            

       Trajan and his Roman Empire:  The Roman army at the time was one of the finest fighting machines the world has ever seen. Thirty legions, comprising 4,000 to 4,800 men in each, were spread across the empire, including five legions in Pannonia and Moesia, four in Germania, and three in Britain and Syria. Each legion was divided into smaller units called cohorts, numbering about 600 men, but the basic battlefield unit was called the century and was composed of a hundred men—hence the eventual usage of the word to denote a hundred years.

                                                                 

   Emperor Trajan  reigned from 98-117 CE.  His oriental policy led to a major clash.  In 105-106, he annexed the Nabatean kingdom including the Negev and Transjordan.  In 115-117, while he was engaged in his Parthian war, Jewish risings occurred in Cyrenaica, Egypt, and Cyprus.  In Alexandria the Greeks attacked the Jewish population.  So in 116, he ordered a preventative massacre of the Jews in Mesopotamia.  Judea itself was kept under firm control by his General Lucius Quietus.  The suppression of the many risings ended the prosperity of the Jewish settlements in Egypt, Cyrenaica,, and Cyprus.   

During the Roman occupation, the Babylonian Jews rose against the emperor TRAJAN, the revolt being bloodily suppressed by his commander, Lucius Quietus (116 CE).                                                  

 One undisputed fact remains: the brief idyll between the benevolent imperial couple (e.g.                                                       

                                   Trajan and  Pompeia Plotina, his wife

Alamy

 Trajan and  Plotina) and the Jews was soon to be shattered by the revolt of 115. The reaction of the Roman government fulfilled the desire of Hermaiskos to see the emperor support his “own people” instead of defending the “impious Jews.” And the image of Trajan as friend and protector of the Jews was to give way to that of a Trajan bent on persecution and destruction.  In the first engagement they happened to overcome the Greeks, who fled to Alexandria and captured and killed the Jews in the city, but though thus losing the help of the townsmen, the Jews of Cyrene continued to plunder the country of Egypt and to ravage the districts in it under their leader Loukouas.  

On 9th August 117 AD (or it might have been the 7th or 8th), the Emperor Trajan died suddenly from a stroke at Selinus in Cilicia on his way from Syria to Rome. This event prompted the renaming of the city as Trajanopolis and the building of a cenotaph to Trajan.  Trajan lived 63 years and eleven months. He reigned for nineteen years and six months.                                           

                              Persian soldiers

    Parthian soldiers.  

They're all from different time periods, though three of them are closely related.

Ancient Persians came from the region of modern Fars, and made up the elite of the Achaemenid period. They spoke an early version of Persian, rather than any of the numerous other Iranian languages.

The Sassanids or Sassanians also came from Fars, and were ethnically Persian and viewed themselves as the heirs of the Achaemenid period. They helped spread the use of the Persian language throughout what is modern Iran and were a major empire and cultural focus before the rise of Islam.

The Parthians did not come from Fars, but rather from what is now northeast Iran and southern Turkmenistan. They spoke an Iranian language, but were a separate ethnic groups closer to the Saka/Scythians than the Achaemenid Persians.

Under both Persian( Iran)  and Parthian (Empire of Iranic people) ruled over Babylon and Media. The Jews of Babylon enjoyed an extensive measure of internal autonomy, being headed by an EXILARCH of Davidic descent who was the king's representative, while the community was governed by a council of elders.   The Parthians  restored Antigonus Mattathias to the throne of Judah in 40 BCE.  The Jews of the Roman Empire looked on Parthia as their future savior.  It was under the rule of Parthia that the famous rabbinic schools in Mesopotamia began to flourish.                              

The great literary creation of the Jews of Babylon, the Babylonian TALMUD, reflects a society preponderantly based on agriculture and crafts.  They were learned in Jewish studies and had produced works of literary merit, like Ezekiel, Daniel, and Tobit.  

At the beginning of the 3rd century CE, Babylonia became the main center of rabbinic studies, academies being founded by SAMUEL at Nehardea and by Rav at Sura, while in the later 3rd century, the academy of Pumbedita was founded to replace that at Nehardea which was destroyed in 261.  The importance of these schools was further enhanced with the abolition of the Palestinian patriarchate in 425.  

                                              

(Canaan, called Eretz Yisrael by the Jews, was named Palestine by the Romans who in anger, named it for the Jews' worst enemy, the Philistines when the Romans had to fight the Jewish General Bar Kokhba from 132-135. The Jewish general was killed, and the name of Palestine was born.

Babylon became the spiritual center for all Jewry after 425.

Persecutions in the 5th century led to the Jewish revolt under Mar Zutra II who held out of 7 years, but was finally captured and killed.                                                                 

The TALMUD was concluded about at this period.  The position of the Jews continued to be difficult until the Arab conquest in the 7th century with Mohammed.  

So history goes round and round.  Abraham left Ur in 722 BCE, and his descendants were brought back in 586 BCE to that same area 136 years later.  Many remained.  What would the DNA tests of the men show?  They might reflect in many a connection to the Jews of today. The town of Babylon was located along the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq, about 50 miles south of Baghdad.

                                                 

 Whit Athey's tool analysis showed that the Iraqi Arab population had seven major haplogroups; J1, E1b1b, J2a1b, J2, R1a, R1b and J2b. The most common haplogroup was J1 which represented 36.6% (93/254) of the population.  J1 is also found in Jews, and is the Cohen line.  Many Jewish men are also E1b1b and J2 and R1a.  Oh my!  

Resource:

Tanakh, Stone Edition

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/06/understanding-world-and-time-of-ur-of.html

https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2014/02/could-iraqis-have-jewish-roots.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_137

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2015/10/06/emperor-trajan-the-roman-empire/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72283-1#:~:text=Whit%20Athey's%20tool%20analysis%20showed,%2F254)%20of%20the%20population.