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Remnants of Jewish Life in Ancient Babylonia

March 16 2015

Ancient Babylonian tablets, now on display in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, have revealed a heretofore unavailable perspective on the Jewish exiles who arrived there around the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Lawrence Schiffman explains the tablets’ significance:

The most important thing about these tablets is most probably the names that occur in them. Here we have Jews undertaking business and personal transactions with other Jews as well as with Babylonians and exiles from other places, in areas with significant populations of Judean exiles. We see how quickly Jews acclimated to the economic and legal conditions of Babylonia, engaging in a variety of business and agricultural activities, while maintaining their identity. . . .

Readers of these tablets who are familiar with the occupations and economic circumstances that are in evidence in the Babylonian Talmud will feel that they are essentially in the same world, in which water depends on an elaborate canal system, barley and beer are the staple foods, plow animals are at a premium, and complex transactions are constantly being effected. What these texts really show us is how the Babylonian Jewish community established itself quickly and successfully in the immediate aftermath of the exile from the land of Israel, and how it was this community that eventually developed into the Jewish community from which the most important statement of [Jewish] tradition emerged—the Babylonian Talmud.

Read more at Jewish Journal

More about: ancient Judaism, Babylonian Jewry, First Temple, History & Ideas, Talmud

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic