Gary A. Rendsburg
The Alan Crown Lecture
The First Diasporas: Egypt and Babylonia
With the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., Jews left the land of Israel in large numbers. Over the course of the next two centuries, we find a considerable amount of archaeological evidence for Jewish life both in Egypt and in Babylonia. The former includes most remarkably the outpost of Jewish soldiers and families at Elephantine, in the far south of Egypt, opposite Aswan. The latter includes hundreds of cuneiform tablets attesting to Jewish businesses and mercantile interests. These people clearly took Jeremiah’s charge (29:1-7) to heart and successfully reconstructed their lives in exile.