Origin to 586 BCE
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon deported the population of Jerusalem in two major waves, first around 7,000 people after the 597 BCE siege, then a larger deportation after he destroyed the city and its Temple in 587 BCE and exiled King Zedekiah's successors. The exiled community did not dissolve; in Babylon it developed institutions, among them the synagogue as a place of gathering and prayer without a Temple, that outlasted the exile itself and shaped Judaism's subsequent life outside its own land.
Facts
Disputed
Start YearSourced to the subject's own account597 BCE is the standard academic date for the first deportation; rabbinic chronology, following the Seder Olam, places the Temple's destruction more than a century and a half later, at 423 or 403 BCE by its own reckoning, a gap this atlas names rather than resolves. Dates
End YearSourced to the subject's own account587/586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II's destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple and the second, larger deportation. StatusSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
How Judaism Was Exiled to Babylon
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon deported the population of Jerusalem in two major waves. The first came after the siege of 597 BCE, when around seven thousand people were taken from the city. The second and larger deportation followed his destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 587 BCE, when he also exiled the successors of King Zedekiah.
The community Nebuchadnezzar scattered did not dissolve once it reached Babylon. Deprived of the Temple that had stood at the center of its worship for centuries, it built new institutions to carry religious life forward without an altar or a priesthood at hand, among them the synagogue, a place of gathering and prayer that could exist anywhere its people settled. Those institutions took root during the exile and outlasted it, continuing long after the deportations that first produced them.
What this changed for Judaism's spread was the tradition's first sustained experience of organized religious life outside its own land, built under the pressure of two waves of forced deportation rather than by any prior design. The synagogue that took shape in Babylon gave Judaism a form it could carry into every later exile, long after the deportations of 597 and 587 BCE that produced it had themselves passed into history.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylon directly: "Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon deported the population of Jerusalem in two major waves, first around 7,000 people after the 597 BCE siege, then a larger deportation after he destroyed the city and its..."
This source names Jerusalem directly: "of Babylon deported the population of Jerusalem in two major waves, first around 7,000 people after the 597 BCE siege, then a larger deportation after he destroyed the city and its Temple in 587 BCE..."
Occurred In
Babylon, on the Euphrates in what is now Iraq.
Spread Event Of
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