Al-Yahudu Tablets

Overview

The Al-Yahudu tablets are a group of about two hundred Babylonian clay tablets recording the everyday business of deported Judeans and their descendants in Babylonia, dating between roughly 572 and 477 BC. The name comes from the settlement most often named in them, al Yahudu, "the town of Judah", which lay somewhere in the region of Borsippa in southern Babylonia.

Archaeological Evidence

The tablets are unprovenanced. They were not recovered in a controlled excavation but appeared on the antiquities market, so the archaeological context that would normally date and place them is missing, and their find site is not known. Most are held in private hands, chiefly the David and Cindy Sofer collection, and a further group is in the British Museum. They are ordinary legal and administrative documents: leases, loans, receipts, tax payments and sales, written in Akkadian cuneiform.

Biblical Significance

The tablets show the exile from the far side of the deportations, in the decades after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and on into the Persian period. The people in them farm land, pay taxes, borrow and lend, and bear names compounded with the name of the God of Israel across the generations, which speaks to a community keeping its identity while settled in Babylonia. That picture stands beside Jeremiah's letter to the exiles, which told them to build houses, plant gardens and seek the welfare of the city where they had been sent (Jeremiah 29:4-7).