Archaeological Artifactbabylonexilejehoiachin
Jehoiachin Ration Tablets
About Jehoiachin Ration Tablets
Jehoiachin Ration Tablets are clay tablets from Babylon that list oil issued to captives at the court of Nebuchadnezzar II, among them the king of Judah with his retinue. They name Jehoiachin, the king of Judah whom Nebuchadnezzar carried away to Babylon (2 Kings 24:15), and they list rations for his five sons. For a Bible reader they are a record, from Babylon itself, of the exiled king of 2 Kings 24 and 25 receiving rations at the Babylonian court.
Jehoiachin in the Bible
Jehoiachin succeeded his father Jehoiakim, became king at eighteen and reigned in Jerusalem three months (598-597 BC; 2 Kings 24:6-8). His mother was Nehushta daughter of Elnathan, from Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:8). When the servants of Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and the king of Babylon came to the city, Jehoiachin surrendered to him with his mother, servants, commanders and officials, and "in the eighth year of his reign, the king of Babylon took him captive" (2 Kings 24:10-12). The Babylonian Chronicle dates that capture to Adar 2, 597 BC. Nebuchadnezzar carried him to Babylon with the king's mother, his wives, his officials, the leading men of the land and the craftsmen and metalsmiths, and made Jehoiachin's uncle Mattaniah king in his place, renaming him Zedekiah (2 Kings 24:14-17). Second Kings counts ten thousand captives in all (2 Kings 24:14); Jeremiah lists 3,023 Jews carried away in Nebuchadnezzar's seventh year, the first of the deportations of the Babylonian Exile that he records (Jeremiah 52:28-30).
Scripture also calls him Jeconiah (1 Chronicles 3:16; Jeremiah 24:1) and Coniah (Jeremiah 22:24). Through Jeremiah the LORD declared that even if Coniah were a signet ring on His right hand, He would pull him off and hand him over to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon (Jeremiah 22:24-25). The oracle ends: "Enroll this man as childless, a man who will not prosper in his lifetime." It goes on, "None of his descendants will prosper to sit on the throne of David or to rule again in Judah" (Jeremiah 22:30). The Chronicler lists the descendants of "Jeconiah the captive" as Shealtiel, Malchiram, Pedaiah, Shenazzar, Jekamiah, Hoshama and Nedabiah (1 Chronicles 3:17-18). The oracle's own next words explain "childless": none of his descendants would sit on David's throne (Jeremiah 22:30), though the Chronicler lists his sons (1 Chronicles 3:17-18). Ezra names Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel among those who built the altar of the God of Israel (Ezra 3:2), and Haggai calls him governor of Judah (Haggai 1:1). Through Haggai the LORD told Zerubbabel, "I will make you like My signet ring" (Haggai 2:23), the image used of Coniah in Jeremiah 22:24. The Chronicler, however, lists Zerubbabel among the sons of Pedaiah, another son of Jeconiah (1 Chronicles 3:19).
Ezekiel, a priest among the exiles by the River Kebar in the land of the Chaldeans, dated his first vision to "the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin" (Ezekiel 1:1-3), the news that Jerusalem had fallen to "the twelfth year of our exile" (Ezekiel 33:21), and a later vision to "the twenty-fifth year of our exile" (Ezekiel 40:1). One older reference work notes that dating by the years of captivity in this way "was equivalent to dating by the reign of Jehoiachin."
In the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin's exile, in the year Evil-merodach (562-560 BC) became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin from prison, spoke kindly to him and set his throne above the thrones of the other kings who were with him in Babylon (2 Kings 25:27-28; Jeremiah 52:31-32). Jehoiachin changed out of his prison clothes, dined regularly at the king's table and received a daily portion from the king for the rest of his life (2 Kings 25:29-30; Jeremiah 52:33-34). Second Kings and the book of Jeremiah both end with this account (2 Kings 25:27-30; Jeremiah 52:31-34).
Finding and publishing the tablets
The tablets were among the clay tablets the German excavators registered from vaulted rooms of the South Palace in Babylon in 1903. That excavation was led by Robert Koldewey, whose German team dug at Babylon from 1899 to 1917, and Koldewey proposed the vaulted building as a possible foundation for the Hanging Gardens. In 1939 Ernst F. Weidner published four fragmentary tablets from the archive under the title "Jojachin, König von Juda, in babylonischen Keilschrifttexten" (Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in Babylonian cuneiform texts). They were a small sample of the archive, of special interest because they name Jehoiachin. Olof Pedersén's 2025 edition of the South Palace archives identifies the king from Yaḫudu (Judah) in these texts as "the biblically attested king Yaʾukīn (Jehoiachin)." One fragment is held by the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin as VAT 16378.
What the tablets record
The tablets mention Jehoiachin's name four times and call him "king of Judah." Only one of them keeps its date, the eleventh and twelfth months of Nebuchadnezzar's thirteenth year (591 BC). The archive as a whole runs from Nebuchadnezzar's eighth year to his thirty-fourth (597 to 571 BC), but most of those years are barely attested.
Jehoiachin's oil ration was the largest in the archive. Tero Alstola, in his 2020 study Judeans in Babylonia, puts it at six times the archive's average ration of one qu, and Pedersén at about 1.6 gallons (6 liters). Several lists also record rations for the Judean king's five sons, who received half a qu each, half the amount given to the princes of Ashkelon. Other foreigners receive oil in the archive as well: princes and courtiers from Ashkelon, courtiers and a large group of guard troops from Egypt, and carpenters from Ionia, Arwad and Byblos. People from the east appear in the archive too, from Urartu, Media, Persia, Elam, Tilmun and Arabia; Elam is represented by many guard troops, boatmen and some house builders. Several hundred guard troops from Caria, Egypt and Elam protected particular buildings in Babylon, and Ionia, Lydia, Caria and Cilicia had messengers there.
The tablets and the biblical account
In 591 BC, the year of the dated list, Zedekiah (597-586 BC) was reigning in Jerusalem in Jehoiachin's place (2 Kings 24:17), while the Babylonian lists call Jehoiachin king of Judah. Alstola judges that the presence of these Judean captives in Babylon "confirms the biblical account of Jehoiachin’s exile at the foreign court." Alstola adds that the relation between the Bible's account of the captivity and the archive "has been interpreted in different ways." Jacob Liver, author of a reference article on Jehoiachin, reads the large quantity of oil issued to him as suggesting that he lived with his family. The dated list comes from 591 BC, some thirty years before Evil-merodach released Jehoiachin from prison (2 Kings 25:27).