The Statsman Always Posts Thrice

My inexplicable obsession with statistics has been chronicled here and here, but I do try to keep a handle on it, recognizing it ain’t everyone’s cuppa. Mind you, the first stats post was in 2017, and the second only last year, so they are coming faster every time. As one hard-bitten detective might say to another on your favorite cop drama, “Uh oh, he’s decompensating!”

I’ll try not to run on too long.

Running the Numbers

Let’s start with this rather unpleasant series of stats from Jeremiah:

“This is the number of the people whom Nebuchadnezzar carried away captive: in the seventh year, 3,023 Judeans; in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar he carried away captive from Jerusalem 832 persons; in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried away captive of the Judeans 745 persons; all the persons were 4,600.”

Wow. Is that possible? So few survivors in Jerusalem to carry away captive to Babylon after over two years under siege? Did Nebuchadnezzar leave more in Judea than he carried away? How bad was that siege really?

Let’s look at those numbers a little more closely.

Daniel, Kings and Jeremiah

Now, there was an earlier siege and there were other deportations. Daniel tells us in the third year of Jehoiakim (ab0ut 605 BC), Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and took some of the nobility captive, including Daniel himself. Daniel gives us no numbers for that deportation, but the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar is close enough to the dates in Daniel to suggest he and his friends were among the 3,023 Judeans in Jeremiah’s first group. Then, 2 Kings records that 10,000 Judean captives were again taken during the three month reign of Jehoiachin (597 BC), which, as usual in Hebrew records, is probably a men-only total. That would have been Ezekiel’s deportation. Jeremiah does not mention that second group.

Jeremiah refers to two other occasions when Judeans were forcibly deported. Yet another deportation occurred at the tail end of the final siege, since Jerusalem burned in the fifth month of the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. So then, the 832 persons included former king Zedekiah, after the Babylonians broke through the walls of Jerusalem and Zedekiah staged his abortive escape attempt.

The final deportation is mentioned nowhere but Jeremiah, and would have taken place four to five years after Jerusalem burned, possibly in the wake of the foolish rebellion staged by Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, a member of the royal family, who murdered Nebuchadnezzar’s appointed governor. All the remaining Judeans then fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah (see Jeremiah 41-43). That was only a few months after the end of the siege, so the 745 persons deported around 581 BC either returned to Judea from other surrounding countries to which they had fled, or were scooped up from Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar.

Four Deportations

So then, we have four deportations for which numbers are given. The figure of 10,000 during Jehoiachin’s reign is obviously rounded.

Year	Number deported	King of Judah	Deportees	Notables
605 BC	3,023	Jehoiakim	Nobility	Daniel
597 BC	10,000	Jehoiachin	Mighty men, craftsmen, smiths	Ezekiel
586 BC	832	Zedekiah	Poor, deserters, artisans	Zedekiah
581 BC	745	—	Probably refugees and the poor	—
Total	14,600

All dates are rough estimates, but the order is correct. If we assume the numbers are men only, then a maximum of 14,600 Judean men were deported by Nebuchadnezzar, and probably not many more than 30,000 Judeans total. We do not know how many fled to Egypt, but we know (1) they were not numerous, and (2) there were no great men among them. After the deportation of 586 BC, the only people left in the land were “some of the poor people who owned nothing”, to whom the captain of the guard gave fields and vineyards, deeming them no threat and wanting to maintain the value of the land. Gedaliah governed these until his murder.

Some relevant statistics that may or may not be accurate, given they do not come from scripture. Archeological estimates are that the walls of Jerusalem during the period of the sieges enclosed 160 acres. The city probably had a normal population of no more than 8,000. In the event of a siege, however, many Judeans would have come into the city from the countryside for protection, increasing the population temporarily. Still, there would have been an upper limit on the number of refugees imposed by Jerusalem’s relatively small size. Large numbers of poor Judeans must have remained in the countryside. The estimated population of the entire nation at that time was about 75,000.

What Can We Conclude?

Putting all these bits and pieces together tells us a few interesting things.

First, the total Judean deportation of 14,600 men over a quarter of a century was much smaller than the Israelite deportation to Assyria 130-odd years earlier. Assyrian records claim Sargon took over 27,000 Israelites captive after the fall of Samaria alone (again, men). That total does not include captives taken in the earlier conquests of the Transjordan tribes and Naphtali, which may well have been considerably greater. Some estimates have the total numbers taken captive by Assyria over a twenty-year period exceeding 100,000. Compare this to the 832 persons deported at the fall of Jerusalem, and you get an idea how seriously depleted Judah had become by the time Nebuchadnezzar completed his conquest. Even if you add in the 745 persons deported later on, it’s a sad picture, but exactly what God had promised. As Isaiah put it many years earlier, “If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah.” At this point in history, the only “hosts” were heavenly. They weren’t living in Judah.

Second, the siege was brutal. Far more had died than lived. After Jehoiachin was taken to Babylon, Jeremiah had received a word from the Lord that the remaining Judeans who resisted Nebuchadnezzar would die by sword, famine and pestilence. This prophecy evidently came true. Not only was there attrition from defending the walls and a series of leadership executions ordered by the Chaldeans, including right in the temple sanctuary, but by the time the city fell, there was no food at all. In Lamentations, Jeremiah records that Judean women ate their own children, and that the Chaldeans entering the city struck down young men and women at random with the sword. Who knows how many died of malnutrition, disease or other afflictions in the two-plus years Jerusalem was under siege? It may have been that as few as a tenth of the Judeans living there when Nebuchadnezzar invaded survived to go into exile.

Third, from this tiny remnant of 14,600 in 581 BC, an assembly of 42,360, mostly Judeans, returned to Jerusalem a little over 40 years later under Zerubbabel and Joshua. That’s a pretty impressive recovery, especially since it is believed more Jews remained in Babylon in 538 BC than returned to Judah. Ellicott comments that a repopulation of as much as tenfold in forty years is “more than can be accounted for by the natural increase of population”, and speculates that poor Judeans left by Nebuchadnezzar migrated voluntarily to Babylon to join their brothers in exile. Naturally, there is no record of any such thing, though it’s equally difficult to explain how, if there were any Jews left by Nebuchadnezzar in Judah after 581 BC, few appear to have maintained their distinctive identity until 538 BC. Instead, the returning exiles faced hostility from the people from the surrounding nations who had migrated into the area. There is an indication that some in the land separated themselves from the uncleanness of the nations and joined the exiles in celebrating the Passover, but it is unclear whether these were the descendants of poor Jews or leftovers from the northern kingdom. We are not even sure they were ethnically distinct. All the Jews with genealogies to prove their lineage were coming home from Babylon.

Increasing the Surplus Population

Despite the disbelief expressed by some commentators at the incredible resurgence of the Jewish population in Babylon in a very short period, there is no difficulty with the logistics. Jews lived in peace and safety for most of those years, unlike the previous hundred or so, and those who embraced their exile obediently enjoyed the blessing of God, as he had promised through Jeremiah. These included the command to seek the welfare of the cities in which they sojourned and the instruction “multiply there, and do not decrease”. Apparently, the Jews took that part to heart. With good sanitation, good food, no persecution and the will and opportunity to reproduce, a tenfold population increase in a bare minimum of forty years is not unreasonable, especially since the vast majority of the deportees (13,023 out of 14,600) would have had a 16- to 24-year headstart on the later ones.

In the book of Esther (between 486 and 465 BC), Jews in 127 Persian provinces killed over 75,000 of their enemies in a purely defensive conflict. That suggests that either Jews had developed unbelievable fighting skills during peacetime, or else there were an awful lot of Jews living throughout the Persian Empire by the mid-fifth century before Christ.

God was disciplining his people in exile, but he was also rebuilding their numbers, much as he did in Egypt, and simultaneously sharing Moses and the Law with the world in a way that would never have happened otherwise.