Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries.

• Author: Spunaugle, Adrianne

Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. By TERO ALSTOLA. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 109. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xii + 353. $150.

In Judeans in Babylonia, Tero Alstola presents a thorough summary of the cuneiform documents that may convincingly be argued to pertain to Judean deportees within Babylonia. A revision of his doctoral dissertation, his research aims to contextualize the case of Judean deportees within the broader context of Babylonian society. As such, this eight-chapter monograph is an invaluable resource for all interested in exploring the lived experience of deportees in Babylonia from a textual perspective.

Alstola focuses primarily on traditional philological argumentation to illustrate both problematic and potential avenues for research on deportees during the "long sixth century" in Babylonia. Dealing solely with previously published texts, he compiles the available data and presents it in chapters structured according to scholarly archives and dossiers. In so doing, he provides contextualization for the Judeans represented within each archive individually and rarely ventures to make macro-level arguments regarding deportees in general or even deported Judeans as a whole. The resulting six case studies focus on Judeans in the Babylonian royal court (Babylon), as traders and royal merchants (Sippar), as laborers and officials in the land-for-service sector during both the early sixth century (Al-Yahudu, Nasar, etc.) and the late (Murasu; Nippur), outside the main archives, and in the community at Neirab.

As a social-historical study, little space is given to the political history of the period. However, equally little space is given to socio-anthropological theories that typically guide the researching of a "social history." This seems a bit odd considering that the purported goal of the monograph is to "offer the first book-length social historical study of the Babylonian Exile." There are several points on which one would wish that an issue had been pursued further and an argument made, yet unfortunately the author's analysis generally does not push beyond the current state of research.

In his introduction, Alstola presents a brief historical background, a review of the scholarly literature broken into reception history and a history of research, a presentation of the available textual sources, and a quick introduction to prosopography and how to identify Judeans within the Babylonian onomastica. This introduction offers a fantastic overview of the research problems intrinsic to identifying ethnic identities in the ancient Near East, but unfortunately stops short...