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The Neo-Babylonian Empire under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II occupied the Kingdom of Judah between 597–586 BCE and destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem. [3] According to the Hebrew Bible, the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, was forced to watch his sons put to death, then his own eyes were put out and he was exiled to Babylon (2 Kings 25).
The destruction was so much so, it may have been a factor in Sennacherib's murder by two of his sons, eight years after the destruction. Another of his sons, Esarhaddon, succeeded him and endeavored to compensate Babylonia for his father's sacrilege by releasing Babylonian exiles and rebuilding Babylon.
Babylon is perhaps most famous today for its repeated appearances in the Bible, where it appears both literally (in reference to historical events) and allegorically (symbolizing other things). The Neo-Babylonian Empire is featured in several prophecies and in descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem and subsequent Babylonian captivity.
A model of the Second Temple in the time of Herod the Great, from the Holyland Model of Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. The Second Temple period in Jewish history began with the end of the Babylonian captivity and the Persian conquest of the Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE.
A Neo-Babylonian royal inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II on a stele from Babylon, claimed to have been found in the 1917 excavation by Robert Koldewey, [5] and of uncertain authenticity, reads: "Etemenanki [6] Zikkurat Babibli [Ziggurat of Babylon] I made it, the wonder of the people of the world, I raised its top to heaven, made doors for the gates, and I covered it with bitumen and bricks."
His successor, Joseph II (1696–1713), was officially bestowed with the symbolic title Patriarch of Babylon. Although this patriarchate was established in the city of Diyarbakır, it was eventually moved to the city of Mosul and finally to Baghdad where it remains to this day.
A recent update of ABC is Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (= CM; 2004, ISBN 978-1-58983-090-5; French version 1993, ISBN 978-2-251-33918-4). An even more recent update of ABC is Amélie Kuhrt , The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources of the Achaemenid Period (Routledge, 2007; ISBN 978-0-415-55279-0 ).
The Greatness That Was Babylon was first published in 1962 by Sidgwick & Jackson. [2] In 1988, the book was reissued in a revised and updated edition. [3] Excavations in Mesopotamia have revealed a large amount of new information relevant to the study of Babylonian civilization, presented here as a revised and rewritten account of the book first published in 1962.