Jehoiachin's Ration Tablets

Dug Up in Babylon, Read Forty Years Later

Robert Koldewey's German Oriental Society expedition worked at Babylon from 1899 to 1917, and somewhere in those eighteen seasons — the exact one is not recoverable from the records — it cleared a barrel-vaulted underground building of parallel rooms near the Ishtar Gate, within the Southern Palace complex of Nebuchadnezzar II. In it was a cache of roughly three hundred administrative tablets recording issues of oil, barley and other rations to people the palace was feeding. No individual finder is named. The tablets went to Berlin with everything else and sat there.

They were identified and published in 1939 by Ernst F. Weidner, in a study contributed to a festschrift for René Dussaud, and that gap of two to four decades between the digging and the reading is the most instructive thing about them. Nothing about the find was dramatic; nobody knew what was in the box. The tablet on display in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin is VAT 16378. Excavation numbers for the other tablets are widely quoted online, could not be confirmed against any published source, and are deliberately not given here.

Rations for the King of the Land of Yahudu

Several of the tablets list issues to Ya'u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu — Jehoiachin, king of Judah — together with his sons and a number of other Judeans, alongside deportees and hostages from Egypt, Elam, Persia, Philistia and elsewhere. It is a palace ledger, not a chronicle. Nobody was making a point; a clerk was recording how much oil went out.

2 Kings 24 has Jehoiachin surrendering to Nebuchadnezzar in the king of Babylon's eighth year and being carried to Babylon with his mother, his wives and his officers. Ezekiel dates his own visions by the years of Jehoiachin's captivity, which tells you the exiles reckoned time by their king rather than by the man ruling in Jerusalem after him. And 2 Kings 25:27-30 — repeated with one small difference of date in Jeremiah 52:31-34, the twenty-seventh of the month against the twenty-fifth — records that after thirty-seven years Evil-Merodach lifted up his head, gave him a seat above the other captive kings, and provided him a daily allowance for the rest of his life. The tablets are from the early part of that captivity, around Nebuchadnezzar's years ten to thirteen, roughly 595 to 592 BC. They show the ledger the last verses of 2 Kings describe the improvement of.

The Real Argument, and the One Not to Manufacture

It would be easy, and wrong, to write this article as a contested identification bravely defended. The identification of Ya'u-kinu of Yahudu with Jehoiachin is close to universally accepted and is not seriously disputed; there is no debate there to report. The genuine disagreements are narrower and less exciting. Was his status that of an honoured royal hostage drawing generous royal rations, or a detainee being kept alive? Are the "five sons" literally his sons or a household? How wide is the span of the tablets, and how much of the captivity do they cover? Specialists differ on all three, and none of them changes what the tablets show.

The honest limit is about reach rather than authenticity. These dockets place a Judean king in Babylon on palace rations in the 590s. They say nothing about the release under Evil-Merodach more than thirty years later, which remains attested only in Scripture. And one caution for readers following this up: a great many websites conflate these tablets with the so-called Nebo-Sarsekim tablet, a different object identified in the British Museum in 2007 and bearing on a different verse in Jeremiah. The two are unrelated finds and neither corroborates the other.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 24:12-15 — Jehoiachin surrenders and is carried to Babylon with his household
• 2 Kings 25:27-30 — Thirty-seven years later, a daily allowance from the king of Babylon
• Jeremiah 52:31-34 — The same release, dated two days differently
• Ezekiel 1:2 — The exiles date their years by Jehoiachin's captivity, not by the king in Jerusalem

Sources

• Holding institutionVorderasiatisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — collection — Staatliche Museen zu Berlin · The holding institution for the Babylon material from Koldewey's excavations, including VAT 16378Supports: Current location
• ScholarshipE. F. Weidner, "Jojachin, Konig von Juda, in babylonischen Keilschrifttexten" — Ernst F. Weidner · In Melanges syriens offerts a Monsieur Rene Dussaud II (Bibliotheque archeologique et historique 30.2), Paris, 1939, 923-935 — the first identification and publication of the tablets, forty years after they were excavated. Print onlySupports: The identification of Ya'u-kinu with Jehoiachin, and the 1939 publication date
• ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): The Babylonian Exile — Society of Biblical LiteratureSupports: The 597 BC deportation that put Jehoiachin and his household in Babylon
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Jehoiachin's Rations Tablets

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Jehoiachin's Rations Tablets

Reflect

A clerk in Babylon wrote down an oil ration and preserved a king's name for 2,500 years. What small, unremarkable faithfulness are you being asked for today?