The earliest parts of the book are possibly chapters 2 – 11, the story of the conquest ; more certain is that this section was then incorporated into an early form of Joshua that was part of then original Deuteronomistic history, written late in the reign of king Josiah ( reigned 640 – 609 BCE ); it seems clear that the book was not completed until after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586, and possibly not until after the return from the Babylonian exile late in the 6th century.

The Babylonian exile lasted approximately 48 years, from 586 to 538 BCE, and ended with the conquest of Babylon in that year by the Persians.

Most modern day biblical scholars assert that the Book of Lamentations was written by one or more authors in Judah, shortly after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC ; and was penned as a response to Babylonian Exile, the intense suffering of the people of Judah, and the complete and utter destruction of Jerusalem.

Originally the Babylonian calendar was used by Jews for all daily purposes, but following the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BCE ( see also Iudaea province ), Jews began additionally following the imperial civil calendar, which was decreed in 45 BCE, for civic matters such as the payment of taxes and dealings with government officials.

Next the Babylonian armies conquered the remaining northern states, including Babylon's former ally Mari, although it is possible that the ' conquest ' of Mari was a surrender without any actual conflict.

During this time, Jews have experienced slavery, anarchic and theocratic self-government, conquest, occupation, and exile ; in the Diasporas, they have been in contact with and have been influenced by ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenic cultures, as well as modern movements such as the Enlightenment ( see Haskalah ) and the rise of nationalism, which would bear fruit in the form of a Jewish state in the Levant.

Later many of them returned to their homeland after the subsequent conquest of Babylonia by the Persians seventy years later, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity.

Opium was also mentioned after the Persian conquest of Assyria and Babylonian lands in the sixth century BCE.

* 605 BC: Battle of Carchemish: Crown Prince Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon defeats the army of Necho II of Egypt, securing the Babylonian conquest of Assyria.

Of the reign of the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus ( Nabu-na ' id ), and the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus, there is a fair amount of information available.

* 605 BC — Battle of Carchemish: Crown Prince Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon defeats the army of Necho II of Egypt, securing the Babylonian conquest of Assyria.

Conflicts between the Pharisees and the Sadducees took place in the context of much broader and longstanding social and religious conflicts among Jews dating back to the Babylonian captivity and exacerbated by the Roman conquest.

Most of them were collected from the surface during Starkey's excavations, but others were found in Level 1 ( Persian and Greek era ), Level 2 ( period preceding Babylonian conquest by Nebuchadnezzar ), and Level 3 ( period preceding Assyrian conquest by Sennacherib ).

Persian became to a great extent the language of everyday life among the Jews of Babylonia ; and a hundred years after the conquest of that country by the Sassanids an amora of Pumbedita, Rab Joseph ( d. 323 ), declared that the Babylonian Jews had no right to speak Aramaic, and should instead use either Hebrew or Persian.

It appears that the Hivite cultural distinctiveness ceased before the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BCE, and the Babylonian conquest of the southern Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, each with consequential population deportations.

A chronicle drawn up just after the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus, gives the history of the reign of Nabonidus (' Nabuna ' id '), the last king of Babylon, and of the fall of the Babylonian empire.

As one example, upon the conquest of Babylon itself, it's recorded that he paid homage at the temple of the Babylonian god Marduk-thereby gaining the support of the Babylonian people and minimizing further bloodshed.

Indeed, since the priestly source, which textual scholars date to a couple of centuries prior to the captivity, doesn't appear to know what the Urim and Thummim looked like, and there is no mention of the Urim and Thummim in the deuteronomic history beyond the death of David, scholars suspect that use of them decayed some time before the Babylonian conquest, probably as a result of the growing influence at the time of prophets.

In Elephantine ( modern Aswan ) in Egypt, Jewish mercenaries, c. 410 BC, make mention of a goddess called Anat-Yahu ( Anat-Yahweh ) worshiped in the temple to Yahweh originally built by Jewish refugees from the Babylonian conquest of Judah.

According to the Book of Mormon, Mulek () was the only surviving son of Zedekiah, the last King of Judah, after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem.

Scholars in the first half of the 20th century came to the conclusion that the Yahwist was produced in the monarchic period, specifically at the court of Solomon, and the Priestly work in the middle of the 5th century BC ( the author was even identified as Ezra ), but more recent thinking is that the Yahwist was written either just before or during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after.

In Babylonian ecclesiastical art the great lion-headed colossi serving as guardians to the temples and palaces seem to symbolise Nergal, just as the bull-headed colossi probably typify Ninurta.

The Babylonian constellation was sacred to Adad, the god of rain and storm ; in the second Millennium it would have risen just before the start of the autumnal rainy season.

In the Blessing of Jacob, Jacob is described as imposing a curse on the Levites, by which they would be scattered, in punishment for Levi's actions in Shechem ; textual scholars date the Blessing of Jacob to a period between just one and two centuries prior to the Babylonian captivity, and some Biblical scholars regard this curse, and Dinah herself as an aetiological postdiction to explain the fates of the tribe of Simeon and the Levites, the simpler explanation of the Levites ' scattered nature being that the priesthood was originally open to any tribe, but gradually became seen as a distinct tribe itself ( the Levites ).

While it sometimes kept that sense in later periods, from Middle Assyrian and Babylonian times on it is generally used to refer to the gods of heaven collectively, just as the term Anunnakku ( Anuna ) was later used to refer to the gods of the underworld.

However the principalities of some of the highest prelates were not known as prince -( arch ) bishopric, which they effectively were, but rather by a term corresponding to a more prestigious ecclesistial or temporal rank: the three German archbishoprics of Prince-electors ( Cologne, Mainz and Trier ) were styled Kurfürstentum ' Electorate ', the patriarchate ( an archbishopric ) of Aquileia just that, the ( Arch ) Bishop of Rome's Italian principalities the Papal State ( s ); on the other hand the papal principality in France, the Countship of Venaissin, where the papacy had resided in ' Babylonian exile ' in Avignon, but which remained a papal state, separate from the Italian states, even after Avignon had been raised to archbishopric, was simply known by its temporal status, no reference to the highest of all princes of the church.

These alleged refugees claimed the ancestry of Sargon of Akkad ( whose dynasty died out some 15 centuries before the fall of Assyria ), they also contradictionally claimed ancestry from Nabopolassar, a Babylonian king of Chaldean extraction who played a major part in the destruction of the Assyrian Empire.

The first was the late 7th century Deuteronomistic reform of official Judean religion under king Josiah, who banned many elements of the old polytheistic cult from the Temple, and the sudden collapse of Assyria and the rise of Babylon to take its place ; the second was exile of the royal court, the priests and other members of the ruling elite following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem c. 586 BCE.

While traditionally accepted as the genuine words of Moses delivered on the eve of the occupation of Canaan, a broad consensus of modern scholars now see its origins in traditions from Israel ( the northern kingdom ) brought south to the Kingdom of Judah in the wake of the Assyrian destruction of Samaria ( 8th century BCE ) and then adapted to a program of nationalist reform in the time of King Josiah ( late 7th century ), with the final form of the modern book emerging in the milieu of the return from the Babylonian exile during the late 6th century.

Ezra, thirty years into the Babylonian Exile ( 4 Ezra 3: 1 / 2 Esdras 1: 1 ), recounts the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon's Temple.

The solution, set out in the series of history books from Joshua and Judges to Samuel and Kings, was to interpret the Babylonian destruction as divinely-ordained punishment for the failure of the kings to worship Yahweh alone.

This traditional prominence is rooted in the Babylonian Talmud ’ s description of how to attain atonement following the destruction of the Temple.

Lehi is also made aware of the imminent Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.

The destruction of the Babylonian kingdom, as well as the kingdom of Yamhad, helped the rise of another Hurrian dynasty.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar engaged in a thirteen year siege of Tyre ( 585 – 572 BCE ), which ended in a compromise, with the Tyrians accepting Babylonian authority.

For example, one legend in the Babylonian Talmud describes Titus as having had sex with a whore on a Torah scroll inside the Temple during its destruction.

As part of the kingdom of Judah, the tribe of Judah survived the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians, and instead was subjected to the Babylonian captivity ; when the captivity ended, the distinction between the tribes were lost in favour of a common identity.

Jeremiah ’ s sole purpose was to reveal the sins of the people and explain the reason for the impending disaster ( destruction by the Babylonian army and captivity ), “ And when your people say, ' Why has the our God done all these things to us?

Tudor Parfitt, Professor of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, has theorised that it was the Ark of the Covenant, lost from Jerusalem after the destruction by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC.

The three Babylonian kings are often mentioned together as forming a succession of impious and tyrannical monarchs who oppressed Israel and were therefore foredoomed to disgrace and destruction.

Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle of the destruction of Jerusalem under the Babylonian rule

As part of the kingdom of Judah, Benjamin survived the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians, but instead was subjected to the Babylonian captivity ; when the captivity ended, the distinction between Benjamin and Judah was lost in favour of a common identity as Israel, though in the biblical book of Esther, Mordecai is referred to as being of the tribe of Benjamin, and as late as the time of Christ some still identified their Benjamite ancestry.

" head of the exile ", Greek: Æchmalotarcha ) refers to the leaders of the Diaspora Jewish community in Babylon following the deportation of King Jeconiah and his court into Babylonian exile after the first fall of Jerusalem in 597 BCE and augmented after the further deportations following the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 587 BCE.

# Early Age of Kings ( Solomon to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity ).

Although the Babylonian tablets dealing with the final fall and destruction of Jerusalem have not been found, it should be noticed that the testimony of Ezekiel 40: 1 is definitive in regard to the year 586.

Later in the period, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires put an end to the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, culminating in the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

These particular passages ( Isaiah 40 – 55, often referred to as Deutero-Isaiah ) are believed by most modern critical scholars to have been added by another author toward the end of the Babylonian exile Whereas Isaiah 1-39 ( referred to as Proto-Isaiah ) saw the destruction of Israel as imminent, and the restoration in the future, Deutero-Isaiah speaks of the destruction in the past ( Isa 42: 24-25 ), and the restoration as imminent ( Isa 42: 1-9 ).