History Globe
Question
Where was Babylon?
Babylon lay on the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, beside the modern town of Hillah in Iraq, about 85 km south of Baghdad; its ruins and partly rebuilt walls are still there.
The city rose under Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BC and reached its height under Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC), who rebuilt it with double walls, palaces, the Ishtar Gate and the ziggurat Etemenanki. It was to this Babylon that the exiles from Judah were brought in 597 and in 586 BC (587 is also held); tablets from the royal palace list rations for Jehoiachin, king of Judah, whom 2 Kings also places at the Babylonian court.
In 539 BC Cyrus of Persia took the city, as the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder record; the Book of Daniel sets the feast of Belshazzar on the night of its fall, and Ezra opens with Cyrus's decree letting the exiles return. Alexander the Great died in Nebuchadnezzar's palace in 323 BC. After Seleucia was founded on the Tigris the people drained away, and when Trajan came in AD 116 he found mostly mounds.
Scripture: 2 Kgs 24:12; 2 Kgs 25:11; Dan 5:30–31; Ezra 1:2–3
Sources
- Nabonidus Chronicle (ABC 7) iii 12-16; the Cyrus Cylinder, l. 17
- Jehoiachin ration tablets from Babylon (E. F. Weidner, 1939)
- Arrian, Anabasis 7.24-28 (death of Alexander); Cassius Dio, Roman History 68.30 (Trajan)
- J. Oates, Babylon (rev. ed., 1986)
- M. Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (3rd ed., 2016)
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