ABSTRACT
Babylonian conquest had a highly destructive eect on Judahite culture, measurable by the archaeological evidence of destruction during this period, but it also stimulated a considerable amount of creativity, measurable by the literature from this period now preserved in the Bible. We have been mentioning that portions of the Bible were written in the wake of the Babylonian conquest, but one might well argue that most of it was composed, or at least revised, at this time. To be more specic:
1. A number of biblical books were actually composed anew during the period of Babylonian domination or in the following centuries. ese include Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Papyri, written in Aramaic (another Semitic language widely used in the ancient Near East under the Persian Empire), provide a remarkable witness to the community that produced them, furnishing scholars with personal and ocial letters, legal and economic documents, and even a literary text about a wise ocial named Ahiqar.
