Babylon and Medo-Persia

The exile and the return · c. 605–445 BC

The three powers stand as they were before 539 BC, when Babylon still held the crescent and Media and Persia lay behind the Zagros — the only arrangement that shows all three without anachronism, since Persia went on to absorb both. Their borders are generalized spheres. The two roads are the deportation of 2 Kings 25, by way of Riblah where Zedekiah was sentenced, and the return under Cyrus and later Ezra (Ezra 1-2, 7); they follow the same crescent because there was no other road, and are drawn apart with arrows so that fifty years are not mistaken for a round trip. Nineveh is drawn as the ruin it already was, fallen a generation before Jerusalem. The plate carries the geography of Daniel and Ezekiel. For Daniel: Babylon and the plain of Dura (3:1 — the site is unidentified, and the name is placed on the plain near the city), Shushan in Elam by the Ulai (8:2), and the Hiddekel of 10:4, which is the Tigris. For Ezekiel: Tel-abib by the Chebar among the exiles (3:15), and the cities of the oracles — Tyre and Sidon (26-28), Gebal and Arvad of the shipwrights and rowers (27:8-9), Rabbah of the Ammonites (25:5), and the Egypt of chapter 30, Noph (Memphis), Tahpanhes, Zoan, On and Sin. Pi-beseth of the same oracle sits between them, too close to mark at this scale; Thebes (No) and Syene lie south of the frame. Shushan is Susa and Achmetha is Ecbatana, both given the names Scripture uses (Esther 1:2, Daniel 8:2, Ezra 6:2). Tel-abib has no secure identification and is placed near Nippur, where the Chebar canal ran; Riblah’s site is likewise uncertain. The battles are dated from the Babylonian Chronicles rather than reckoned: Nineveh fell to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 (Nahum 1-3), Josiah was killed at Megiddo in 609 intercepting Neco on his march to help what was left of Assyria (2 Kings 23:29), Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Egyptian army at Carchemish in 605 (Jeremiah 46:2), Jerusalem was taken and burned in 586 after an eighteen-month siege (2 Kings 25:1-10) — the deportations of 605 and 597 preceded it — and Babylon fell to Cyrus in 539, the night Daniel 5 records. The exception is the siege of Tyre, thirteen years from about 585, which ended without the plunder the army had counted on (Ezekiel 29:18); its dates come from Josephus and are approximate. Cyrus beat the Babylonian army in the field at Opis a few days before the city was entered; the plate marks Babylon because the account in Daniel is of the city.

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