After that reference in the Wainer tablets, we have a few stray references
in contracts and other miscellaneous cuneiform Babylonian documents mentioning
from one time to another an occasional Judean or
other member of an elite or just a regular person from the west,
in occasional contracts and documents.
It's not until we reach almost 150 years later
in the end of the 5th century BCE that we begin to learn more
from cuneiform documents about the fate of these Westerners.
In the so-called Murashu Archive, a collection of documents from
a business family near the city of Nippur Southeast of Babylon.
We begin to learn, once again,
that these Judeans who had been sent to the land of Babylon are present and
active in administrative contexts, economic contexts, farming contexts.
But what happened between the time of 597 and 586 when Judah was finally destroyed,
and this time of the Murashu Archives in the late 5th century BCE?
This region, this period of time was known, for
the most part as a kind of dark age.
Stray references but no more, the only other information we have,
of course was from the Bible.
This is now beginning to change slowly, and
in a new collection of texts that were obtained in the antiquities market,
we find out that Judeans were settled in the vicinity of Nippur
immediately upon their arrival as deportees from Judah.