Babylon's palace ration lists name Judah's exiled king

Jehoiachin reigned over Judah for three months. In 597 BCE, at eighteen, he surrendered Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar's army and was taken to Babylon with his mother, his officials, and thousands of Judah's soldiers and craftsmen, as 2 Kings 24:12-16 records.

Between 1899 and 1917, German excavators led by Robert Koldewey dug through Babylon's royal palace and found a vaulted building near the Ishtar Gate holding hundreds of administrative tablets. In 1939 the Assyriologist Ernst Weidner published a few of them: receipts for rations of oil paid out to foreigners living in the palace's keeping. Several list "Ya'ukin, king of the land of Yahudu," along with the sons of the king of Judah and other Judeans. Alongside them are princes from Ashkelon and craftsmen from Egypt and the Greek cities of Ionia. One of the tablets is dated to 592 BCE, five years into the exile.

The tablets give the last scene of the books of Kings a second witness. 2 Kings ends not with the temple's fall but with Jehoiachin, thirty-seven years into his captivity, released from prison by Nebuchadnezzar's successor and given a seat at the king's table and a regular allowance "every day a portion, all the days of his life." The tablets come from earlier in his exile and do not record that release. What they show is the same arrangement recorded by Babylon's own clerks: the palace feeding Judah's captive king, and still writing down his title.