Babylonian Chronicle 5 (the Jerusalem Chronicle)
A cuneiform tablet of the Babylonian court chronicle for the years 605–594 BC. It records Nebuchadnezzar’s victory at Carchemish and his capture of Jerusalem in 597 BC, dated to the day.
Read the text at britishmuseum.org ↗English translation with line numbers (Livius) ↗
The Babylonian chronicles are terse year-by-year records of the king’s campaigns, written in Akkadian on clay tablets. This tablet, known as Chronicle 5 in A. K. Grayson’s edition (ABC 5), runs from the last year of Nabopolassar to the eleventh year of Nebuchadnezzar II.
Its entry for the seventh year reports the siege of “the city of Judah”, its capture on the second day of the month Addaru, the removal of its king and the appointment of another. It is the only Babylonian account of the First Deportation to Babylon, and it supplies the exact date. The tablet breaks off before the destruction of Jerusalem a decade later, for which no Babylonian chronicle survives.
Cited in
- 627 BC, estimated date
- 605 BC, firm date
- about 605 BC to 536 BC, traditional date
- 16 March 597 BC, firm date
- 593 BC to 571 BC, estimated date
- 587/586 BC, estimated date