Jehoiachin's Ration Tablets

A king of Judah, listed in Babylon's supply records. In the ruins of Babylon, excavators found clay tablets that name him, and five sons beside him.

Scripture: In the thirty-seventh year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, Evilmerodach king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah out of prison; and he spoke kindly to him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings who were with him in Babylon, and changed his prison garments. Jehoiachin ate bread before him continually all the days of his life; and for his allowance, there was a continual allowance given him from the king, every day a portion, all the days of his life.

The book of Second Kings ends with Jehoiachin, king of Judah, living as a captive in Babylon. His story closes in verses twenty-seven to thirty.

The tablets were dug up at Babylon between 1899 and 1917. The excavator was Robert Koldewey.

They were stored in a barrel-vaulted underground building, meaning one with an arched, tunnel-like ceiling, a row of rooms near the Ishtar Gate. They come from the royal archives of Nebuchadnezzar the Second.

Scripture: One tablet names this man, listed with his five sons as royal princes. Scholars identify him as Jeconiah, another name for Jehoiachin.

The tablets list oil rations, measured in the sila, a Babylonian unit of capacity. That is roughly eight hundred millilitres.

The tablets date from the sixth century BC. The photo shows a clay tablet with an Akkadian cuneiform inscription, meaning wedge-shaped writing pressed into clay, that lists rations and names Jeconiah. It is the sort of everyday paperwork that survives when grand speeches do not.

So it illustrates the passage. A king of Judah was in Babylon and was supplied from the royal stores. But the sources describe rations only. They do not mention a release from prison or the king's kindness, so the link is indirect.

A name on a ration list: small evidence, but a real person in a real place. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today. Follow for more from the ground beneath the Bible.