were entirely devoted to destruction, as, for example, Jericho, the firstfruits of the conquest. (Josh. 6:17, 21) When capturing other cities not devoted to destruction, the Israelites, unlike the pagan nations, were not allowed to rape the women. If they desired a captive woman for a wife, certain requirements had to be met first.—Lam. 5:11; Num. 31:9-19, 26, 27; Deut. 21:10-14.

However, when enemy nations came up against the Israelites, Jehovah sometimes allowed his people to be carried off captive when they had been unfaithful to him. (2 Chron. 21:16, 17; 28:5, 17; 29:9) The most notable examples of this were in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., when thousands of Israelites were exiled as captives by the Assyrian and Babylonian World Powers. (See CAPTIVITY.) Ahijah and Jeremiah foretold this coming national disaster. (1 Ki. 14:15; Jer. 15:2) Moses too had warned that their sons and daughters would “go off into captivity” as a penalty for disobedience to Jehovah, adding that, if they repented, such captives would in time return. (Deut. 28:41; 30:3) Solomon foresaw captivity resulting from unfaithfulness and he prayed for Jehovah to release the captives if they repented.—1 Ki. 8:46-52; 2 Chron. 6:36-39; see also 2 Chronicles 30:9; Ezra 9:7.

The treatment of captives varied a great deal, depending on many circumstances. Sometimes they were permitted to remain in their own land on condition that they pay tribute and not rebel against their new master. (Gen. 14:1-4; 2 Sam. 8:5, 6; 2 Ki. 17:1-4) A conquered monarch was sometimes permitted to continue reigning as a vassal king, or he might be replaced. (2 Ki. 23:34; 24:1, 17) In some instances great numbers of captives were put to death, like the 10,000 who were thrown down from a crag so “they, one and all, burst apart.” (2 Chron. 25:12) Some conquerors were very cruel and fiendish in their treatment of captives, hanging them “by just their hand” (Lam. 5:12), cutting off their noses and ears (Ezek. 23:25), blinding them with red-hot irons or boring out their eyes with spears or daggers (Judg. 16:21; 1 Sam. 11:2; Jer. 52:11), or “slitting open the pregnant women” of a captured town. (Amos 1:13) The sadistic Assyrians, particularly noted for their extreme cruelty, are depicted in monuments as tying captives down and then skinning them alive.

Captives were often led away to forced labor (2 Sam. 12:29-31; 1 Chron. 20:3), taken into slavery, or sold as chattel. (1 Sam. 30:1, 2; 2 Ki. 5:2; Isa. 14:3, 4) Often conquerors delighted in roping captives together around the neck or head (compare Isaiah 52:2), or binding them in fetters (2 Ki. 25:7), and leading them off “naked and barefoot, and with buttocks stripped,” to their humiliation and shame.—Isa. 20:4.

Release and return of the Jewish captives was the happy theme of many prophecies. (Isa. 49:24, 25; Jer. 29:14; 46:27; Ezek. 39:28; Hos. 6:11; Joel 3:1; Amos 9:14; Zeph. 3:20) The psalmist also looked toward the time when “Jehovah gathers back the captive ones of his people.” (Ps. 14:7; 53:6; 85:1; 126:1, 4) Many of these prophecies were fulfilled in a miniature way from and after 537 B.C.E., when a remnant of the captives that had come under control of the Persian Empire began streaming back to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and its great temple. (Ezra 2:1; 3:8; 8:35; Neh. 1:2, 3; 7:6; 8:17) Certain enemies of Jehovah’s people were especially mentioned as destined for captivity themselves, nations such as Babylon (Isa. 46:1, 2; Jer. 50:1, 2), Egypt (Jer. 43:11, 12; Ezek. 30:17, 18) and Moab.—Jer. 48:46.

Jesus quotes from Isaiah 61:1, 2, applying it to himself as sent by Jehovah “to preach a release to the captives and a recovery of sight to the blind.” (Luke 4:16-21) The apostle Paul draws illustrations from the ancient practice of conquerors’ taking captives. (Eph. 4:8; 2 Cor. 10:5) In the last book of the Bible the principle is set forth: “If anyone is for leading into captivity, he goes away into captivity.”—Rev. 13:10.

CAPTIVITY

In Biblical history a number of different captivities are mentioned. (Num. 21:29; 2 Chron. 29:9; Isa. 46:2; Ezek. 30:17, 18; Dan. 11:33; Nah. 3:10; Rev. 13:10; see CAPTIVE.) However, “The Captivity” generally refers to the great exiling of Jews from the Promised Land in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. by the Assyrian and Babylonian World Powers, and is also called “the Exile” and “the deportation.”—Ezra 6:21; Matt. 1:17.

Jeremiah, Ezekiel and other prophets warned of this great calamity in statements like these: “Whoever is for the captivity, to the captivity!” “As for you, O Pashhur, and all the inhabitants of your house, you will go into captivity; and to Babylon you will come.” “There is this pronouncement against Jerusalem and all the house of Israel . . . ‘Into exile, into captivity they will go.’” (Jer. 15:2; 20:6; Ezek. 12:10, 11) Later, concerning the return from Babylonian captivity, Nehemiah (7:6) relates: “These are the sons of the jurisdictional district who came up out of the captivity of the exiled people whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had taken into exile and who later returned to Jerusalem and to Judah.”—See also Ezra 2:1; 3:8; 8:35; Nehemiah 1:2, 3; 8:17.

Assyria, it seems, was the first to introduce the policy of uprooting and removing the entire populations of captured towns from their homeland and repopulating the territory with captives from other parts of the empire. This deportation policy of Assyria was enforced against not only the Jews, for when Damascus, the capital of Syria, fell under the crushing military onslaught of this second world power, its people were banished to Kir, as foretold by the prophet Amos. (2 Ki. 16:8, 9; Amos 1:5) The practice had a twofold effect: It discouraged the few remaining ones from subversive activity; and the surrounding nations that may have been friendly with those taken captive were less inclined to give aid and assistance to the new foreign element brought in from distant places.

In both the northern ten-tribe kingdom of Israel and the southern two-tribe kingdom of Judah, the root cause leading up to captivity was the same: abandonment of true worship of Jehovah in favor of false gods. (Deut. 28:15, 62-68; 2 Ki. 17:7-18; 21:10-15) Jehovah, for his part, continually sent his prophets to warn them both but to no avail. (2 Ki. 17:13) None of the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel’s kings ever made a complete purge of the false worship instituted by that nation’s first king, Jeroboam. Judah, her sister kingdom to the S, failed to heed both Jehovah’s direct warnings and the example of the captivity into which Israel fell. (Jer. 3:6-10) The inhabitants of both kingdoms eventually were carried away into exile, each nation in more than one principal deportation.

BEGINNING OF THE EXILE

During the reign of Israelite King Pekah at Samaria (c. 778-758 B.C.E.), Assyrian King Pul (apparently his more official title was Tiglath-pileser III) came against Israel, captured a large section in the N and deported its inhabitants to eastern parts of his empire. (2 Ki. 15:29) This same monarch also captured territory E of the Jordan and from that area “he took into exile those of the Reubenites and of the Gadites and of the half tribe of Manasseh and brought them to Halah and Habor and Hara and the river Gozan to continue until this day.”—1 Chron. 5:26.

When Samaria fell to the Assyrians in 740 B.C.E., thus ending the ten-tribe kingdom, its inhabitants were taken into exile “in Halah and in Habor at the river Gozan and in the cities of the Medes.” This was because, as the Scriptures say, “they had not listened to the voice of Jehovah their God, but kept overstepping his covenant, even all that Moses the servant of Jehovah had commanded. They neither listened nor performed.” (2 Ki. 18:11, 12; 17:6) However, the credit for the city’s fall Assyrian King Sargon II claimed for himself. In his Annals it is written: “I besieged and conquered Samaria (Sa-me ri-na), led away as booty 27,290 inhabitants of it. I formed from among them a contingent of 50 chariots and made remaining (inhabitants) assume their (social) positions. I installed over them an officer of mine and imposed upon them the tribute of the former king.”—Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Pritchard, 1955, pp. 284, 285; see SARGON.

Captives from other widely scattered places were then brought in and settled in the cities of Samaria. “Subsequently the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon and Cuthah and Avva and Hamath and Sepharvaim and had them dwell in the cities of Samaria instead of the sons of Israel; and they began to take possession of Samaria and to dwell in its cities.” (2 Ki. 17:24) This foreign element imported with them their pagan religion; “each different nation came to be a maker of its own god.” And because they showed no regard or respect for Jehovah, he “sent lions among them, and they came to be killers among them.” The king of Assyria then returned one of the Israelite priests “and he came to be a teacher of them as to how they ought to fear Jehovah.” So, as the account then says, “It was of Jehovah that they became fearers, but it was of their own gods that they proved to be worshipers, according to the religion of the nations from among whom they had led them into exile.”—2 Ki. 17:25-33.

During the century and more that followed the overthrow of the northern kingdom, other notable exiles began. Before Sennacherib’s humiliating defeat at God’s hand in 732 B.C.E., he attacked other places in Judah. It is claimed by Sennacherib in his Annals that he captured 200,150 from towns and fortresses in Judah’s territory, though, judging from the tone of the Annals, the number is probably an exaggeration. (2 Ki. 18:13) His successor Esar-haddon and the Assyrian monarch that followed him, Asenappar (Ashurbanipal), both transported captives to foreign territories.—Ezra 4:2, 10.

In 628 B.C.E., Egypt’s Pharaoh Necho put Josiah’s son Jehoahaz of the southern kingdom in bonds and carried him captive to Egypt. (2 Chron. 36:1-5) But it was more than a decade later, in 617 B.C.E., that the first captives from Jerusalem were taken into exile at Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar came against the rebellious city and carried off the upper class of the population, including King Jehoiachin and his mother, and men such as Ezekiel, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, together with the “princes and all the valiant, mighty men—ten thousand he was taking into exile—and also every craftsman and builder of bulwarks. No one had been left behind except the lowly class of the people . . . court officials and the foremost men of the land he led away as exiled people from Jerusalem to Babylon. As for all the valiant men, seven thousand, and the craftsmen and the builders of bulwarks, a thousand, all the mighty men carrying on war, the king of Babylon proceeded to bring them as exiled people to Babylon.” He also took much of the treasure from the temple. (2 Ki. 24:12-16; Esther 2:6; Ezek. 1:1-3; Dan. 1:2, 6) Jehoiachin’s uncle Zedekiah was left behind as a vassal king. A few others of note, including the prophet Jeremiah, also remained in Jerusalem. In view of the large number of captives recorded at 2 Kings 24:14, the figure 3,023 given at Jeremiah 52:28 apparently refers to those of a certain rank, or to those who were family heads—their wives and children, numbering thousands, not being included in the figure.

The second and final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar was completed in 607 B.C.E., after an eighteen-month siege. (2 Ki. 25:1-4) This time the city was emptied of most of its inhabitants. Some of the lowly ones of the land were allowed to remain “as vinedressers and as compulsory laborers” under the governorship of Gedaliah at Mizpah. (Jer. 52:16; 40:7-10; 2 Ki. 25:22) Those taken captive to Babylon included “some of the lowly ones of the people and the rest of the people that were left remaining in the city and the deserters . . . and the rest of the master workmen.” The expression “that were left remaining in the city” apparently indicates that great numbers had died either from the famine, disease or fire, or were slaughtered in the war. (Jer. 52:15; 2 Ki. 25:11) Zedekiah’s sons, the princes of Judah, court officials, certain priests and many other prominent citizens were put to death on the order of the king of Babylon. (2 Ki. 25:7, 18-21; Jer. 52:10, 24-27) All of this could account for the rather low number of those actually listed as exiles that were led off, the number given being only 832, probably heads of households, their wives and children not counted.—Jer. 52:29.

Some two months later, after the assassination of Gedaliah, the rest of the Jews left behind in Judah fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah and Baruch along with them. (2 Ki. 25:8-12, 25, 26; Jer. 43:5-7) Some of the Jews also may have fled to other nations round about. Probably from among these nations and Egypt were the 745 captives, as household heads, exiled five years later when Nebuchadnezzar, as Jehovah’s symbolic club, dashed to pieces the nations bordering Judah. (Jer. 51:20; 52:30) Josephus says that five years after the fall of Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar overran Ammon and Moab and then went on down and took vengeance on Egypt.—Antiquities of the Jews, Book X, chap. 9, par. 7.

The situation with Jerusalem was different from that of other conquered cities. Unlike Samaria, which was reinhabited with imported captives from other parts of the Assyrian Empire, and as was the usual policy of the Babylonians toward the cities they conquered, in this particular case Jerusalem and its vicinity were emptied and left desolate, just as Jehovah had predetermined. Bible critics may question that Judah’s once-prosperous land was suddenly made “a desolate waste, without an inhabitant,” but there is admittedly no historical evidence, no records from this period, to prove otherwise. (Jer. 9:11; 32:43) Archaeologist G. E. Wright declares: “The violence visited upon Judah is clear . . . from archaeological surveys which show that city after city ceased to be inhabited at this time, many never to be reoccupied.” (Biblical Archaeology, 1957, p. 179) W. F. Albright agrees: “There is not a single known case where a town of Judah proper was continuously occupied through the exilic period.”—The Archaeology of Palestine, 1949, p. 142.

CONDITION OF THE EXILES

The captivity was regarded in general as a period of oppression and bondage. Jehovah said that, instead of showing mercy to Israel, “upon the old man you [Babylon] made your yoke very heavy.” (Isa. 47:5, 6) No doubt certain payments (tax, tribute, toll), based on what they were able to produce or earn, were exacted of them the same as was levied on other captives. (Ezra 4:20) Also, the very fact that the great temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem had been stripped and destroyed, its priesthood either killed or taken into exile, and its worshipers carried away into captivity and made subjects to a foreign power, certainly constituted a state of oppression.

However, being exiled to a foreign land was not as bad as being sold into cruel perpetual slavery, or executed in the sadistic manner typical of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. (Isa. 14:4-6; Jer. 50:17) The captive Jews, it seems, enjoyed a certain measure of freedom to move around, and they exercised some degree of internal administration of their affairs. (Ezra 8:1, 16, 17; Ezek. 1:1; 14:1; 20:1) “To all the