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12JOURNAL OF HEBREW SCRIPTURESREFLECTIONS ON ODED LIPSCHITS, THEFALL AND RISE OF JERUSALEMTAMARA COHN ESKENAZI,HEBREW UNION COLLEGE/JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION,LOS ANGELESI wish to thank Oded Lipschits for the rich new data and insights thathis book contains and, also, for the kind of balanced and balancingsynthesis that his work offers. By “his work” I do not only refer to thebook which is the focus of this paper, but also the conferences he hasorganized over the years on the subject of Judah and the Judeans duringthe Persian Period. In both venues, Lipschits promotes collaborativework that is both rare and necessary.In this excellent book, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah underBabylonian Rule, Lipschits strides boldly through the minefield ofpoliticized scholarship. He does so sensitively and sensibly, and presentsa clear, cogent and constructive analysis of the Babylonian period inJudah.By “constructive” I mean that in addition to constructing modelsfor investigating the historical features of the period, Lipschits alsomodels a non-positivistic use of biblical narrative in conjunction witharchaeological data. The synthesis of the relevant information that hepresents brings order to a chaotic time and almost equally chaoticscholarly debates. The book, therefore, is indispensable for all futurestudies of the topic.Fortunately for those of us who concentrate on the Persian period,Lipschits extends his fine analysis beyond the scope of the Babylonianperiod to include aspects of the postexilic era. My paper is a briefreflection on how Lipschits’s book contributes to the interpretation ofthe postexilic era, especially to Ezra Nehemiah’s (EN) depiction of theera.The term that Lipschits uses for the early Persian Era is “Return toZion,” an English translation of the Hebrew designation shivat Zion. Butthere is a built-in, inevitable, irony here because Lipschits maintains thatthere was no real “return” (at least not in the sixth century B.C.E.). Hewrites:The ‘Return to Zion’ appears to have had no demographic impacton the land of Judah: no change in population density is detectablebetween the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifthcentury B.C.E. Moreover, the dwindling of the total population ofthe province after the destruction of Jerusalem continued into thebeginning of the Persian Period: the population of the province of