AND HERE'S A BOOK REVIEW IN HA'ARETZ:

Filling in the blanks
By Joshua Schwartz
"Yerushalayim Bein Khurban Lehitkhadshut" ("Jerusalem between Destruction and Restoration - Judah under Babylonian Rule") by Oded Lipschits, Yad Ben-Zvi, 551 pages, NIS 115.80.

Most people are familiar with the controversial "empty country myth" in the context of 19th- century Palestine. Israeli historians, "old" and "new," have spent a whole generation debating the facts, the conventional thinking and the ideologies on which our understanding of Israeli and Palestinian history is based. Far from the spotlights, however, another "empty country" debate is taking place. The time frame in this case is the brief interval of Babylonian rule over Palestine - less than 70 years - in the sixth century B.C.E.

In this case, it is not a question of Jews and non-Jews, but of exiles and those who remained in Eretz Israel. What did the exiles in Babylon who wept at the memory of Zion find when they returned to Palestine? Did they find a vacant land emptied of its inhabitants, a land that had been desolate for 70 years, or did they find a land where Jews - even a large number of them - continued to reside?

There are two schools of thought in the debate over the question of continuity (or noncontinuity) of Jewish habitation in ancient Palestine. Those who believe in continuity, among them Hans Barstad, argue that despite the destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the fall of the Kingdom of David, a Jewish cultural, economic and demographic presence never entirely disappeared. According to this school of thought, Jews continued to live in the Negev, the district of Benjamin, the Judean Hills and possibly even Jerusalem. Those in the opposing camp regard the biblical descriptions - "Those who survived the sword he exiled to Babylon" (2 Chronicles 36:21); and "Thus Judah was exiled from its land" (2 Kings 25:21) - as historical truth.

[...]

The premise of Oded Lipschits' book, an outgrowth of the doctoral dissertation he wrote under the supervision of Prof. Nadav Ne'eman of Tel Aviv University, is that the period of Babylonian rule over Judah was not just an interim period. It was a period of great import for the religious, social and cultural consolidation of the Jewish people. True, there are very few historical, biblical or extra-biblical sources for this time frame, and it is difficult to reach conclusions on the basis of the meager archaeological findings attributed to this period. And yet Lipschits believes it is possible to draw a broad and comprehensive picture, "showing the centrality of this interval in the geopolitical processes in Eretz Israel between the late First Temple period and the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods."

Although Lipschits admits that in the end there is no certainty, and many key questions remain unanswered, there is no question that the period of Babylonian rule over Judah is no longer an unknown quantity. With his insights and commentary, Lipschits has illuminated the darkness.

In the matter of the land being "empty," Lipschits takes the middle ground. Most modern scholars are reluctant to embrace the radical "discontinuity" theory and concede that some Jews remained in Judah during the Babylonian period. The debate is ultimately over how many of them remained and where they lived. Lipschits dwells at length on these issues, some of which he has written about before.

Analyzing the archaeological findings, Lipschits shows that while the country was not deserted during the Babylonian period, the amount of settled land decreased by 60 percent and there were only 40,000 inhabitants living in the administrative district of Judah at that time, compared with 110,000 toward the end of David's reign. (Some scholars, of course, will disagree with these statistics or doubt that population figures can be assessed altogether).

[...]

UPDATE: Noted already by Jim West here.