After the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem there were three deportations brought to Babylon. The total number is estimated between 4,000 and 20,000. The Babylonians left the poor people and took only the most elite families, which included the top priests and scribes and craftsmen, and forced them to resettle in Babylon. This was to prevent further revolts by their client state Judah. This tactic of separating cultures from their homeland had also been practiced earlier by the Assyrians.
So when Cyrus (the first Persian king permitting freedom of religion, who allowed the spread of the Zoroastrian religion) freed those Judaic elites to return home, it’s possible he urged them to write down the Torah, and they might have been happy to craft a version of Moses that included elements of both Cyrus and Zoroaster (noble baby discarded at birth: man climbs sacred mountain and comes back with god’s laws). One thing for sure, the Torah was first compiled while they were still in Babylon but very close to going home. Another thing for sure: Cyrus loved to have things written down as attested by the Cyrus Cylinder created to commemorate his conquest of Babylon.
The caravans between Jerusalem and Babylon ran through Damascus to the north. Once there, they would turn northeast to the Euphrates and then follow the river to Babylon. A fast rider could make the trip in a few weeks but the caravans took four months.
The Jews being exiled could only take what little they could carry. All the wealth in Jerusalem had already been seized while the city was being leveled for the crime of forming an alliance with Egypt.
While in Babylon, the Jews became familiar with the many uses of hemp, a significant part of the Babylonian economy. The burning bush could be a reference to Zoroaster’s cannabis discoveries, and manna could be a reference to how hemp plants survived drought better than other grains, and the seeds could be turned into flour.
They were given small plots of land to cultivate and had to pay taxes with their crops, mostly barley, although they also grew vegetables for self consumption. Although Cyrus freed all slaves and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem (which had been demolished), most seemed to have stayed in Persia, and only a small group went back to start rebuilding the temple.
Scribes—including Ezekiel—used the time in Babylon to collect, redact, and organize oral and written traditions. This intensive period of literary curation formed the core text of what would become the Torah. Deprived of a physical sanctuary, the elite standardized new decentralized religious practices and shifted focus toward fixed communal prayer, public fasts, and the strict observance of the Sabbath.
In the ancient Near East, if your nation was conquered, it meant your god was weaker than the enemy’s god. When Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, the Israelites faced a crisis: either admit Yahweh was weak, or rethink their entire theology. Prophets and priests chose the latter.
The oldest known versions of the Torah were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and dated to around 250 to 300 years after Cyrus freed the Judaic elite.
Most mainstream historians and biblical scholars agree that Judaism was significantly influenced by Zoroastrianism. This historical intersection primarily occurred during the Babylonian Exile (586–538 BCE) and the subsequent Second Temple Period (538 BCE–70 CE), when the Jewish people lived under the rule of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.