Judah was small country, and the number of its educated and skilled citizens could not have been great. Second Kings 24 claims that Nebuchadnezzar took away between eight and ten thousand people in his first attack of 598, but the parallel account in Jeremiah 52 lowers the total amount to three thousand. Several thousand more would have been taken to Babylon in later deportations in 586 and 582 BC. According to some modern estimates, the exiles numbered 20,000 out of a total population of 200,000 by one reckoning, or 80.000 by another; thus representing 10 percent or 25 percent, respectively, of the population of Judah in its final years. These would have been by far the great majority of all leading persons in the nation.
It is probable that the Babylonians left sufficient Judeans in Judah to maintain the agricultural economy for the purpose of taxation and the production of olives and grapes. Archaeology reveals that Jerusalem and towns south of it were heavily damaged, whereas the towns north of Jerusalem -Gibeah, Gibeon, Mizpah, and Bethel- were left intact. Edomite encroachment in the southern part of Judah suggests that the Babylonians did not control that area. This helps explain the great hostility toward Edom in some exilic and postexilic biblical texts. Many exiles were settled near Nippur, about fifty miles from the city of Babylon. The river or canal Chebar, near which Ezekiel had his great vision (Ezek 1:1-3), runs through Nippur. The exiles may have been tenant farmers. Ancient structures perdured, and elders retained their authority (Ezra 5:5, 9; Jer 29:1; Ezek 8:1, 14:1, 20:1, 3, 6:7-8).New markers of Jewish identity, appropriate to a "foreign" environment, became more important: praying toward Jerusalem (1 Kings 8:30, 35; Dan 6:10), circumcision, Sabbath observance, and dietary laws. And there were small signs of hope: King Jehoiachin, who had been carried off to Babylon as a prisoner in 598, seemed eventually to have been treated with dignity and allowed to live in ease. A small Babylonian clay tablet found in the 1930s listed a daily list of food for his household from the royal palace. And the prophet Ezekiel ... moved and spoke with considerable freedom in his place of exile ...
Jeremiah ... communicated with exiles by letter in the years from 598 to 586 (Jer 29:1-23). In fact, he counseled the exiles to "build houses and settle in them; plant gardens and eat their produce ..."
Many apparently did settle down contentedly and make a home in Babylon. Certainly the length of the total stay in exile, some sixty years for the first deportees, and forty-five for those who were taken in 586, suggests that all but a very few died in Babylon and that most of their children
never knew any other home than that of their exile. The records of the Murashu family, a Babylonian banking firm of the fifth century BC, were found by archaeologists in Nippur ... and they list several prominent Jewish families among their clients about the years 450 to 400 BC. We can reasonably conclude from this that opportunities to get ahead were available to the exiles if they wished to settle down and become part of the local people.
Jewish settlements ... in the Diaspora ... did not begin with the Babylonian exile. Already 2 Kings 17:6 relates the earlier exile of the Northern Kingdom: "In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried the Israelites back to Assyria and settled them in Halah, on the Habur River in Gozan and in the cities of the Medes." This was the year 721 BC, and Sargon II, the king of Assyria, recorded that he deported a total 27,290 inhabitants of Samaria ... they are never mentioned again in the Bible.
https://books.google.com/books?id=wSpHA ... on&f=false