his death are uncertain, though the Book of Chronicles claims that despite Necho's lack of enmity for Josiah, Josiah insisted on attacking him. Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that Necho may have objected to Josiah's expansionist policies, which could have threatened the Egyptian dominance of the region to the west of Judah (the Philistine lands) or of the strategically important Jezreel Valley to its north, or could equally have objected to the effect of the new (deuteronomic) social policies on the caravan routes, which ran through southern Judah. With Josiah's death Egypt became suzerain over Judah. The new king, Egypt's vassal ruler, undid Josiah's changes, restoring the former shrines and returning the country once again to religious pluralism. But when the Babylonian faction eventually won the Assyrian civil war, they set out to forcibly retake the former Assyrian tributaries. Judah, as a loyal Egyptian vassal-state, resisted, with disastrous consequences: the Babylonians plundered Jerusalem in 597 BCE and imposed their own vassal king; these events are described in the Bible and confirmed, with variations, in the Babylonian Chronicle. A few years later, the king of Judah rebelled against his Babylonian masters, and the Babylonians returned to destroy all the cities in Judah, burning Jerusalem to the ground in 587 BCE. In 539 BCE, the Achaemenids conquered Babylon, and, in accordance with their Zoroastrian perspective, allowed the people deported by the Babylonians to return; this is described by the Cyrus Cylinder, which also indicates that the Persians repaired the temples in these conquered lands, returning any sacred artifacts to them. According to the archaeological record, no more than 25% of the population had actually been deported; according to the Book of Ezra and its parallel passages in the First Book of Esdras, when the deportees began to return, their leader—Zerubbabel—refused to allow the undeported Israelites to assist them in reconstructing the Jerusalem temple, apparently believing that only the former deportees had the right to determine the beliefs and practices which could count as the orthodoxy. Although the undeported majority then tried to stop the reconstruction, Darius, the new Achaemenid king, eventually allowed it to continue. The conflict between the returnees and those who had always been in Judah evidently required resolution; the two groups had to be reintegrated. Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the Deuteronomic law advanced by parts of the deported elite (the ancestors of the returnees), and the laws and legends