What it was. The Babylon of the exile is the Chaldean, or neo-Babylonian, empire, a short, brilliant power founded by Nabopolassar in 626 BC as Assyria collapsed, and brought to its height by his son Nebuchadnezzar (ISBE, "Babylonia," "Neo-Babylonian Rulers"). The ISBE says Nebuchadnezzar "transformed Babylon into the mistress of the civilized world," and his own building inscriptions, boasting of the city's walls, temples, and the great processional street, bear out the biblical "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built …?" (Daniel 4:30). Where Assyria had been a war-machine, Chaldean Babylon is remembered for the splendor of its capital and for the deportation that carried Judah away.
How it dealt with Judah. Babylon is the empire that ended the southern kingdom. After Carchemish (605 BC) it was master of Syria and Palestine; Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem's treasures and nobles, then in successive deportations carried off king Jehoiachin and finally, when Zedekiah rebelled, destroyed the city and the temple in 586 BC (2 Kings 24–25; Jeremiah 52). This is the seventy-year exile the prophets had warned of (Jeremiah 25:11). Yet the empire scarcely outlived its great king: within a generation it fell, in a single night, to Cyrus's Persians in 539 BC (Daniel 5:30–31). (Source: ISBE 1915, "Babylonia," "Neo-Babylonian Rulers"; "Babel; Babylon.")