History
- Exile
The Chaldeans, following
standard Mesopotamian practice, deported the Jews after they had
conquered Jerusalem in 597 BC. The deportations were large, but
certainly didn't involve the entire nation. Somewhere around 10,000
people were forced to relocate to the city of Babylon, the capital of
the Chaldean empire. In 586 BC, Judah itself ceased to be an independent
kingdom, and the earlier deportees found themselves without a homeland,
without a state, and without a nation. This period, which actually
begins in 597 but is traditionally dated at 586, is called the Exile in
Jewish history; it ends with an accident in 538 when the Persians
overthrow the Chaldeans.
Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Chaldeans, only deported the most
prominent citizens of Judah: professionals, priests, craftsmen, and the
wealthy. The "people of the land" (am-hares ) were allowed to stay. So
Jewish history, then, has two poles during the exile: the Jew in Babylon
and the Jews who remain in Judah. We know almost nothing of the Jews in
Judah after 586. Judah seems to have been wracked by famine, according
the biblical book, Lamentations, which was written in Jerusalem during
the exile. The entire situation seemed to be one of infinite despair.
Some people were better off; when Nebuchadnezzar deported the wealthy
citizens, he redistributed the land among the poor. So some people were
better off. In addition, there were rivalries between the two groups of
Jews. It is clear that the wealthy and professional Jews in Babylon
regarded themselves as the true Jewish people.
The salient feature of the exile, however, was that the Jews were
settled in a single place by Nebuchadnezzar. While the Assyrian
deportation of Israelites in 722 BC resulted in the complete
disappearance of the Israelites, the deported Jews formed their own
community in Babylon and retained their religion, practices, and
philosophies. Some, it would seem, adopted the Chaldean religion (for
they name their offspring after Chaldean gods), but for the most part,
the community remained united in its common faith in Yahweh.
They called themselves the "gola," ("exiles"), or the "bene gola" ("the
children of the exiles"), and within the crucible of despair and
hopelessness, they forged a new national identity and a new religion.
The exile was unexplainable; Hebrew history was built on the promise of
Yahweh to protect the Hebrews and use them for his purposes in human
history. Their defeat and the loss of the land promised to them by
Yahweh seemed to imply that their faith in this promise was misplaced.
This crisis, a form of cognitive dissonance (when your view of reality
and reality itself do not match one another), can precipitate the most
profound despair or the most profound reworking of a world view. For the
Jews in Babylon, it did both.
From texts such as Lamentations , which was probably written in
Jerusalem, and Job, written after the exile, as well as many of the
Psalms, Hebrew literature takes on a despairing quality. The subject of
Job is human suffering itself. Undeserving of suffering, Job, an upright
man, is made to suffer the worst series of calamities possible because
of an arbitrary test. When he finally despairs that there is no cosmic
justice, the only answer he receives is that humans shouldn't question
God's will. Many of the psalms written in this period betray an equal
hopelessness.
But the Jews in Babylon also creatively remade themselves and their
world view. In particular, they blamed the disaster of the Exile on
their own impurity. They had betrayed Yahweh and allowed the Mosaic laws
and cultic practices to become corrupt; the Babylonian Exile was proof
of Yahweh's displeasure. During this period, Jewish leaders no longer
spoke about a theology of judgment, but a theology of salvation. In
texts such as Ezekiel and Isaiah, there is talk that the Israelites
would be gathered together once more, their society and religion
purified, and the unified Davidic kingdom be re-established.
So this period is marked by a resurgence in Jewish tradition, as the
exiles looked back to their Mosaic origins in an effort to revive their
original religion. It is most likely that the Torah took its final shape
during this period or shortly afterward, and that it became the central
text of the Jewish faith at this time as well. This fervent revival of
religious tradition was aided by another accident in history: when Cyrus
the Persian conquered Mesopotamia, he allowed the Jews to return home.
This was no ordinary event, though. Cyrus sent them home specifically to
worship Yahweh—what was once only a kingdom would become a nation of
Yahweh.
From:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/HEBREWS/HEBREWS.HTM
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