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Babylonian Exile
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EXILE AND RETURN 147 BABYLONIAN EXILE Being ejected from Judah and driven into exile in Babylonia was a shattering experience for the Jews. They had lost their homeland, their Jerusalem, their Temple and their homes, and been required to start new lives in a strange land. They had been abandoned by the God who they had believed had chosen them as His own from all peoples of the world. “The Lord has acted like a foe,” they grieved. “He has laid waste Israel.”[61] The roots of their religious and national identity seemed severed. Though adrift in a foreign environment, the exiles were not widely dispersed as the “lost tribes” of the Children of Israel had been by Assyrian conquerors more than a century earlier. Instead, they were deposited by the Babylonians in a small region of southern Mesopotamia, in the town of Tel Abib and elsewhere along the Chebar River, not far from the capital of Babylon. Once the Jews had gone through the trauma of transplantation and settling in, the Babylonians did not subject them to extreme hardship. Jeremiah proclaimed that God inclined the king of Babylon “to be merciful to you.”[62] Few restrictions or obstacles were imposed on them as they went about building communities and following their chosen ways of life. They followed God’s urging, as transmitted by Jeremiah, to “Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit.… Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you.”[63] Largely spared oppression and persecution, with the passage of time some flourished in their new home. Many turned or returned to farming in a region more fertile than the one they had left. Others took up their old trades as artisans and merchants. The wonders of Babylon—its majestic palaces, its “Tower of Babel” dedicated to the deity Marduk, its city walls wide enough for a four-horse chariot to run atop, and other trappings of a highly accomplished, sophisticated culture—must have tempted many to forsake their own heritage and adapt to new ways of thinking and living. It would have been easy or convenient to accept that the pagan gods of their conquerors had proved superior to their own Yahweh, and to worship them instead. But for Jews who remained true to their faith, and for Judaism generally, the Babylonian exile turned into a crucial time of rejuvenation. Having been denied the Temple in Jerusalem, the nerve center and keystone of Jewish worship, and the tangible focus of their faith since the days of Solomon, they turned elsewhere to fill the great gap its destruction had left. They replaced it with the sacred texts they had brought with them from Judah. They established community meeting KINGS OF THE JEWS 148 places in which they regularly gathered to recite from those texts, to pray and to worship. Some such places had existed earlier in Judah and in Israel. But the phenomenon of the synagogue as the site of community religious observance and interaction for Jews was formalized and systemized in the Babylonian exile. It was to remain a permanent, central feature of Jewish life from then on and would later be the model for Christian churches and Moslem mosques. Prayer and observance of the Sabbath and other holy days also became heightened symbols of mutual belonging, obligation, and religious distinctiveness. They provided the comforts of spiritual sustenance while the prophet Ezekiel conveyed God’s promise of their eventual return to Judah. Ezekiel forecast that the breath of the Lord would revive the “dry bones” to which the exiles had been reduced. I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries and I will bring you back to your own land.… I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you.… I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules … You shall be My people and I will be your God.[64] However tolerable or benign life in Babylonia may have been for the deportees , nostalgia for the homeland which most of their offspring would never have seen became deeply rooted. By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Zion.… How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I...