True to form, Jeremiah’s warning anticipated the events of the late seventh
century. In 610, the Babylonians conquered Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. A
year later, when the Egyptians marched against the Babylonians, Josiah
attacked Egypt at Megiddo, where he was killed in battle. Soon after, as the
Babylonians continued their conquest of the Near East, Jeremiah began to
preach accommodation to Babylonian rule, a reversal of a prophetic tendency
to oppose alliances with foreign governments. His repeated warnings not to
challenge the Babylonian juggernaut went unheeded. In 598, King
Jehoyakim joined an alliance of small states against Babylonia. Following the
defeat of this alliance, the upper class of Judah was sent into exile, and
Zedekiah, a quisling vassal, was installed as king of Judah. A decade later,
unable to quiet the surging nationalist sentiments, Zedekiah joined a revolt
against Babylonian rule. The revolt was defeated in 586, resulting in the
destruction of the Temple and the wholesale expulsion of the Israelite popula-
tion to other parts of the Babylonian Empire.
Exile and the return to Zion
There is relatively little historical evidence as to the precise nature of this
exile. Historically, we know relatively little other than what the Tanakh
tells us. There were no mass executions. Jews not from Judea left
unharmed. Jews fared reasonably well in Babylonia, some even becoming
part of the Babylonian Court. The priestly lineage remained intact. More
important, perhaps, was the theological crisis set in motion by destruction
of Judah and the Temple: How could Jerusalem be destroyed? What about
the covenant? In addition, the exile raised an even larger problem: could the
Israelite religion exist outside of the Land of Israel, or was Yahweh a terri-
torial deity?
Subsequent Jewish responses addressed these questions in very different
ways. Some Jews responded with utter despair, such as the anonymous author
of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I called to you, oh God,” or Psalm 137: “By
the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept as we remembered Zion. ... If I
forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” Others despaired, but
attempted to explain theologically how such a tragedy could have happened.
Two such individuals were the authors of the wisdom texts Ecclesiastes and
Job. The former attributed these events to the emptiness of existence
(“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”) or to a fatalistic circularity of life (“There is
nothing new under the sun”). The author of the Book of Job, after trying at
great length to explain the suffering of the righteous, concludes with God
appearing to Job out of the whirlwind and explaining that the nature of
theodicy is ultimately beyond human comprehension.
In sharp contrast to these responses was that of Jeremiah. Already in 597,
Jeremiah, in a letter to the recent exiles, had defined the possibility of
22 The world of the Hebrew Bible