How long was exile in babylon

The return from exile was a long process of waves of returnees. Bob Becking taught for thirty years Hebrew Bible at Utrecht. Did you know…? The deportation from Jerusalem in is reported in the Hebrew Bible 2Kgs as well as in the Babylonian Chronicle. Evidence on the march of the Babylonians to Jerusalem in is found in the Lachish Letters.

These inscribed ostraca date from the period just before the conquest of Jerusalem. They contain letters written by the officer in command at Lachish expressing his fear of the foe. Archaeological evidence indicates that the land of Judah was not uninhabited during the Babylonian exile. Some biblical stories are set in an exilic context Ezekiel; Daniel. Excavations in Mesopotamia have revealed traces of the Judahite exiles in Babylon.

Ask a Scholar. Related Articles 6 Exile in the Hebrew Bible Exile was a recurring experience for ancient Israel and Judah and profoundly affected the shape and formation of the Hebrew Bible. Mesopotamia - Babylon Babylon was one of the most important political, religious, and cultural centers of ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Iraq.

Israel and Judah According to the Bible, King David reigned over a large territory and his son Solomon over an even larger one. Empires of Antiquity This dynamic video map shows the movement and expansion of the great empires of antiquity, starting with the Egyptian New Kingdom in B.

HarperCollins Dictionary Babylon. Related Passages 2Kgs Ps Dan Ps Lament over the Destruction of Jerusalem 1By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. Of or relating to ancient lower Mesopotamia and its empire centered in Babylon. Characteristic of a deity a god or goddess. A broad, diverse group of nations ruled by the government of a single nation. 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. At the beginning of this period, Judean society reflected world events in its own internal conflict between pro-Babylonian and anti-Babylonian factions. By the end of this period, the groundwork had been laid for a new conflict between the returnees from the Babylonian exile and those who remained in the land.

The Destruction of Jerusalem The sovereignty of the Judean kingdom in the land of Israel came to an abrupt end with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the leading citizens to Babylon in B. Nebuchadnezzar II, the crown prince of Babylon, had defeated Pharoah Neco and the Egyptians at the battle of Carchemish in , and attempted to conquer Egypt.

After he failed to extend his power, Egypt apparently continued to foment rebellion against Babylon in the kingdom of Judah and its neighbors. For the evident reason of the political dimension of loss and of all hopes for reconstruction, Jerusalem, in fact, is henceforth one of the three central religio-political symbols of Jewish as subsequently of Christian and Islamic eschatology, i. Before the exile, Judah was a monarchy that had taken on the traditions of "Israel," the tribal community once united under King David.

It absorbed many of the pan-Israelite traditions but it still was a commonwealth, a political entity with no other purpose than to exist, survive, and thrive as a political entity. Among the major institutions of pre-exilic Judah are:. After the exile, Judah was politically rebuilt as a Persian satrapy, a semi-autonomous administrative province, ruled by a priestly elite that remigrated from Babylonia and whose views and attitudes were shaped by the religious blue-prints for reconstruction drafted in the exile.

They were at odds with the local population, rigorously enforced separation from the mixed multitude of inhabitants of Judah, and ruled on the basis of the Torah. This code of law was promulgated by Ezra in the early 4 th century BCE and it served as the legal ideal of a theocratic state ruled by priests rather than kings. According to the later rabbis, the institution of the Torah as the basic law in addition to which there must have been oral law traditions of various kinds brought the earlier institution of prophecy to an end.

Religious practices now included the keeping of the Sabbath as a strictly enforced day of rest on every seventh day roughly conforming to quarters of the lunar month but without real parallel in any other ancient culture. Persian influence is noticeable in Jewish apocalyptic literature symbolism of good vs. The administrative language of Judah is now Aramaic, the language of the Persian empire, rather than Hebrew.