Chapter 46 jews in exile

The compilers of that great national history (such as Herodotus above) were not trained historians.They were not concerned with the spelling of the surnames of their new rulers in foreign lands, and were vague about their geographic location, and no one could pinpoint the exact location of some of the places they frequently mentioned in their history books. Moreover, they often go out of their way to conceal the true meaning of what they want to say, and they use a peculiar symbolism.For example, they speak of a whale that swallowed a shipwrecked sailor and spit him out on land a few days later—when the Jews wanted to tell how the mighty Babylonian empire conquered the tiny kingdom of Judah, and in This is how it was expressed when the captives had to be released half a century later.This approach is certainly easy to understand for people two thousand and five years ago, but for those of us who only know that Babylon is a pile of stones and rubbish ruins, we cannot clearly understand what they want to say. What is it.

Even so, the last twenty books of the Old Testament are written at length in a strangely vague way, but it is still possible to reconstruct the real history of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries BC on the basis of a considerable number of correct accounts. I will now try to tell you what you should know, with the help of such dubious sources, if you wish to understand the great religious drama which took place shortly thereafter. This exile did not mean slavery for the people of Judah. From a secular point of view, the transition from Palestine to Mesopotamia was, for the vast majority of Jews, an improvement.A century and a half ago, the Israelites were widely divided into four or five villages, overwhelmed by their Babylonian neighbors.However, the exile of Judah in 586 BC allowed them to live together in the same place, becoming a real Jewish settlement.

They were a group of genuine involuntary immigrants, moving from the crowded slums of Jerusalem to the open space of Chebar.They left the barren lands and valleys of the Canaanite homeland, and found a new home in central Babylon among sophisticated irrigation systems and gardens. Nor did they have to endure the gratuitous violence of foreign overseers that their ancestors suffered in Egypt a thousand years ago. They were allowed to retain their own leaders and their own priests. Their religious customs and rituals are not violated. They were allowed to correspond with friends who remained in Palestine.

They are encouraged to practice ancient arts with which they have long been familiar in Jerusalem. They were free men, granted the right to have their own servants and slaves.No trade or trade was closed to them, and it was not long before a large number of Jewish names began to appear in the lists of wealthy merchants in the Babylonian capital. In the end, even the highest positions in the state were opened to able Jews, and the kings of Babylon repeatedly courted Jewish women. In short, exiles enjoy all the pleasures of the world except that they cannot freely come and go as they wish.

By migrating from Jerusalem to Tel-Hasha, they were able to abandon many of their disadvantages in their native land. But now, alas, they had to endure a new pain. It's called homesickness. This affliction, which has had a strange effect on the human soul since the beginning of the world, casts upon the Jew a glimpse of the happy remembrance of his fatherland; Turn the "old days" into "the good old days" and give the past years the honorific title of "golden years". When a man falls victim to homesickness, he rejects everything that is good in his new home.His new neighbors are far inferior to his old ones (even with the fact that he is always quarreling with them); times); and the new climate is suitable only for savages and primitives.

In short, everything old is suddenly good, just as everything new is just bad, bad, and undesirable. When the exiles were allowed to return to Jerusalem a century later, few took advantage of the opportunity.The longer they stayed in Babylon, the more Palestine became their lost paradise, and this attitude affected everything they told or wrote. In general, the Jewish half-century in exile has been a tedious, event-free process, where the exiles went about their daily affairs while they waited.