The Exile (jan 1, 586 BC – jan 1, 539 BC)

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Babylonian defeat of the Assyrians and Judeans started a series of exiles of the Israelites to Babylon. The exiles and the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE forced a profound shift in Israelite religion. The faith had previously been intimately tied to a locale - the temple - where people encounter God. With the fall of the temple, new practices emerged. One of them being the eventual building of synagogues as the place of study and worship. The ransacking of Jerusalem and the temple brought intense pain and sorrow for the exiles, which can be seen in psalm 137, where Israelites’ grief was met with mocking derision of the Babylonians. Israelites’ plea for violent justice at the end of psalm 137 remains one of the more challenging psalms to exegete and to grasp especially for modern audiences.

Psalm 137 (NRSV)
Lament over the Destruction of Jerusalem
1 By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
3 For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator![b]
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

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Coogan, Michael David, and Cynthia R. Chapman. A brief introduction to the Old Testament: the Hebrew Bible in its context. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 315-319.

Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann, Cyrus By the Waters of Babylon (The Mourning Jews in Exile), 1832, oil on canvas, Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz Museum, accessed October 24, 2020, http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/fisher/image.html?id=FISHER_n2009100960&.

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