Sárospataki Füzetek 18. (2014)

2014 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Jacob J. T. Doedens: The Return of YHWH and the End of the Exile

TANULMÁNYOK

We are like paleontologists struggling to piece together a set of bones which a dinosaur had used all its life without even thinking about it.1

Jacob J. T. Doedens

THE RETURN OFYHWH ANDTHEEND OF THE EXILE

Introduction

According to the popular view on the Old Testament, the people of Judah and Jerusalem went into Babylonian exile in 587/86 BCE2 and were allowed to return to their homeland as a result of Cyrus’ decree soon after he conquered Babylon in 539 bce. Of course, the reader of the Old Testament is well aware of the fact that this return hardly can be viewed as a story concluding with the cliché “and they lived happily ever after”, considering the difficulties the returned exiles met when they tried to rebuild the daily life of a shattered community on the ruins of the past. Still, this so called Babylonian exile appears, in this popular view, to be no more than an unpleasant intermezzo which befell them but could be forgotten as soon as their trial was over.3

1 N.T.Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 101.

2 Usually, this date is viewed as the beginning of the exile, although many of the inhabitants of the Northern kingdom had been deported by the Assyrians in 722 bce. In 598/597 bce king Jehoiachin, together with a large group of captives, had already been deported to Babylon (2 Kgs 24:8-17). Jeremiah 52:28-30 mentions three separate waves of captives after the fall of Jerusalem. For an assessment of the dates of the deportations, cf. Rainer Albertz, Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century b.c.e. (Studies in Biblical Literature 3; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 76-81.

3 Cf. Bob Becking, '"We All Returned as One!': Critical Notes on the Myth of the Mass Return," in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. 0. Lipschits and M. Oeming; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 3-18.

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