Exiles in their own land

The Bible notes that when the walls of Jerusalem fell, the people who were carried into exile in Babylon were the nobles and the ruler of the people.

And yet the Babylonian captivity was something that affected the entire nation.

The Bible never really tells us the story of the people who remained. There’s a postlude in Jeremiah for the exiles who fled to Egypt and convinced him to go with them and of course there are the books like Daniel and Esther that tell the story of the captives in Babylon. For its part the Ezra scroll tells the story of how Ezra and Nehemiah led the descendants of the captives back. There are even psalms about how the exiles felt when in captivity (“Down by the rivers of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion”) and when they returned. (“We were like men who dreamed”) but about the people who remained in the land, nothing.

They never stopped being Jewish. They never stopped being people of the covenant; but, the writers of the Bible being who they were, they also never mattered much when it came time to write the history.

What was it like to have your identity, your entire way of life, upended and negated by the Exile, and yet have everything stay pretty much the same? Every day you went to the river to wash the clothes, watch your sheep, make your deals. Probably every Shabbat you went to the same high place your ancestors had gone to since before the Temple was built, excepting those brief periods of reform by kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, when they tore the high places down.

But the city was gone. The Temple was gone. Did you notice? Probably. the king was gone too, and now people ruled you who worshiped Astarte or Marduk or one of the other, more fashionable weather and fertility gods (though not Baal. He was kind of passe these days). Without the Temple priesthood around, the proo-Judaism of the day was more folk religion than anything else, centered around an unseen god talked about in stories that were passed down like beloved heirlooms.

Then one day the captives returned. What was it like when suddenly you were told that these strangers who didn’t even speak Hebrew were your superiors? All because their grandfathers had lived in Jerusalem and yours had tended sheep in Beit Shelem or Shechen, or Hebron or some place else.

Did your identity matter? How maddening must it have been to be pushed aside and subordinated to complete strangers, to be shoved to the margins because they mattered and you didn’t, simply because that’s the way status works

Being common is a form of exile in itself.