In the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE, the Hebrew peoples experienced a series of blows that drastically transformed how they understood themselves and their relationship with God. First, the fall of the kingdom of Israel to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which created an influx of well-educated YHWH-worshiping refugees into the kingdom of Judah, and triggered the work of both the Deuteronomistic reformers and historians and the prophets. Second came the fall Judah — and its Temple — to the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which destroyed the certainties of the Temple-oriented Deuteronomistic agenda. And third was the Babylonian Exile, in which Judah’s upper classes were removed to Babylon for the better part of a century, creating an existential crisis for their faith in YHWH, and immersing them in foreign ways of thinking and believing. This is the experience we’ll be looking at today, and it was nothing short of revolutionary.
Nowhere in the Scriptures is the trauma of the Exile captured better than in Psalm 137, which begins:
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How could we sing YHWH’s song
in a foreign land?
Not only is this a beautiful lament longing for home, but it runs deeper than that. For remember that in the Ancient Near East, gods were largely understood to be finite and local. Remember Deuteronomy 32.8-9, for example, where the High God El apportions the world’s lands and peoples to various divinities, and gives Canaan to YHWH, who then gives it to the Hebrews to inhabit. YHWH was believed to physically dwell in the Jerusalem temple at Mt. Zion, or by proxy within the Ark of the Covenant. The whole Deuteronomistic reform program dialed in on this idea, focusing the religious life of Judah entirely on that one Temple. And now they find themselves a thousand kilometres away from YHWH’s dwelling place, their land-based covenant with YHWH in tatters, their Temple destroyed (and Ark presumably captured or destroyed).
The question, “How can we sing YHWH’s song in a foreign land?”, wasn’t a rhetorical one. They had to completely rethink their relationship with God in order to make worshiping YHWH reasonable in their profoundly changed circumstances. And rethink it they did.
Coming at the problem from the perspective of a person of faith, I’d like to think that this started by them uttering tentative questioning prayers and finding that their God was still with them in Exile, rather than as a theological or political exercise. But no matter how we imagine it happening, Exile didn’t destroy Yahwism and monolatry (worship of one god alone), but only served to reinforce them. So, we have their transformation of the Babylonian creation myth, which turned a battle among petty gods into a no-nonsense setting things to order by one God. And against the increasingly imperialistic tendencies of the national Babylonian god Marduk, the Exiles started to insist that, despite all social and political appearances, it was their god YHWH who had rightful dominion over the whole world.
It’s been said that the slow transition from monolatry to monotheism started as a rhetorical strategy that came to be hardened into literal belief. That is, from “our God is greater than other gods” to “so much greater is our God than others that they’re nothing compared to him” to eventually, “other so-called gods are nothing whatsoever.” Nowhere is this rhetorical shift more clear than in the later chapters of Isaiah. Here we have such passages as:
Thus says YHWH, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, YHWH of hosts:
I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me?
Let them proclaim it, let them declare and set it forth before me.
Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be.
Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it?
You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?
There is no other rock; I know not one. (Isaiah 44.6-8)
I am YHWH, and there is no other; besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know,
from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me;
I am YHWH, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness,
I create peace [shalom] and make evil [ra’]; I YHWH do all these things. (45.5-8)
Here we see the rhetoric of monotheism at its greatest in the Old Testament. This rhetoric is even more extreme than many Jews and Christians would be comfortable with today, since it claims that YHWH actively creates everything, including evil. Clearly YHWH has come a long way, from his origins as a local storm god associated with brigands and raiders to the undisputed creator and ruler of all things!
While this takes us beyond the witness of the Scriptures themselves, it also seems that the experience of the Exile revolutionized the ways YHWH-followers understood themselves in relationship to God. During the period of the kingdoms, there seemed to be something of a hierarchy of relationships: the people’s experiences of YHWH were mediated to a great degree through the priests and kings. But in Exile, their priests were of no use, and their kings and judges of no consequence or authority. The trappings of their religion were gone and in their absence, they had to conceive of ways of engaging with YHWH outside of that old system. What seems to have emerged is Torah-study by all men in the community and the regular coming together to hear and dispute the Scriptures and to pray. In other words, it would seem that the Exile created what would later become the synagogue.
The impact of these changes was so great that it’s only at the end of the Exile that scholars stop talking about “Hebrew,” “Israelite,” and “Judahite” religion and start talking about Judaism. But that doesn’t mean the understanding of God became fixed. Next time, we’ll look at the developments within Judaism during the long centuries known as the Second Temple period.
Matthew Root 