The Exile had several phases. In 721 BC the Assyrians conquered the Northern Israelite kingdom. Assyrian policy was to stamp out national identities by mixing up populations. Therefore the 10 tribes of that Kingdom disappeared. The Southern kingdom, Judah, was not conquered until 597. By this time the dominant power was Babylon, whose policy was deportation. First, in 597 when Jerusalem was captured, the leading citizens were taken to Babylon. Then, in 587 when, following an abortive revolt, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, all but the poorest were taken. These exiles were allowed to retain their national identity and live together in community.
Brueggemann views 587 as a pivotal date. The crisis of life occurred when public life in Judah came to an end but this was not the heart of the matter. Instead, 587 is a “way of speaking about the end of any known world” for the Israelites. This is the crisis of faith, not simply defeat in war and separation from homeland but the loss of every reference point that explained who they were as a people and the failure of their God to protect them.
The Israelite normative testimony was that they were a people chosen out of all the nations - chosen indeed before they were a nation - to be in a special relationship with the one true God who created, sustained and controlled the cosmos. This testimony developed as God made covenants about their land, city, and kings. Each were lost as a result of the Exile and, therefore, this normative testimony was fundamentally threatened.
The Exile was a crisis but was it one in which Israel let go of the old world of King and temple? The fact of exile seemed to force them in this direction. Both their Kings, Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, were imprisoned in Babylon while in Judah, Jerusalem and their temple had been destroyed. Very little of their old world was left to them. They reacted, or were asked by God to react, in a variety of ways:
i. Reflection: David Sceats has argued that “all the evidence points to the fact that the Old Testament came into existence in substantially its present form in and immediately after this period of defeat, exile and religious disintegration”. The purpose of both collating and organising older material and writing new material, was reflection. Those who put together the Old Testament in this way were reflecting on Israel’s past to “remind the nation of its identity, to help it understand its place in God’s purposes, and its responsibility as the covenant people, and, above all, to remember the universal claims of Yahweh, and his authority over all nations, including Babylon”. Reflection is a theme that permeates the Bible as a whole. God condemns the Israelites pre-exile precisely because they do not reflect on the life that they lead. The book of Isaiah begins with the statement that his people do not consider. Likewise, the Deuteronomists recognized this as a characteristic of Israel throughout their history. In compiling the Old Testament, the theologians of the exile engaged in an act of reflection and remembering that had fundamental consequences for Israel.
ii. Re-interpretation: Sceats argues that this act of reflection was not simply about remembering but also about reinterpretation. God was, through the exile, revealing himself in a new way and therefore, in organising the religious literature of Israel, it was also necessary to reinterpret that literature “in such a way as make religious sense of the crisis of faith it had gone through”. Three key features of their re-interpretation were:
- Assimilation: Jeremiah wrote to the first wave of exiles encouraging them to settle in Babylon. This was a clear call to leave the old world behind. Jeremiah is clear in his letter, however, that assimilation is merely a temporary necessity not a long-term career plan. After 70 years God will bring the people back from captivity. It is also clear from the story of Daniel that assimilation did not mean assimilation to the religion of Babylon. This would have been to repeat another of the key failures that had resulted in exile, as those reflecting on the lessons of exile were discovering. Instead, as with the story of Joseph, assimilation meant being in the world of the Exile but not of it. It meant serving Babylon loyally but not compromising their relationship with God and using whatever position they gained to also serve their people and God’s purposes. In this way, though they were leaving the world of the kings, of Jerusalem and of the temple, they were not leaving the fundamental relationship between God and his people out of which the newer world of King, city and temple had grown. In the stories of Daniel, Esther and Nehemiah we have examples of Israelites who lived out this balance.
- Voicing hurt: Pain was a fundamental experience of exile and one that was felt individually and corporately. Jeremiah is an example of an individual experiencing both the pain of the community in exile and the pain of God at the unfaithfulness of the community. In the process Jeremiah voices complaints about his personal situation direct to God in a way that draws on other examples from earlier in the Old Testament – including Abraham, Jacob and Moses – who argue or wrestle or debate with God. Brueggemann identifies this strand within the Old Testament as counter-testimony to the normative testimony of Israel and puts forward the argument that the defining characteristic of the Old Testament is a dialectic between hurt and hope. God responds to voiced hurt and wants to draw Israel into an intimate relationship with him in which the counter-testimony becomes normative. In which Israel debates, argues and complains with him out of faith and commitment, as did Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Jeremiah. In which Israel understands God’s heart - his responsiveness to the hurt of human beings and his grief over rebellion – and acts as God’s hands and feet within the world. It is this intimate relationship that Israel continually rejects throughout her history wanting to encounter God through intermediaries - leaders, kings, rituals, even the normative testimony - anything (including syncretism) other than the direct encounter which would compel them to become a nation of Jeremiahs. It is this understanding of God and God’s people that leads to the servant songs in the book of Isaiah. Songs which characterize the normative life of the servant as suffering in order that others can be saved.
- Articulating hope: Brueggemann’s thesis is that hope derives from hurt because God hears and responds to the people’s cries of pain. He argues that “both complaint about hurt and promise of hope are acts of rigorous criticism of every present”. The present is protested because it generates hurt and it is less desirable and faithful than what is promised in the theological tradition. This gap between the promise and the present identified because of hurt enables imaginative projections about the future on the basis of the tradition. The result is that God’s new acts for the future are understood in terms of his acts in the past. The new world is envisioned in terms of the old - exodus, covenant, land, King and city - but the theologian’s fresh experience of suffering has re-awakened an understanding of Israel as a community whose life is a sign of the love that the universal God has for both the nations and each suffering individual.
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M. Ward - Requiem.
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