Reading between the lines 3.5.19.doc

Reading between the Lines: The Unwritten Story of the Babylonian Exile Richard Damashek RICHARD DAMASHEK, a retired college English professor and a student of Rabbi Schaalman for a decade and a half, is the author of A Brand Plucked from the Fire: The Life of Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman and The Gang of Five, a sequel to his previous book and the first book-length study of a remarkable group of German refugee rabbinic students who had a major impact on twentieth-century Reform Judaism, as well as numerous articles. He graduated from Rutgers University and received his M.A. at Columbia University and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.” Note 32 mentions both Schiffman’s book and Porten’s book, so note 33 can’t be “Ibid.” Does it refer to Schiffman or Porten?Thanks for the close reading. No, my mistake. Newsome, 81.Please confirm the citation for note 34. The text mentions Newsome, but note 34 just has “Ibid.”fixedChange “from” to “around”?Please confirm my changes/additions to the Haggai citations.I changed Haggai 1:13 to 1:14. The others are correct. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 234. —Gustavus Poznanski (1805–1879) The only story we have of the Babylonian Exile is the one told by the exiles that returned to Judea with a mission to live out the covenant that they believed God had made with their ancestors. To realize that goal, they had to rebuild the Temple’s altar so that they could resume the ritual of sacrifice that they deemed necessary to communicate with their God. Because this communication could only be carried out through priestly intervention, they had to reestablish the authority of the priestly class. Next, they needed to rebuild God’s house, God’s Mishkan, the Temple. Once these fixtures were in place, the returning exiles needed to purify the land. That proved to be the most difficult part of creating the theocratic state they envisioned. According to the Bible, the peoples that had not been exiled were their “enemies,” the unclean and unholy that became targets of reform. The biblical account of these people is scanty, but we can learn a great deal about them by holding up as a foil the account of the returning exiles. Against the background of the returnees’ effort to impose their own form of Biblical worship on the Judeans, we can uncover the outline of the people they saw as their opposition. Technically, the term “Jew” is a misnomer. According to Shaye Cohen, at the time of the Babylonian Exile and until late in the first century b.c.e., there was no clear designation of “Jew” as someone belonging to a religious group. “Jews” were known as “Judeans,” or “Israelites,” and these designations were geographical rather than religious. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3–4. Although many translations of Ezra 4:12 translate יְהֽוּדָיֵ֗א as “Jews,” The Israel Bible translates it as “Yehudim,” Judahites, a geographical location, not specifically a religious group: “Be it known to the king that the Yehudim who came up from you to us have reached Yerushalayim and are rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city; they are completing the walls and repairing the foundation” (Ezra 4:12). The Israel Bible (Jerusalem: Israel 365, 2018), https://theisraelbible.com/bible/ezra/chapter-4 (accessed August 14, 2018). On the one hand, we have the returnees, religious zealots, on the other, their “enemies,” the people that tried to thwart the imposition of religious values and practices that sought to transform and eventually did transform their way of life. As for the Judeans that chose to remain in Babylon, in the succeeding centuries they grew in number and economic and political power and over a period of more than thousand years established a second center of Jewish learning that came to be the preeminent source of Jewish learning. This essay is an attempt to construct a model of how this transformation may have occurred. The transformation is what we call Second Temple Judaism.  The Bible that came out of this catastrophic experience of exile and captivity was written to reveal an unalterable pattern for national Jewish survival and well-being. A superficial reading of the Bible reveals a consistent and recurring pattern: God lays down the law; the people violate the law; angered by the peoples’ idolatry, God punishes them; they cry out to God for help; and the merciful and loving God redeems them. This recurrence, however, is not foreordained. The people have choices. Moses tells the Israelites, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deut. 30:19). From the time the Israelites left Egypt, they lived in a constant tension between two polar opposites: follow God’s commandments and you will live and prosper; violate those commandments and you will suffer and possibly die. If they experienced natural disasters (plagues, drought, pestilence, earthquakes), or disasters that might be seen as human events, such as military defeats, they attributed them to God’s punishment. This is the shaping paradigm or narrative that, despite Rabbinic Judaism, continues to this day as the foundation of belief for a major segment of modern Jews. That paradigm is the basis for the traditional Jewish understanding of the Babylonian Exile, the single greatest catastrophe for the Jewish people before modern times. The story is told particularly in the Books of the Prophets, in II Kings, and in II Chronicles. Yet, this story is only one part of the larger story. Missing are the stories of the experience of those Judahites that were not sent into exile and of the exiles that chose not to return from Babylon. The writers of the Bible characterized the Judahites that were not taken into exile as “enemies,” the exiles that chose not to return to Judah as apostates. The story of the returning exiles is the story written by the people that considered themselves as the true children of God. They were responsible for bringing God back to Jerusalem, for purifying the Promised Land, and for living according to God’s law. The Bible is their story. To uncover the stories of the others, it is necessary to “read between the lines.” A Contemporary Analogy On July 23, 2018, a large chunk of stone fell out of the Western Wall and came crashing down on a platform set aside for egalitarian prayer. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but a few hours earlier the platform had been filled with people coming to pray. Is there a meaning in this event? There is, depending on your religious outlook. Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the rabbi of the Western Wall, called it a warning: “The fact that this powerful incident happened a day after the 9th of Av fast, in which we mourned the destruction of our temples, raises questions which the human soul is too small to contain, and requires soul-searching.” Marcy Oster, “The Western Wall ‘Spit Out a Stone,’” Jewish Press of Pinellas County, August 10–23, 2018, http://m.jewishpresspinellas.com/news/2018-08-10/World_News/The_Western_Wall_spit_out_a_stone_and_some_see_a_m.html (accessed August 25, 2018). The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Dov Kalmanovich, thought it was an act of God: “The falling of one of the Western Wall stones, so close to Tisha b’Av, and exactly at the location of the controversial prayer area, should be a red light for us all. I suggest that Reform leaders, Women of the Wall and the other quarrel mongers examine themselves, and not the Wall.” Ibid. Other voices from the Orthodox community chimed in: “several religious and mainstream news websites showed similar sentiments from rabbis and laypeople.” Ibid. A Reform Jew, Alden Solovy, had a different opinion. He wrote in his blog that God’s infinite love for the Jewish people “held back a stone from falling from the southern Western Wall onto liberal Jews worshipping below.” Ibid. A third point of view came in a facetious tweet by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. She blamed the state. In her tongue-in-cheek opinion, the stone fell as a rebuff to the Israeli Parliament’s passage of a bill disenfranchising non-Jews as well as a law that denies surrogacy rights to same-sex couples: ‘“The day after (or day of? Not sure when this happened) Tisha b’Av during a time when Israelis had been passing bills that are racist, homophobic, and antidemocratic, the Western Wall spit out a stone.”’ Ibid. A fourth opinion surfaced from an Israeli archaeologist, Meir BenDov: ‘“So a rock fell—so what! The State of Israel hasn’t ended, the Messiah won’t come because of this.”’ Ibid. Here we have an example of four Jews on a street corner and four different opinions. The Orthodox response to the Holocaust offers a more serious example of the huge divide in Jewish religious thinking. The Orthodox response to the modern catastrophe is to blame the victims. Writing nearly a quarter century after the end of World War II, Emil Fackenheim wrote, “Good Orthodox Jews have resorted to the ancient ‘for our sins are we punished.’” “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” Commentary, August 1, 1968, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/jewish-faith-and-the-holocaust-a-fragment (accessed August 26, 2019). One example of the ultra-Orthodox response to the Holocaust comes from Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, who pronounced the Holocaust as God’s punishment of the unfaithful. Motto Infabi, “Blog,” The Times of Israel, January 23, 2018, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-did-the-satmar-rebbe-survive-the-holocaust/ (accessed August 28, 2018). See also Or N. Rose, “The Holocaust: Responding to Modern Suffering,” My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-holocaust-responding-to-modern-suffering/ (accessed August 28, 2018). Two years earlier, Richard L. Rubenstein wrote that traditional Jewish theology “has interpreted every major catastrophe in Jewish history as God’s punishment of a sinful Israel.” Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). In his book Va’Yoel Moshe, the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum (1888–1979), states unequivocally that the Holocaust was a divine punishment for the secular Zionist efforts to create a modern Jewish state in the land of Israel. He understood the Holocaust in terms of traditional covenantal theology, as a punishment for Jewish sins. Rose, “The Holocaust: Responding to Modern Suffering.” According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, “Jewish sources often assert that tragedy happens to the Jewish people as a punishment for their sinfulness.” “There are several variations on this theme. The first ascribes the cause of the Holocaust to Jewish sin but does not specify which sin. The second view states that the Holocaust happened as a result of the rise of Reform and other non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. The third position contends that Zionism was the sin that caused the Holocaust, as the Jews should have waited for the Messiah rather than proactively try to build a Jewish state in Palestine.” Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, “Jewish Philosophical and Theological Responses to the Holocaust,” http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206385.pdf (accessed September 21, 2018). More recently, Andrew Altman wrote, “In yeshiva, we were gently reminded that the Holocaust was God’s rebuke for assimilation.” Altman’s family rebbetzin told him that he should understand the Holocaust as HaShem’s way of sending us a message: “‘Hashem (God) did send us a big slap, but He has helped us build up.’” “Is Ultra-Orthodoxy a Response to the Holocaust?” Forward, January 18, 2018, https://forward.com/scribe/391756/is-ultra-orthodoxy-a-response-to-the-holocaust/ (accessed August 28, 2018). Substitute “the exile” for “Holocaust” and you have what I think is a meaningful analogy between the thinking of the ancient writers of the Bible and modern Orthodox thinking about Jewish calamity. Why did the huge stone fall from the Wall? It was God’s warning to those that want to deviate from tradition. Why the exile? The prophets—Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel—tell us it was God’s punishment for the sins of the Israelite people. “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death,” says the writer of Deuteronomy, “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deut. 30:19). The biblical writers chose to frame their story by “for our sins are we punished,” and the way to redemption is through repentance. In II Chronicles 36:11–13, the chronicler tells us that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 is the result of King Zedekiah’s “evil in the eyes of the Lord his God [because he] did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke the word of the Lord” (II Chron. 36:12). The Babylonian Exile A brief review of the exile will provide the background for this discussion. Biblical scholars set different parameters around the period of exile. According to Coogan, “the dates, numbers of deportations, and numbers of deportees given in the biblical accounts vary. These deportations are dated to 597 b.c.e. for the first, with others dated at 587/586 b.c.e., and 582/581 b.c.e. respectively.” Michael Coogan, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 321. Some maintain it began as early as 607 b.c.e., again in 597, and then again in 587/586 b.c.e. Scholars that cite 597 b.c.e. as the date of the first deportation base their dating on Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Judea under King Jehoiachin, who abdicated his throne and was sent into exile with his family, his court, and thousands of workers. Other scholars use the later date of 586 when the Babylonians again conquered Judea and this time destroyed the Temple and laid waste to Jerusalem. The 607 b.c.e. dating is based on the Book of Jeremiah (29:10) and the Book of Zechariah (1:12). Both prophets claim the Judahites were in captivity seventy years. The accepted date of the Persian King Cyrus’s edict allowing all captives from foreign nations to return to their homes is 538 b.c.e. Counting from 586 b.c.e., some scholars use the dates of the exile of 586–538, making the exile forty-eight years. Israel Ephal claims that the Bible refers to five deportations over a period of sixteen years, 598–582. Israel Ephal, “The Babylonian Exile: The Survival of a National Minority in a Culturally Developed Foreign Milieu,” Gründungsfeier, December 16, 2005, 21–31. The story of the exile can be said to have begun historically during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king and Emperor, 605–566 b.c.e. According to the biblical prophets, the exile was God’s punishment for his wayward people. He sent Nebuchadnezzar to chastise them for their sins: idol worship, injustices to their own kind, and failure to live according to God’s commandments. When Nebuchadnezzar ascended to the Babylonian throne, his kingdom was under stress by a combination of Egyptian and other neighboring nations. His first notable act was to defeat the Egyptian army under Pharaoh Necho at the Euphrates, an event known in history as the Battle of Carchemish (Jer. 46:2). Sometime around 605/604 b.c.e., Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah and made King Jehoiakim his subject (II Kings 24:1). Three years later, another revolt occurred in Babylonian provinces, and Jehoiakim, believing that it had weakened the Babylonian Empire, decided to try to throw off the Babylonian yoke. Nebuchadnezzar was furious at what he considered perfidy and attacked Judah. Jehoiakim died in the battle. To drive home his point of his response to traitors, Nebuchadnezzar had Jehoiakim’s corpse “dragged away and thrown outside the gates of Jerusalem” (Jer. 22:19). As further punishment for this uprising, Nebuchadnezzar deported 3,023 Judeans (Jer. 52:28). Next, he installed the dead king’s son Jehoiachin, who was only seventeen, as the new king. Three months later, in 597 b.c.e., Nebuchadnezzar came back to reassert his authority over Judah. He invaded Judea and laid siege to Jerusalem. Rather than fight a fruitless war against a much stronger enemy, Jehoiachin and his family, attendants, nobles, and officials all surrendered (II Kings 24:10–12). Nebuchadnezzar removed the treasures from the Temple and from the royal palace. Emil G. Hirsch, Bernhard Pick, Solomon Schechter, and Louis Ginzberg, “Jehoiachin,” The Jewish Encyclopedia.com/Jehoiachin, 2002–2011, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8560-jehoiachin (accessed August 27, 2018). He also “carried away the king’s mother, his wives, his officials and the prominent people of the land…the entire force of seven thousand fighting men, strong and fit for war, and a thousand skilled workers and artisans (II Kings 24:15–16). Nebuchadnezzar left behind only the poorest people of the land (II Kings 24:13–14). In more specific detail, the Bible tells us, “The king of Babylon also deported to Babylon the entire force of seven thousand fighting men, strong and fit for war, and a thousand skilled workers and artisans” (II Kings 24:16–17). He made Mattaniah, Jehoiachin’s uncle, king in his place and changed his name to Zedekiah. Megan Moore and Brad Kelle claim: “Overall, the difficulty in calculation arises because the biblical texts provide varying numbers for the different deportations. The HB/OT’s conflicting figures for the dates, number, and victims of the Babylonian deportations become even more of a problem for historical reconstruction because, other than the brief reference to the first capture of Jerusalem (597) in the Babylonian Chronicles, historians have only the biblical sources with which to work.” Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 357–58. Nebuchadnezzar appointed Jehoiachin’s uncle, Mattaniah, whom he renamed Zedekiah, to rule in his nephew’s place (II Kings 24:17). Nebuchadnezzar’s expectation was that he could control Zedekiah. And he did for a while. Nine years later, Zedekiah went the way of his predecessors. When the Egyptians revolted against their Babylonian overlords, Zedekiah joined forces with them. This time, Nebuchadnezzar was determined to wipe out resistance from the Judeans and sent a huge military force to destroy Jerusalem and to capture Zedekiah. Jerusalem’s walls proved to be formidable, and it took Nebuchadnezzar eighteen months to breach them. In 586, the Babylonians conquered the city. In a desperate effort to escape, Zedekiah and his retinue fled under cover of darkness. They didn’t get far before the Babylonians caught up with them. Enraged by his act of treachery, Nebuchadnezzar forced Zedekiah to witness his sons’ execution and then had Zedekiah’s eyes gouged out. His anger not appeased, Nebuchadnezzar ordered the complete destruction of Jerusalem. In II Chronicles, we learn that Nebuchadnezzar spared no one. He “killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and did not spare young men or young women, the elderly or the infirm” (II Chron. 36:17). He slaughtered an unknown number of soldiers and military officers, priests, and nobles. Next, he razed the Temple and took back to Babylon “all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord’s temple and the treasures of the king and his officials” (II Chron. 36:18). Then the Babylonians “set fire to God’s temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem…burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there” (II Chron. 36:19). This was a lesson Nebuchadnezzar did not want the Judeans to forget. To ensure that Jerusalem would not rise again, Nebuchadnezzar took large numbers of Judeans and Jerusalemites captive and sent them into exile in Babylon where they “became servants to his successors” (II Chron. 36:19). How many is unknown. The counts in the Bible are inconclusive largely because they differ from each other. For example, II Kings 24:14–25:8 lists over 8,000 and Jeremiah 52:28–52:30 lists the number at 4,600. Perhaps most important is the havoc that resulted from these deportations. The exiles from 586 b.c.e. constituted a second wave. These were the Judeans that, during the ten years since the first exile, had appropriated the property and the pride of their captive cousins. Nevertheless, as the second-generation exiles, they could count on the help and support of the first group in their effort to fit themselves as best they could into patterns of life that had been established by their predecessors. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the exile marks one of the lowest points in the history of Judaism and was a theologically traumatic event that would scar the collective Jewish psyche and linger in its memory up to the present. Robert Cargill, The Cities That Built the Bible (New York: HarperOne, Kindle ed., 2016), 98. Cargill writes, “And this is how Babylon, the city that destroyed Jerusalem, contributed arguably a disproportionate amount of content to the Bible. Not only did it fundamentally alter the political plight of ancient Judah, but it also remained a symbol of destruction and evil even into the first Christian century. Revelation 17:5 adopts the symbol of Babylon, calling it the ‘mother of whores,’ and promises that one day God’s people will experience vindication and victory over their oppressors, as Revelation 18:21 symbolically claims, ‘With such violence Babylon the great city will be thrown down, and will be found no more.’ And this, I argue, is why most people have a negative view of Babylon— because of the role it played in building the Bible.” Exiles Split into Two Groups: The Judahite Returnees and the Judahite Expatriates James Newsome argues that there were two groups of exiles living in Babylon: (1) those who dreamed of return fueled by the words of the prophets and (2) those “who believed they had nothing to return to and were living comfortably as Judahite expatriates.” James D. Newsome, Jr., By the Waters of Babylon: An Introduction to the History and Theology of the Exile (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979), 71. To the writers of the Bible, they were apostates, and, except for condemnation by the prophets, their stories remain untold. The prophets made it clear that God had gone into exile with the Judahites and wanted to return with them to the Promised Land. Those that believed those words must have been the ones that returned. Apparently, those that remained in Babylon didn’t believe in the prophecies of return. The destruction of nearly everything they valued may have caused them to doubt. Other prophets (cf. Hag. 1:6ff. and Zech. 6:8–9) reveal that many of the exiles questioned the value of serving YHVH. In Malachi (1:2) we read, “‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord; but you say, ‘How have you loved us?’” God is aware that the exiles have lost faith in God’s love or ability to save them. Larger questions emerge from the exiles’ decision to remain in Babylon. Had they decided that God was not a god of place? That God was everywhere and didn’t need a Mishkan in which to live? Could God be worshiped anywhere? See Mal. 1:11: “For from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered in my name.” We can conclude from their decision to remain in Babylon that the exiles had decided that the answer to these questions was “yes.” As we will see below, there is ample evidence that these exiles had assimilated into Babylonian society and many had become comfortable in their new home. Should we also conclude that the widely dispersed diaspora Jews that chose to remain Jews must have found themselves in similar circumstances? Is this development the first step toward a non-Temple-centered Judaism and the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism? We don’t know much about the lives of the exiles. What we know comes mainly from the Bible and from a few scraps of archaeological remains. Ephal, “The Babylonian Exile,” 22. We know that many of the exiles, perhaps following the prophet Jeremiah’s advice, settled down and began new lives: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29:5–7; emphasis added) They became part of the people among whom they lived. At the same time, they did not abandon their culture and religion. Instead, they made it a monument to their past, an anchor to their identity, and a guide to their future lives. Their assimilation into Babylonian society, however, only went so far. Unlike their Palestinian brethren that engaged in periodic rebellions, they did not rebel, then or ever. In a few generations, the exiles prospered financially and gained respectability in Babylonian society. Some even became important figures in the Babylonian hierarchy. Cargill, Cities That Built the Bible, 85–86. A sign of this new status comes from II Kings 25:27–29, where we learn that, after Nebuchadnezzar II died, his son, Awel-Marduk, in the first year of his reign freed Jehoiachin, the exiled king of Judah, who had been imprisoned for thirty-seven years. The Bible tells us that the king “spoke kindly to Jehoiachin and gave him a seat above the other seats of the kings that were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes. Every day of his life he dined regularly in the king’s presence. The king gave him a daily allowance for as long as he lived” (Jer. 52:31; II Kings 25:27–30). We know from the CUSAS 28 cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians resettled the exiles in the countryside, where they were forced to cultivate lands for their own upkeep in exchange for part of the yield. This resettlement was part of a “land-for-service” project that allowed the captives to set up a new life and become contributors to the Babylonian economy. Caroline Waerzeggers, “Review of Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer, Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology (CUSAS) 28,” STRATA: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 33 (London: The Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, 2015): 179–94. See also J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 494. They were also required to help provision the imperial military and to provide fiscal services to the state. Caroline Waerzeggers speculates that these exiles must have had a very different life than those that were settled in “the metropolis of Babylon” and that became part of the cosmopolitan society and its mercantile community. Ibid. Even when the Persians under Cyrus gave them the chance to return to their homeland, many of the exiles (number unknown) decided to stay. One of the few extant sources for the biblical story of Cyrus comes from the Cyrus Cylinder, an artifact found in Iran and currently housed in the British Museum. Written on it is the story of the downfall of Babylon because its ruler, Nabonidus, had not honored its God, Marduk, and how Cyrus, King of Persia, defeated Nebuchadnezzar, and allowed the Babylonian captives to return to their homes. Very likely, Cyrus wanted to help reestablish the Judeans so that he could create a buffer zone against the rise of Greece, which he saw as a rising threat. The Persians gave their provinces (satrapies) a good deal of independence, as well as promoting commerce by building roads. Very likely, the second and third generations of the Babylonian exiles had become part of the professional classes and members of the ruling classes. The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah record that Ezra and Nehemiah were officials of the Persian court. The Judeans throughout the Persian Empire rose in the ranks of the civil servants. The large empire required a huge bureaucracy to govern it. Judeans also were deployed in military units on the borders of the empire. Lawrence H. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1991), 34. This pattern of assimilation repeated itself many times in Jewish history in various parts of the world. In most places where the Jews settled, they became substantial members of their adopted communities. To better understand this phenomenon, we need only turn to the Book of Daniel and the Book of Esther. Even though some scholars question the historicity of these books, they point to a period when the events they present could have happened. The Book of Daniel is set in Babylonia during the time of Nebuchadnezzar at the end of the seventh century b.c.e., during the first of the Judean exiles. In the “third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim’s rule of Judah” (Dan. 1:1). The Book of Esther takes place perhaps one hundred years after the Persians had conquered Babylon. Mary Joan Winn Leith claims that the name “Esther” is a cognate with “Ishtar,” the Babylonian goddess of love and war and a cognate of the Persian word “stara,” translated as “star.” In the Vulgate, Esther is “Hester.” “Esther,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New and Revised, ed. Michael Coogan (New York: Oxford U Press: 2010), 707. In this story, the Judean, Esther, rises to become the queen of Persia, the wife of King Xerxes, “Ahasuerus,” in the biblical account. Because of the identification of Xerxes as the king, the time has to be sometime at the end of the fifth century b.c.e. These stories are good examples of the assimilation that occurred during this time. One of those enclaves was in Elephantine, Egypt. Substantial records from this community have survived and reveal that these Jews had set up their own “temple” and sought permission to do so from the Jerusalem central priestly authority. These documents also reveal that the community practiced a syncretic form of cultic religion. They accepted YHVH and the Mosaic tradition, but they also worshiped other gods. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition, 35. An excellent source for an extended discussion of this community is Bezalel Porten’s Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). What is important for our purposes is that these biblical stories reveal that the readers of these stories must have accepted the idea that Judeans had been assimilated into the highest level of Babylonian and Persian society. Daniel and his friends were attached to the royal court as advisors to the king. Esther was the queen of the Persian kingdom. Their enemies tried to destroy them but, in turn, were themselves destroyed. Because the stories are about the exiles that chose to remain exiles and that became important people in their respective cultures, it is reasonable to assume that they wrote these stories. As we know from the Bible, the Judeans that returned had little regard for the exiles that chose not to return with them. In an irony of history, Nebuchadnezzar’s effort to destroy Jerusalem resulted not in its destruction but in the transfer of the upper classes and intellectual elite to Babylon, thus creating a new “Jewish” center, a Jerusalem in exile. Although some of the original exiles had tried to assimilate “into the tissue of Babylonian life—sporting Babylonian clothing, brandishing Babylonian speech, worshipping Babylonian gods, applying for Babylonian jobs,” as a whole the “exiled community had opted for their continued Jewishness.” Newsome (1979), 81. Newsome speculates that they did not want to suffer the fate of the Northern Kingdom exiles nearly two centuries earlier. They feared that they too might disappear through assimilation and be lost to history. Ibid. A parallel example of diaspora survival in a new land may be seen in the modern history of Reform Judaism. In 1841 in Charleston, South Carolina, a Jewish leader told his congregation: “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.” Meyer, Response to Modernity, 234. For more than two thousand years, the Babylonian Jewish community lived in peace with their neighbors and prospered. During the first one thousand years, from their captivity around 586 b.c.e. until sometime around 600 c.e., they recreated/reformed Judaism through their academies and their Talmud and Mishnah. These sacred texts preserve the teachings, interpretations, and often dissenting opinions of the most prominent early rabbis on a variety of subjects found in the Hebrew Bible. Cargill, Cities That Built the Bible, 98. Other Judeans and Israelites had left their homeland and resettled in other parts of Asia Minor and around the Mediterranean. One such “colony” was a military outpost in Elephantine, Egypt, where Israelites lived during the same time as these events and that left documents that have given us a picture of their life as exiles. At this early period of Jewish history, we have documents from the Jewish community on the island of Elephantine in Egypt. I don’t think we've given enough attention to this group of exiles. Their lives in Babylon must have been better than what they thought their lives would be in Judah. A reasonable comparison might be the fate of European Jewish exiles at the end of World War II. Their homes had been destroyed, their property confiscated, their cemeteries desecrated, their families exterminated, and their way of life destroyed. When they found new homes in the United States and Canada, in South America and South Africa, in New Zealand and Australia, and in Israel, they chose to stay where they were rather than to return to a life that no longer existed. The Jews that did go back to Europe were few. They went back to rebuild their lives but were haunted by the memory of their previous lives and by the awareness that the destruction they experienced could always happen again. My sense is that the exiles that remained in Babylon chose not to endure these hardships. The Return of the Exiles The Book of Ezra (1–3) tells us that following King Cyrus’s freeing of the Judahite captives, the first wave of returning exiles included: “42,360 exiles” including men, women, and servants returned from Babylon to Jerusalem and Judah. “The Jewish Temples: After the Babylonian Exile (538–332 b.c.e.),” The Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/after-the-babylonian-exile (accessed October 2, 2018). The author of this article claims that Cyrus’s intention was to reestablish the theocracy but not the kingdom of Israel. They were led by Zerubbabel, the last “king” of the Davidic line, and Jeshua ben Jehozadak, the high priest and the legitimate descendant of Aaron, the first high priest and the brother of Moses. Jehozadak claimed his right in the priestly Zadokite succession and, together with Zerubbabel, organized the returnees to set about purifying the site for the rebuilding of the Temple. In Ezra 1:5, we read, “So the chiefs of the clans of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and Levites, all whose spirit had been roused by God, got ready to go up to build the House of the Lord that is in Jerusalem” (emphasis added). “All whose spirit had been roused by God” were originally a small group and that, later, larger numbers of exiles returned over a period of 118 years as described in the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles (538 b.c.e. to 420 b.c.e., the date attributed to the conclusion of the Book of Nehemiah). Miller and Hayes, History of Israel and Judah, 511. Cf. Cargill, Cities That Built the Bible, 98. As early as Deuteronomy 30:1–6, God had promised to return the exiles even before they became Babylonian exiles. The heroes of the biblical story, and no doubt the writers of the Bible, returned to Judea with a mission. They intended to reestablish the religious cult, to restore the Temple (described as God’s house) and to rebuild Jerusalem: “Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again’” (Ezek. 11:17). The background for this story is told in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, II Kings, Chronicles, and in Prophets: Isaiah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We learn more of the background in the Books of Esther and Daniel and, to a lesser extent, from the prophets Haggai and Malachi. Unlike the exiles that chose to remain in Babylon, the returnees believed passionately that their role was to fulfill the prophecies of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Zechariah. Ezekiel had told them that they were the “true Israelites.” From the returnees’ perspective, “the only citizens who seem[ed] to matter (and the only Temple personnel allowed to function) [were] those with proper genealogical records brought from Babylonia.” Ibid. They had gone into exile and God had gone with them (Ezek. 11:17–19). In Jeremiah 30:3, we read: “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will bring my people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their ancestors to possess,’ says the Lord.” Perhaps, the most emotionally charged statement of the need to return comes in Zechariah 2:10–13: 10 “Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares the Lord. 11 “Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you. 12 The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land and will again choose Jerusalem. 13 Be still before the Lord, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.” In Zechariah (1:16–17), we learn that God expects that the Temple, God’s house, will be rebuilt: “‘I will return to Jerusalem with mercy, and there my house will be rebuilt…And the measuring line will be stretched out over Jerusalem’…‘My towns will again overflow with prosperity, and the Lord will again comfort Zion and choose Jerusalem.’” Believing in their ideals and fortified by the sense that they were doing God’s work, the returnees sought nothing less than to purify the land and its people. James D. Purvis and Eric Meyers referred to them as “leaders.” “Exile and Return: From the Babylonian Destruction to the Reconstruction of the Jewish State,” http://cojs.org/james_d-_purvis-_and_eric_meyers-_-exile_and_return-_from_the_babylonian_destruction_to_the_reconstruction_of_the_jewish_state/ (accessed July 18, 2018). After all, God had told Ezekiel that the people that had not gone into exile violated God’s statutes and “‘have done according to the customs of the Gentiles which are all around you”’ (Ezek. 11:12). Ezekiel warns the Jerusalemites that they are not the “true Israelites.” They had gone into exile and God had gone with them (Ezek. 11:17–19). Newsome, By the Waters of Babylon, 75. The job of the returning exiles will be to “remove all its [Israel’s] vile images and detestable idols.” God will infuse in them a new spirit that will allow them to “follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God” (Ezek. 11:18–19). The returnees’ challenge was to reestablish or set up a strict religious sacrificial cult that they believed their ancestors had practiced. They considered themselves the official carriers of Judaism and viewed “the local Judahite population…with contempt.” Purvis and Meyers, “Exile and Return.” In Ezra 9:12–13 we read: “‘The land that you are coming to inherit is an unclean land because of the uncleanliness of the peoples of the lands, by their abominations with which they filled it from end to end with their uncleanliness.’” To understand the returnees’ passion, we might look to modern Israel where Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews from around the world made aliyah to Israel. Their motives were similar to those of their ancient forebears: to remake the secular state into a Holy Land as envisioned by the biblical prophets. I remember in my childhood in the 1950s how disgusted my mother would be when she read in the Jewish press that the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem were throwing stones at buses that traveled through their neighborhood on Shabbat. She called them meshuga (crazy). The first wave of returning exiles arrived between 538–522 b.c.e., soon after Cyrus gave them permission. Most of those who were taken into exile were not the people that left. The majority were the children and grandchildren of the Babylonian exiles. They no longer identified themselves as Judeans, but as a new group, an ethnos, a religious group. Amy Jill-Levine, “The Restoration,” The Old Testament (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2001), 100. They not only had no experience living in Judea but had never seen it. We know from the Book of Ezra that among the returnees were original Judahites that cried when they compared the original Temple to the one that the returnees constructed. The first Temple was so much larger and more elegant than what the returnees were able to afford. They knew their national history from the stories told to them by their parents and grandparents. Unlike them, however, they had no homes, no land, no property. Once their families went into exile, all of that had been forfeited. Newsome, By the Waters of Babylon, 71. What the returnees found on their return proved to be a major disappointment. Destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 b.c.e., nearly a half century before, Jerusalem had not been repaired and lay in ruins. According to Isaiah, “Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; O holy and beautiful house where our fathers praised you have been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins” (Isa. 64:10–12). The deportations had “frayed the total fabric of the society, siphoning off many of the upper and artisan class…[which led] to the redistribution of Judean property and wealth.” Miller and Hayes, History of Israel and Judah, 481. The Bible tells us that the Babylonians left behind the poorest of the poor, farmers that most likely worked as laborers on someone else’s land. Their job was to work the fields to produce food and wine for their own sustenance and for their new captors (II Kings 25:22). Whatever that remnant was, Judea had changed in many ways over the half-century since the exile. Now that Judea was a Persian province, the returnees would have found that it had new administrative structures, new laws, new taxes, new building projects, a new monetary system including “banks,” lending institutions, and a new language, Aramaic. During the extended period of exile, it is reasonable to think that the native population must have developed a new monied elite and a new religious hierarchy. For those exiles that had lived in Judea before the exile, they must have felt like they had encountered a foreign culture and like aliens in what they considered their own land. Rebuilding the Temple Cyrus provided the returning exiles with financial support to rebuild the Temple. He even authorized the return of Temple vessels plundered by Babylon (II Kings 24:13). The Cyrus Cylinder (cf. Isa. 44:28; 45:1; 47ff; Ezra 1:2–4; II Chron. 36:23: Ezra 6:3–5) states: “I returned to [these] sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which [used] to live therein, and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I gathered all their inhabitants and returned their habitations.” To foster stability in his empire, Cyrus’s foreign policy principles were based on toleration of a subject nation’s cultural practices and limited autonomous governance. Both fostered stability and provided a bulwark against the growing Greek threat. Jill-Levine, “The Restoration,” 100. Although Cyrus had authorized the rebuilding of the Temple, the returnees did not undertake the project immediately. “Ezra,” in Coogan, ed., New Oxford Annotated Bible, 667–68. Some scholars think that the project was eventually completed in four or more steps. First, they rebuilt their own homes. God is annoyed: “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins” (Hag. 1:4)? God punishes them with a “drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the olive oil and everything else the ground produces, on people and livestock, and on all the labor of your hands” (Hag. 1:11). God sends Haggai to Zerubbabel to prompt the laggards to get going in rebuilding the temple: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house’” (Hag. 1:2). With a push from God, who stirs “up the spirit of Zerubbabel…and the spirit of Joshua…the high priest, and the spirit of the whole remnant of the people” (Hag. 1:14), the rebuilding commences in 522 b.c.e. Conflict with the Judean Inhabitants That Were Left Behind Another part of the story of the Babylonian Exile is not as well-known. What became of the people that were not carried off to Babylon, and what happened to them when the exiles began to return? The story of this group is difficult to research because of the lack of extant historical documents from this period. Taking the biblical account as the story of the victors, we need to see that the people they called “enemies” were the people that had escaped exile. They sought to defend their way of life and to prevent the returnees from reestablishing their former social, political, and religious control. Fearing that these returning exiles, would recreate the kind of political turmoil that ended in destruction and devastation nearly a half century earlier, they tried to sabotage their efforts. If we take the “clues” from the Bible, it is possible to draw some meaningful, if speculative, conclusions about these people from the available information. The technique is to read “between the lines” of the biblical account. Although the Babylonians had destroyed much of Judea, the remaining Judeans found themselves with more control of their own lives. As owners of appropriated lands, the abandoned homes, and the property of the old aristocrats, they concluded that God had taken into exile “the diseased branches” of Judah and that they were now the “healthy vine” that would “bear its good fruit” (cf. Ezek. 15:1–8). What they didn’t realize was that the “Lord” had gone into exile with their counterparts and had told Ezekiel that they would return to reclaim their land and property (Ezek. 11:17–20). It is difficult to imagine that the “new” owners of the property that had been abandoned by the exiles would welcome them back and turn over the lands and properties they had appropriated. As noted above, these properties had changed hands at least forty-eight years before, and now many were likely owned by the descendants of the people that first came into their possession. “Three generations” counting from the first exile in 597 b.c.e. Without the authority of the priests and the monarchies, the population enjoyed religious freedom. With no Judean kingship or priesthood, no central place of worship, and with all the figures of authority gone into exile or killed, we have to assume that the natives had rebuilt their religious society on new, and probably, less stringent religious laws. Of course, the laws under which they lived previously must have supplied a model, but there would be other models from which to choose: their occupier’s and those of their neighboring nations (e.g., Canaanite, Hittite, Amorite, and Egyptian). Without the insistent pressure to worship only one god, they surely reverted to the synchronistic practices that the prophets railed against and that the Bible tells us were a common practice throughout Israel’s history. In Mal. 3:7, God says, ‘“Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statues and have not kept them.’” They must have set up their own rituals, holy days, festivals, and eating and worshiping practices and styles. All of these changes produced a large-scale social and economic transformation. The people that stayed behind found that suddenly they acquired land and property. The poor were no longer as poor, and debtors were relieved of their debts (Ezek. 11:15). Although not intended, the result for the poor was an unanticipated Jubilee year. The Bible is not happy with these developments. Some of these people, along with other Israelites that had fled for their lives in the face of the Assyrian onslaught in 722 b.c.e., had resettled in the territories of Judah and Benjamin (Ezra 4:1). In II Kings, we read: “Each national group made its own gods in the several towns where they settled and set them up in the shrines the people of Samaria had made at the high places” (17:29). Samaria was the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that the Assyrians had destroyed in 722 b.c.e. The survivors, a remnant of the Israelites, and the peoples that the Assyrians had resettled in the area had adopted YHVH, the god of the land, but not as their exclusive god. They saw no reason not to continue their ancient practice of worshiping multiple gods. They set up their traditional idols and indulged in their traditional religious practices. Even more horrendous, they “burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelek and Anammelek, the gods of Sepharvaim (17:31). Sepharvaim, one of the cities from which the king of Assyria brought settlers to Samaria, after the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel (II Kings 17:24). Though they “worshipped the Lord,” they set up “high places” to worship other gods and appointed their own priests (II Kings 17:32–33). The native peoples had good reasons to fear the returnees. They knew that the hubris and poor policies on the part of the returnees’ ancestors—the former monarchies, their priests and nobles--had led to the destruction of Jerusalem and to much of Judea. They feared that the returnees, remnants of this same ruling class, meant to rebuild the city and start the political process over again that would lead to their ruin. They remembered, perhaps not personally, that two centuries ago the Assyrians had destroyed the Northern Kingdom (722 b.c.e.). More recently, the Babylonians had turned Judea into a vassal state in the period from 597 b.c.e. to 538 b.c.e., impoverishing and finally destroying Jerusalem and much of Judea. This defeat by Nebuchadnezzar not only left the kingdom in shambles but created a huge hardship for the survivors. With this memory paramount in their minds, they must have feared that the entire process would begin again. It is no wonder, then, that the returning exiles faced hostility. Although the natives failed to prevent the rebuilding of the Temple altar, they did succeed in inspiring fear in the builders: “And they [the returnees] set the altar upon its bases; for fear was upon them because of the people of the countries” (Ezra 3:3). Once the altar was set up, the natives tried to sabotage the returnees’ efforts to restore the Temple and to rebuild Jerusalem, which had been the center of Judahite life and a threat to surrounding kingdoms and empires. Whether a subterfuge or not, when the locals offered to help restore the Temple, they were told, “thank you, but no thank you.” This insult led to a counter action. The natives bribed Persian officials to work against the effort and frustrate their plans “throughout the entire reign of Cyrus king of Persia and down to the reign of Darius king of Persia” (Ezra 4:4–5). The Samarian officials played a major role in this subversive effort. They sent a letter to King Artaxerxes (Darius) warning him that Jerusalem was being rebuilt. At first the tactic worked. The king ordered the work to stop, that is until Darius ordered a search of the royal archives to see whether his predecessor, Cyrus, had left instructions for how to manage these returnees. When the Decree of Cyrus was located, giving the exiles not only the right to return but to rebuild at the king’s expense, Darius approved the continuation of the project and helped finance it himself (Ezra 6:1–10). He also declared that anyone that attempted to interfere in the project would be hanged on a beam from his own house (Ezra 4:11). Ezra’s Arrival: 458 b.c.e. We know very little about the period after the rebuilding of the Temple in 516 b.c.e. until Ezra’s arrival in 458 b.c.e., more than half a century later. What we know comes from the Book of Ezra, where we learn that Ezra was granted authority by Artaxerxes, the Persian king, who also authorized the subsidization of the entire return, the completion of the rebuilding of the Temple and the provision of animals for sacrifice. More than fifty years after the Temple had been completed in 516, it still needed work. If we read between the lines we can deduce that as a Judahite from Babylonian, Ezra was part of a clan that maintained strict observance of what the clan understood as the law of Moses. Also, we can infer that the exiles that had chosen not to return either maintained a devoted coterie of observant exiles, or, that in the generations following the first return, new devoutly observant people emerged from the remaining Judahites. Like the first mission-driven returnees, they intended to reestablish the Holy Land. What Ezra discovered on his arrival in Jerusalem was a shock. Members of the first groups of returnees had reverted to the former abominable practices that originally caused God to send their ancestors into exile, including priests and Levites. In Ezra 9:2–3, we learn that the chiefs that Ezra had brought with him found out that: “The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites were not separated from the peoples of the lands, like the abominations of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons, and the holy seed has become mingled with the peoples of the lands, and the hand of the chiefs and the deputies was first in this treachery.” (Ezra 9:2–3). Stunned by this discovery, Ezra went into mourning. When members of the community saw the depth of his grief, they gathered around him and together decided that the community had sinned and needed to reform. Their decision was to ban marriage to “foreign women.” The men that had foreign wives needed to separate from them as the first step to “purifying the land,” and the people. Interesting from a modern point of view is that this decision was arrived at through a democratic process of decision-making. Instead of imposing his will, which Artaxerxes had authorized, Ezra allowed the community to make this decision. It is an important moment for the development of Judaism. As the editors of the Oxford edition of the Bible note, this “law” prohibiting marriage to a non-Israelite woman does not appear in the Pentateuch. It is an “interpretation” of Mosaic law. All the Patriarchs and Moses had married non-Israelite women and were not condemned by law or by God. Cf. Coogan, ed., New Oxford Annotated Bible (footnotes) 680–84. Soon after, in 445 b.c.e., another group of returnees arrived led by Nehemiah. The Book of Nehemiah credits him with restoring the walls of Jerusalem and repopulating the city. The returnees’ expectation that the rebuilding of the Temple would result in the restoration of its glory and of the return of the greatness of Israel did not materialize. Conclusion The Bible that emerged from this experience of exile is the work of the returnees. According to Cynthia Chapman, “Judah becomes the memory holder for Israel. By surviving as a people, Judah wins the right to tell the story of Israel, and in that story, Judah sees itself as the ‘remnant of Israel.’” Cynthia Chapman, The Great Courses: The World of Biblical Israel (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2013), 13. Their hope was that they would not only make sense of their traumatic experience but provide their descendants with a memory of who they were and where they had came from. Not all the stories were written during the exile, but they were ordered, edited, and redacted.” Ibid., 20. The story of the Babylonian Exile is really two stories. The first is the story of the destruction, resurrection, and transformation of the cult of YHVH into Second Temple Judaism. The second is story of the splitting of this cult into two religious centers, both vital, one in Jerusalem and the other newly created in Babylon that produces the Babylonian Talmud. In the biblical account, they are not equal centers. The Bible depicts the Judahites that chose to remain in Babylon as apostates. The Judahites that returned to Judah made themselves the heroes and their Babylonian cousins the enemy. The reason the returnees left Babylon was because they saw it as the antithesis of the Holy Land that God had promised them. As we saw in the books of the prophets, the people that returned believed that God had gone into exile with them and wanted to return home and live again in God’s house. It was their job to serve their God and to follow God’s commandments. For them there was no choice but to go back. They were the holy people, the only remnant of the people that were decimated by the Babylonians. They had an obligation to recreate the Holy People God said they were. Anyone that did not make that return, they considered a heretic. We know the history of the return, at least that part of it recorded in the Bible, sketchy as it is. The early history of the exiles that remained in Babylon, however, remains a mystery for lack of a biblical account and other extant records. The biblical account tells the story of the winners and the losers. The winners wrote the history from the returnees’ perspective. This is the turning point in what we now call Second Temple Judaism, which came eighty years after the arrival of the first group of exiles. M. Patrick Graham, The “Chronicler’s History: Ezra-Nehemiah, 1–2 Chronicles,” in The Hebrew Bible Today: An Introduction to Critical Issues, ed. M. Patrick Graham and Steven L. McKenzie (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 204–5. It was not, however, a smooth transition. Within a half a century, the first groups of returnees had reverted to the sinfulness and idolatry that were the source of the original problem. Ezra reminds them of their original purpose. They needed to reestablish Mosaic law and to live according to the law. He ushered into Judahite religious practice a major innovation: he established the Torah as the law for leading a good and righteous life for the people of Judea. Coogan, ed., New Oxford Annotated Bible, 667. “Some scholars have suggested that Ezra’s return, with his religious innovations, took place only after Nehemiah’s political improvements.” The Bible is the story of this evolution. In its final telling of the affairs of the Israelite people, it reinforces once more the paradigm of reward, punishment, and redemption. We might remember that the prophecies of redemption ended with the closing of the Bible. However, traditional Judaism holds on to that dream in the eventual restoration of the glory of Israel and holds that a messiah (a mashiach) will return to bring that about. This belief is enshrined as part of Rambam’s 13 Principles of Faith, traditionally seen as the minimum requirements of Jewish belief. David R. Blumenthal, trans., “Maimonides, Thirteen Principles of the Faith,” http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Maiimonides%27%20Principles%20%28DRB%29.pdf (accessed October 9, 2018). Moreover, the traditional version of the Sh’moneh Esreih prayer, recited three times a day, lists the events that must occur for the coming of the mashiach: ingathering of the exiles; restoration of the religious courts of justice; an end of wickedness, sin, and heresy; reward to the righteous; rebuilding of Jerusalem; restoration of the line of King David; and restoration of Temple service. For a traditional Jew, this paradigm is a never-ending story. Notes PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2