Myths of Exile

History and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible

Anne Katrine Gudme, Ingrid Hjelm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317501220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Babylonian exile in 587-539 BCE is frequently presented as the main explanatory factor for the religious and literary developments found in the Hebrew Bible. The sheer number of both 'historical' and narrative exiles confirms that the theme of exile is of great importance in the Hebrew Bible. However, one does not do justice to the topic by restricting it to the exile in Babylon after 587 BCE. In recent years, it has become clear that there are several discrepancies between biblical and extra-biblical sources on invasion and deportation in Palestine in the 1st millennium BCE. Such discrepancy confirms that the theme of exile in the Hebrew Bible should not be viewed as an echo of a single traumatic historical event, but rather as a literary motif that is repeatedly reworked by biblical authors.

Myths of Exile challenges the traditional understanding of 'the Exile' as a monolithic historical reality and instead provides a critical and comparative assessment of motifs of estrangement and belonging in the Hebrew Bible and related literature. Using selected texts as case studies, this book demonstrates how tales of exile and return can be described as a common formative narrative in the literature of the ancient Near East, a narrative that has been interpreted and used in various ways depending on the needs and cultural contexts of the interpreting community. Myths of Exile is a critical study which forms the basis for a fresh understanding of these exile myths as identity-building literary phenomena.

PART I Creating exilic identities

1 Exile as the great divide Would there be an ‘ancient Israel' without an exile?

Niels Peter Lemche

DOI: 10.4324/9781315714516-1

It is really remarkable how biblical studies have developed over the last generation. When I studied theology– in the heyday of classical historical-critical scholarship– early Israel explained everything. The formation of Israel and Israelite identity belonged to this period and to the dominating societal model of the time, the amphictyony, a league of twelve tribes.¹ Students would flunk at the examination in the Old Testament if they were not able to explain in detail every function of this sacral tribal league. Israel’s traditions about its origins all belonged to the amphictyony where such holy traditions were nourished, not at the campfire among shepherds but within the sacral confines of the amphictyonic institutions. There might never have been a historical Abraham or Jacob as maintained by mainly German scholars,² or there might have been one as argued by their American colleagues,³ but everyone was in agreement that the traditions about Abraham existed within the context of Israel’s sacral league. The amphictyony was simply the axis mundi and everything turned around this centre.

Now, as argued years ago by Thomas Kuhn, dominating paradigms are bound one day to become too ‘heavy’ when they are used to explain everything and end up explaining nothing but their own existence (Kuhn 1962). As a consequence, they simply break down and sometimes leave no traces after them. This was very much what happened to the amphictyony. Around 1970, several scholars including this author (Lemche 1972) began asking questions in earnest about this amphictyony (a few, such as Otto Eissfeldt (1935 and 1975), Sigmund Mowinckel (1958) and Georg Fohrer (1966), had never succumbed to the impact of the hypothesis). This happened on the basis of historical-critical readings of the biblical historiography pertinent to the pre-state period. The amphictyony had to go because it was not found in biblical stories. However, the consequence was that scholars had to look for another period to pin the Israelite historical tradition. And the logical choice was the period of the united monarchy of David and Solomon. Here scholars following Gerhard von Rad placed the original home of the Yahwist and Israelite history writing (von Rad 1944).

The issue was to find a situation when all Israelite tribes were still together, and the period of David and Solomon seemed to be the last possible chance of finding a historical home for Israelite unity, at least in pre-Hasmonean times. After Solomon, the Israelite tribes split into two sections, Israel and Judah. The common Israelite tradition would have to originate in a time when a unity was supposed to exist. In the royal centre of Jerusalem, hectic activity took place when scribes and Gelehrter were commissioned to write the ‘national’ history of the newly established kingdom. In itself this theory about the origins of Israelite historiography was not a bad idea. There are indeed plenty of examples of historians getting such assignments, the period of Augustus being perhaps the most obvious, when Livy sat down to write his enormous history of Rome.⁴ Livy was part of the intellectual circle around Augustus and simply had to cope with the anti-imperial sentiments still strong in higher Roman society. More modern examples have to do with the rise of modern history writing after the French revolution when a new kind of society was looking for its legitimation (Lemche 2008: 34–35).

History repeats itself. It was not long before the idea of a home for Israelite historiography at the court of David and Solomon came under attack, simply because the very existence of this court was questioned. The same happened to the reality of the image of the early Israelite monarchy as found in the Old Testament, which now went down the drain, taking with it also its major figures, David and Solomon. There was no royal city of Jerusalem when David and Solomon were supposed to have ruled from Jerusalem over a major kingdom stretching far into Syria (Palmyra).⁵

Much of the discussion about Israel’s origins was founded on archaeology and the interpretation of what was found on the ground. Thus the American model of the Israelite conquest– very close to the story told by the Book of Joshua– rose and fell with the interpretation of the archaeology on which it was founded.⁶ The same happened to the imperial city of Jerusalem in David’s and Solomon’s time. The very archaeology which should have supported the existence of the great centre of Jerusalem turned out to be a broken cane when it became clear that there were no traces of a great city here in this period. The long discussion, which was mainly conducted between Israeli archaeologists, more or less ended in a kind of stalemate when Israel Finkelstein gave in and said that maybe David was some local chieftain roaming the mountains of Judea (Finkelstein and Silberman 2006: 58–59). However, it was hardly so that this chieftain had an elaborate court where great histories were written down.

Now the catastrophe struck: Where did this unity between Israel and Judah, i.e. between all twelve of Israel’s tribes, originate, when there was not a society embracing all parts of ancient Israel? Evidently there were no historical reasons for its existence. There was no institution in the pre-state period where such an idea of unity might have been kindled. Neither did anything turn up in the Iron Age allowing for an Israelite feeling of identity between all its components. The centuries following the alleged break-up of this alleged united monarchy never provided any occasion when such a pan-Israelite identity was in effect. On the contrary, the historiography of 1 and 2 Kings describes a continuous conflict between Jerusalem and Shechem, soon substituted by Samaria, as a kind of continuation of the conflict that previously existed in the Amarna Age, symbolized by the characters of Abdi-Ḫeba from Jerusalem and Lab’aya from Shechem.⁷ This enmity between the north and south pops up again in the conflicts between Samaria and Jerusalem in the Persian (although only literarily attested in Nehemiah’s story about the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, Nehemiah 3–4; 6) and Hellenistic periods and is perpetuated in the conflict between Jews and Samaritans into Roman times.

Israel and Judah were never united during the Iron Age. It is a totally imagined unity belonging to another period. It is not reflecting any historical reality and should be left out as a paradigm for explaining historiography in the Old Testament or for that matter the history of ancient Palestine.

Now it is time to move down again to the next point in history during which the idea of an Israelite unity may have arisen. Logically this should be the exile, a period without Israelite and Judean presence in Palestine, or so it is argued in the Bible. From a historical point of view this is nonsense. The tiny stratum of literati– an expression nailed by Ehud Ben Zvi– from Judah, by all means a minor political entity in the southern mountains, may have been lifted from Jerusalem and Judah to Babylonia, but there was no exile from the former area of Samaria dating to the beginning of the 6th century. On the contrary, the former territory of the kingdom of Israel was left in peace by Nebuchadnezzar who had no problems with Samaria.⁸ The deportation after the Assyrian conquest of Samaria was limited to, according to Sargon II, some 27,290 persons, perhaps about one tenth of the total population.⁹

Whether or not the descendants of people from Samaria merged with newly arrived deported people from Judah after 597/87 is unknown. Thus we cannot say that the idea of a united Israel arose by combining northern and southern traditions in the years following 587. Further, it should also be remembered that the Assyrians, over a period of two hundred years, carried out several deportations from many places, some of a much larger scale than the ones that hit Samaria and Jerusalem (Oded 1979; Lawson Younger 1998). It is not wrong to imagine the Assyrian empire as a melting pot not only of people but also of traditions from all over the ancient Near East. The population of the Assyrian core landscape around the city of Assur was never very large.¹⁰ However, if the Babylonians brought some stray 10,000 or fewer immigrants from the west it would not have mattered much. Babylon alone counted for perhaps up to 200,000 people.¹¹ If biblical historiographers have something to contribute, the importance of the small number of deported people was mitigated somewhat by the decision to settle these people in one place in Mesopotamia close to the Khabur river, the Tel Abib of Ezekiel, which does not undermine the fact that the best sources for their life come from the Murašu archives from Nippur in Central Mesopotamia.¹²

Biblical tradition tells us that these were the true remains of the ancient population of Jerusalem and Judah, who at their return to the old land had a considerable task left to clean the land of its foreign population who had no right to the place where they were living. Biblical tradition says that after Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon, the Jews were allowed to return to the land of their fathers, and so they did (2 Chron 36:22–23). History– and the Bible– says that this was far from true but makes it clear that during the following Persian period there was a comprehensive Jewish population in Mesopotamia.¹³ To be sure, the Babylonian exile ended around 1950 ce when the Jewish population of Iraq was airlifted to Israel.¹⁴ The same happened in Egypt, where– again according to scripture– there was a considerable community of refugees from Jerusalem and Judah, a society which did not return but settled in Egypt and became rather dominant in the newly founded Greek city of Alexandria in the Hellenistic Period.

Did the exile create these societies? In a way the answer is yes, but did it as a physical fact create the idea of the world popular in emerging Jewish societies outside of Palestine between 600 and 300 bce? That was definitely the case, although we should give up the idea of seeing this exile as a punishment that forced early Jews to stay in foreign countries. Rather we should speak of a Jewish diaspora (in Hebrew golah means both exile and diaspora) as a place of Jewish communities that for the most part had no intention to ‘return’ to poor Palestine. Studying the living conditions in a Hellenistic city explains why they may not have found the perspective of moving to the naked hills of Judah very inviting.

In the Old Testament we find a plethora of traditions about origins from many places– some Palestinian, some Egyptian, some Mesopotamian, some relating to Phoenicia and Syria, and some deriving from Greek tradition. The writers who put these traditions together into (later) biblical literature were educated people– the literati. But did everything happen in one place? And where did it happen? In Jerusalem? The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Copenhagen International Seminar
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Creating exilic identities
• PART II Motifs of exile and return
• Index of sources
• Index of authors