An Atheist's Guide to the Bible

Exile

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In the fifth century BCE a group of returnees to Jerusalem created a literature, the Hebrew Bible, which set out to explain their shared history as the remnant of a previously exiled population, now restored to their land by the promise of Yahweh.

The story of the restoration of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple is contained in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Unfortunately these two books have been preserved in a rather disorganised form, leaving us with serious problems in dating the events and identifying the characters that are central to the story.

The scriptures which this same returning population held dear explained the history of the kingdoms that had existed before the Babylonian and Assyrian conquests. It is probably at this time that we would be able to see a collection taking shape which approached the modern Old Testament in form - the Torah, the "historical books" and the Chronicles, plus the earliest of the prophetic books and psalms.

Clearly, following defeat and deportation many people from the Palestinian area went into exile, and continued to uphold their own traditions of the worship of Yahweh. Eventually, a new king, Cyrus the Persian, defeated the Babylonians and was able to allow some of the exiles to return to the area of Jerusalem. They formed a new state of Judah. It is from this period that it is proper to refer to this people as Jews. For earlier periods the term Israelite is generally used.

In recent times a better understanding has been reached about the way in which empires like the Assyrians, Babylonians and even Cyrus himself, used the uprooting of peoples as a means of exerting imperial control. Thomas Thompson, in The Bible in History, explains how exile became a recurring theme for early Jewish religion because of the continuing policy of empires to use mass deportation to control their subjects. A similar approach was used in the 20th century by Stalin with his "nationalities policy". A classic work on this subject is Oded's Mass deportations and deportees in the neo-Assyrian Empire.

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