The Old Testament Through the Lens of Exile

Introduction

The Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is a collection of religious writings in Hebrew. It tells the story of a group of people brought out of slavery who intended to become a small nation on land ostensibly promised to them by God. According to Kelle, although Canaan was inhabited at the time, the invaders thought that it was nobody’s land because they believed God was on their side and the locals were heathen.¹

Until relatively recently, most researchers were of the same opinion as most believers – that Canaan’s invasion and the Exodus were historical facts.² However, after recent improvements in archaeological techniques and text interpretations of the Bible, most scholars now hold the view that Canaan’s invasion never took place. What it is instead is an analogy for a series of events that occurred in the 7^th and 6^th centuries BC. It was discovered that the new generation of Jews that returned from Babylon to Israel and Judas rewrote ancient legends and myths to metaphorically match their experiences.

The Northern and Southern Kingdoms: Collapse

The story began in the 8^th century BC, with the Northern Kingdom of Israel becoming conquered and shattered by Assyrian king Sargon II. The kingdom’s cities were laid siege to, and their residents captured and reportedly exiled, vanishing from history as Israel’s ‘ten lost tribes’ (Brueggemann and Linafelt, 2021).³ In accordance with the practice at that time, Sargon II replaced them with other peoples, which assimilated with those who remained. As per Brueggemann and Linafelt, Israel had always been an extremely fertile area compared to the Southern Kingdom, but the conquest led to the destruction of its crops and even the removal of its topsoil.⁴ Its priests, part of a considerable Northern bureaucracy, took flight to the Kingdom of Judah, bringing their traditions, customs, and oral history with them, all of which were recorded in their time.

Then, in the 6^th century BC, came the time of people of the Southern Kingdom, that is, the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, to be annihilated and displaced. According to Brueggemann and Linafelt, in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, ordered the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, to make it uninhabitable and prevent the establishment of a regional government.⁵ He captured a large number of the city’s prominent figures, among which were the royal family, those holding leadership positions, and those who knew how to write. From those who were exiled, many were subjected to forced labor in Nebuchadnezzar’s grandiose public works program. This included not merely public works, but also grand projects such as the construction of the Ziggurat, a massive stepped tower to connect Earth to Heaven, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Inhabitants of the Southern Kingdom were deported in groups: some in 597 BC, others later, in 586 BC. Consequently, there were several separate exiles, and the Old Testament communicates the voices of those who suffered and the hope that they had, for example: ‘Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel.’ ⁶

This is what the Lord says:

When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.⁷

At that time, declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people.

This is what the Lord says:

The people who survive the sword

will find favor in the wilderness;

I will come to give rest to Israel.⁸

This is what the Lord says—

your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:

For your sake I will send to Babylon

and bring down as fugitives all the Babylonians,

in the ships in which they took pride.⁹

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill. ¹⁰

Deuteronomy

The Exile was an experience that can be considered both political and spiritual. The tribes that originated on Canaan’s hilltops and eventually merged into an Israeli ethnic identity initially came from different places and had their own separate cultures. As per Elms, it is believed that Abraham traveled from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Canaan with the promise that he and his descendants would make this land theirs.¹¹ In his turn, Moses is reputed to have forced out his people in Egypt from slavery to this ostensibly promised land.¹² Both histories underlie a land claim through divine mandate, with Joshua’s one through conquest, similarly so. It is totally possible that a small group of people could have left Egypt and landed in Canaan, but when their experiences were recorded centuries later, they coalesced with a history of Judah.

These distinct experiences were not created but developed over time, and they eventually conjoined into a great national narrative in which one’s story became everyone’s story. When, during the exile, the question of ‘why is all this happening to us?’ was asked, the best answers were given by those who historians today call the Deuteronomists.¹³ According to Elms, they were scribes who had been studying the texts and were familiar with the stories, and whose role was to maintain, edit, correct, and modify the material that was presented to them.¹⁴ In doing that, they not only protected the national identity, they created an entirely new one, founded on collective trauma. The Exile was interpreted by this school of thought as God’s punishment to people for worshiping idols, which was discovered as a result of a retroactive theological analysis based on the period post-exile.

Deuteronomy is an appeal to the people of Israel as much as to the people of Judah. Kelle notes that Moses was the original figure of the Exodus for Israel; however, it was Daniel for Judah.¹⁵ The religious amalgamation of Israel and Judah thus starts with Deuteronomy, and, as a consequence of the fusion of these distinct histories, Israel’s lost identity was restored. Its traditions were united with Judah’s in a theologically manufactured account of a common experience of slavery and atonement, which was later developed and expanded. However, when it comes to the retelling of the invasion of Canaan and the story of Exodus, serious doubts can be raised about their authenticity. Cho states that none of the Pentateuch’s original documents are composed from primary sources or within a thousand years of the events they intend to describe.¹⁶ Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that an oral tradition could not have preserved accurate and reliable details across such a time gap.

The Debunking of Myths

Nowadays, it is generally accepted among scholars that there is not any evidence to support the biblical accounts of the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. For instance, it is interesting to mention the land of Goshen, which the pharaoh of Joseph allegedly granted to the Hebrews and from where they left Egypt during the Exodus. According to Cho, it does not appear in Egyptian texts before Israel becomes strongly settled in Palestine.¹⁷ Moreover, there is nothing that suggests that the Israelites were ever in Egypt – not in tombs, papyri, or monumental inscriptions on temple walls. There is also no indication of the existence of Moses outside the Biblical text, who some suppose might have been a collective image of the Hyksos, the West Semitic kings.

Most mainstream archaeologists began doubting the occurrence of the Israelites’ mass Exodus from Egypt and grand-scale wanderings in Sinai’s wilderness due to the lack of archaeological evidence. According to the biblical data, there were at least a few hundred thousand people exiling and wandering over a long period of time.¹⁸ In other areas around the world, contemporary archaeological techniques have been able to detect even the smallest remains of lives of groups and tribes; however, not in this case. Additionally, Cho talks about archaeologists having found a letter from the 13^th century BC, in which an Egyptian border guard reports two slaves escaping from a city.¹⁹ It follows that even a relatively small group of the escaping would not have gone unnoticed by the Egyptians, let alone a group as big as hundreds of thousands.

The assumed route of the Exodus does not topographically match the period of 15^th-13^th centuries BC when it was to have taken place. As per Cho, it rather corresponds to the 7^th century.²⁰ What is more, although the Pentateuch tells of the wanderings in the desert, the overwhelming majority of years were ostensibly spent in the same place: Kadesh Barnea.²¹

Its location has been identified but nothing suggestive of an Exodus narrative has been discovered. In fact, despite numerous expeditions and excavations throughout the Sinai Peninsula, no evidence of occupation before the 10^th century BC, 300 years after the estimated event, has been found. The Israelites were apparently located in Ezion-Geber, which is another site where the search has been conducted and no artifacts dating back to the Exodus have been detected.²² However, what archeology has been able to establish is that in the period of 15^th-11^th BC Canaan was an Egyptian province, therefore, the Israelites could not have fled from the Egyptians by going there.

In accordance with the Bible, the Israelites came from Mesopotamia through Abraham, and after Egyptian slavery, through Moses and Joshua to Canaan, which they took by conquest. Yet the irrefutable proof is that the Israelites arose from a group of tribes that lived in central Palestine at the time.²³ According to Cho, Israel’s origination from Canaan is confirmed by the Merneptah Stele, an inscription by a king in Ancient Egypt, Merneptah.²⁴

Its text is mainly a description of the king’s victory over the Libyans, but a few lines in the end refer to a campaign in Canaan, which was a part of the imperial domains of Egypt then. It includes the first probable mention of the name ‘Israel’ in the archaeological records, and this is the only one until the middle of the 9^th century BC. Scholars agreed that a different group of tribes was then populating some regions between the Canaanite highlands and Mount of Ephraim, having settled there at some uncertain point in time.

In its turn, Canaan’s conquest under Joshua has been invalidated by archaeological efforts as well. According to Cho, most of the places believed to have been ruined by Joshua were uninhabited at that time.²⁵ Jericho had no trace of any settlement in the 13^th century BC, and the earlier 14^th century one, which did take place, was almost insignificant. Cho states that there were no walls in Jericho and, as a consequence, no signs of destruction.²⁶ In such a way, the famous storyline of the Israelites marching along the walled settlement and bringing down the mighty walls of Jericho with the sound of their war trumpets was nothing short of a romantic fabrication.

Previous generations of architects had come to believe that the destruction of several cities spoken about in the Bible – Lachish, Aphek, Megiddo, and Hazor – was actually due to the Israelite invasions. However, as per Cho, there is evidence that these destructions occurred over a span of a century or even longer.²⁷ The causes might have included invasion, social disintegration, and civil unrest. There never was one military force to blame for it, and it could not have happened in one military campaign. The Book of Joshua tells the story of the great conquest and genocide ostensibly approved by a god with no respect for the majority of the existing inhabitants of the Holy Land. Granted, it has not lost its power even today, but it is not history.

The Merging of Histories

In such a way, with the scribes writing Exodus, its origin was not the Egyptian exile, but the story of the Babylonian exiles, and these experiences were retroactively embroidered as the legend of the Exodus. The scribes portrayed their ancestors as ancient Egyptian slaves just as they themselves had been in Babylon. Elms states that they philosophized about surviving this experience and claiming a new promised land.²⁸ Therefore, the exile and post-exile periods served as the catalyst for creating the Old Testament.

In the process of creating a common identity between the Northern and Southern peoples, the scribes consolidated the tradition of Moses/Sinai/Exodus as the key element of Judaism of the Second Temple. Moreover, they effectively constituted a denial of Israel originally arising in Canaan. During this period, two separate editions of Deuteronomy appeared, each of which included a significant rewriting of events.²⁹ The main political goal was to bestow an identity upon those returning from the exile, and the Old Testament provided beliefs relevant to that. For instance, it is said in 1 Kings 9:6: ‘But if you or your descendants […] go off to serve other gods […], then I will cut off Israel from the land I have given them’.³⁰ Here, the message is clear: if one worships other gods they will lose their land.

The Exodus history explains the collapse of the Northern and Southern kingdoms. As per Elms, the explanation is that the text of the Old Testament was developed by Judeans during this period and communicates the perspective of the Southern Kingdom.³¹ It has profoundly Judean prejudices, and the Northern Kingdom’s kings are painted in a very bad light, particularly in the Books of Kings. They are portrayed as traitors, renegades, and opponents of the true continuity of the House of David, and condemned for not being dedicated enough in their devotion to Yahweh, one true god. In addition to that, the Northern Kingdom’s history is depicted as a well-deserved series of continuous disasters.

The Return

When the next generations of Jews returned from Babylon after being absent for seventy years of captivity, not all did. Those who returned, however, were a different people and referred to themselves as the Golah, an elite ‘trembling at God’s word’.³² After the return, they found a prosperous community, which they considered impure as people of this community had not endured what they had endured. Being guided by the prophets Jeremiah and Ezra, they asserted themselves as a community of the Second Temple, for which interbreeding, intermarriage, and trade with locals were strictly prohibited. However, Elms notes that the lack of archaeological findings indicates that there might have been only a small group of returnees.³³ It is unlikely for the elders to have wanted to return due to the duration of the journey, and those who did shape their own fate and built their own community isolated from the locals.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Old Testament cannot be considered a collection of stories about the origins of peoples, events, and prophecies pertaining to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. What it turned into instead is a collection of stories created by the Jewish elite in the post-exile Jerusalem of the 7^th century. It was meant to bestow an identity upon them, despite their connection to the world and the occurrences they wrote about being interrupted, remote, and virtually absent.

References

Bible Gateway. (n.d.). New revised standard version updated edition (NRSVUE). Web.

Brueggemann, W., & Linafelt, T. (2021). An introduction to the Old Testament: The canon and Christian imagination (3^rd ed.). Westminster John Knox Press.

Cho, P. K. K. (2019). Myth, history, and metaphor in the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge University Press.

Elms, E. (2020). Through the lens of the Babylonian Exile. Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page. Web.

Kelle, B. E. (2017). Telling the Old Testament story: God’s mission and God’s people. Abingdon Press.

Timmer, D.C. (n.d.). Enduring Exile: The metaphorization of Exile in the Hebrew Bible. The Gospel Coalition. Web.

Footnotes

1. Kelle, Brad, Telling the Old Testament story: God’s mission and God’s people, (Abingdon Press, 2017), 116.
2. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 4.
3. Brueggemann, Walter, Linafelt, Tod, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 85.
4. Brueggemann, Walter, Linafelt, Tod, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 233.
5. Brueggemann, Walter, Linafelt, Tod, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 517.
6. Ezekiel 37:12-13.
7. Jeremiah 29:10-11.
8. Jeremiah 31:1-2.
9. Isaiah 43:14-15.
10. Psalm 137:4-5.
11. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 7.
12. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 12.
13. Timmer, Dale, Enduring Exile: The Metaphorization of Exile in the Hebrew Bible, (The Gospel Coalition, 2022), 117.
14. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 52.
15. Kelle, Brad, Telling the Old Testament story: God’s mission and God’s people, (Abingdon Press, 2017), 207.
16. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 12.
17. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 15.
18. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 69.
19. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 114.
20. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 148.
21. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 157.
22. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 172.
23. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 192.
24. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 212.
25. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 215.
26. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 245.
27. Cho, Paul. K., Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 246.
28. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 58.
29. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 176.
30. 1 Kings 9:6.
31. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 244.
32. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 144.
33. Elms, Echezkel, Through the Lens of the Babylonian Exile, (Elwyn’s Hebrew Bible Page, 2020), 148.