ALL the Exiles Israel Suffered in Chronological Order(M4A_128K)

Sometime around the year five and eighty six before Christ,

in the alluvial plains east of the Tigris and Euphrates,

a group of survivors sat down by a canal and wept.

The city was gone Jerusalem, the city of David, lay

seven hundred miles behind them in Ash, the temple that

Solomon had built four centuries earlier had been pried apart

at stone by stone by Babylonian soldiers, its bronze pillars

cut up for transport, its gold and silver vessels carried

off as imperial lute. One of those survivors wrote down

what they felt. The poem is preserved in the Hebrew

scriptures as Psalm one hundred thirty seven and the opening

four verses read by the rivers of Babylon. We sat

and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars,

we hung our harps for there our captors asked us

for songs. Our tormentors did demanded songs of joy. They said,

sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can

we sing the songs of the Lord while in a

foreign land? Tit designed for to tat eight pitiub image

harps hung silently on poplars by a foreign river is

for many readers of the Bible, the defining picture of exile.

But it is not the first, it is not the last,

It is not even the largest. It is one stop

on a road that begins centuries before David is born

and continues for another six hundred years after the Babylonian

captives are allowed to go home. Long before the rivers

of Babylon, there were the brick kilns of the Nile Delta,

where Hebrew slaves under Egyptian foremen made the bricks of

Pitham and Rameses. Long before Nebucadnetta, there were the cycles

of the Judges, when Mesopotamian kings, Moabite warlords, Canaanite charioteers,

and Philistine garrisons each in turn pressed Israel into submission

inside its own land. Decades before the fall of Jerusalem,

the Assyrian kings Tiglath Piles of the third Schalmonates of

the fifth, Sagon the Second emptied the Northern kingdom in

a sequence of deportations that produced what later tradition would

call the Ten Lost Tribes. After the Persian return came

the Greeks and after the Greeks came Rome, Vespasian, and

Titus in the year seventy of the Christian era. Hadrian

and his legions in one hundred thirty five, sealing the

longest dispersion of all the Hebrew scriptures themselves, had foreseen

the pattern. In Deuteronomy twenty eight, verse sixty four, Moses

warns the assembled tribes, before they have even crossed the

Jordan into the land they are about too receive, Then

the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one

end of the earth to the other. That sentence became

the lens through which Israel would later read every loss

it suffered. What follows is the chronological order of those losses,

every captivity, every deportation, every dispersion, from the brick pits

of Egypt to the smoking ruins of Bar Kokbar's last fortress,

not as a list of disasters, but as the spine

of a single continuous story, the story of a people

whose identity was forged again and again on foreign ground.

The story of Israel's first exile does not begin with chains.

It begins with a famine and a brother sold into slavery.

Around the year eighteen seventy six, before Christ, using the

conservative chronology that takes the biblical numbers at face value,

a Canaanite shepherd named Jacob, also called Israel, came down

out of the hills above Hebron with seventy souls and

walked into Egypt. Because his sons could know longer feed

their flocks the grain was in Egypt. Jacob's son, Joseph,

was in Egypt two in the second highest office in

the kingdom. After a sequence of betrayals, accusations, and providential

reversals that the Book of Genesis takes thirteen chapters to describe,

the Pharaoh of Joseph's day welcomed his family and gave

them land in the Eastern Delta, a fertile pocket called Goshen,

where the Hebrews settled as cattle herders alongside the canals

of the Nile. For a generation or two, the array worked,

the Hebrews multiplied, the Egyptian crown profited from Joseph's grain administration.

The family of Israel buried its patriarchs in their adopted soil,

but Genesis closes with Joseph's coffins still above ground, awaiting

an exodus that has not yet come, and Exodus opens

with a single sentence that reverses everything in Exodus chapter one,

verses eight through fourteen. The Hebrew text reads, then a

new king to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power

in Egypt. Look, he said to his people, the Israelites

have become far too numerous for us. Come. We must

deal shrewdly with them, or they will become even more numerous.

And if war breaks out, we'll join our enemies, fight

against us, and leave the country. So they put slave

masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and

they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.

But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied

and spread. So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites

and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with

harsh labor in brick and mortar, and with all kinds

of work in the fields. In all their harsh labor,

the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly. That paragraph is the entire

architecture of the first captivity. In summary, a demographic threat,

a political pretext, a program of forced labor, and two

store cities Pithom and Rameses, whose names are not symbolic.

They are real Egyptian sites that archaeologists have been digging

for over a century. Pitham is most often identified with

Telel Muscuta in the Wadi Tumilat, a chain of New

Kingdom storehouses on the eastern edge of the Delta. Rameses

is identified with Piramess, the great capital city built by

Pharaoh Rameses the second around twelve seventy before Christ near

modern Contier. Excavations there by Edgar Push and Manfred Btack

over the past forty years have uncovered enormous mud brick complexes,

military stables for thousands of horses, and a population profile

that included Asiatic Semites laboring in royal construction. What that

labour looked like day to day is not something we

have to imagine. Egyptian scribes recorded it. The Anastasi Papyri,

a group of New Kingdom administrative texts now in the

British Museum, preserve the daily quotas of brickmakers in Pirames,

the number of bricks expected from each man, the supervisors

who counted them, the punishments meeted out when quotas were missed.

The Leiden Papyrus three forty eight mentions distributions of grain

to labourers called a peru hauling stone for the building

projects of Rameses the second. The word a peru related

etymologically to the term Hebrew, designated a class of stateless

workers used as construction labour across the Eastern Mediterranean. Whether

or not every apiru was an Israelite, the Egyptian record

confirms the institutional reality. The Book of Exodus describes Asiatic

Simites in the Eastern Delta working clay into bricks under foreman,

with quotas and rods, building the storehouses and palaces of pharaohs.

The dating of the Bondage and the Exodus is one

of the most contested questions in Biblical archaeology. The Book

of First Kings, Chapter six dates the Exodus four hundred

eighty years before the fourth year of Solomon, which would

place it around fourteen forty six before Christ, the so

called early date defended by scholars such as Bryant Wood

and the late John Bimson. The geographic detail of Pithom

and Ramesses, however, fits the Egyptian nineteenth dynasty under Rameses.

The second, suggesting a late date around twelve sirs fifty

to twelve sixty before Christ, the position held by Kenneth

Kitchen and James Hoffmeyer. Both camps agree on one point

that matters here. The pattern of Asiatic Seamites entering Egypt

during a famine, rising under one favorable regime, and being

reduced to forced labor under a later one is not

biblical fiction. It maps onto a known cycle in Egyptian history.

That cycle is most visible in the period of the

so called Hicksos, Asiatic rulers predominantly West Semitic in language

and culture, who governed northern Egypt from the city of

Avarus between roughly sixteen fifty and fifteen fifty before Christ.

Avarus is the same site that would later be rebuilt

as Pira mess When the Theban dynasty under Ahmose drove

the Hixos out, native Egyptian rule reasserted itself with vehement xenophobia,

and Asiatic populations who remained in the Eastern Delta found

themselves recategorised from settlers to servants. Whatever the exact chronological fit,

the biblical phrase a new king, to whom Joseph meant

nothing describes a regime change of a kind well documented

in Egyptian sources. The duration of the bondage is given

twice in the Bible, in two different ways. In Genesis fifteen,

verses thirteen and fourteen, the Lord tells Abraham, while the

patriarch is still alive in Canaan, know for certain that

for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in

a country not their own, and that they will be

enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation

they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out

with great possessions. The Book of Exodus, chapter twelve, verses

forty and forty one gives a slightly fuller figure. Now,

the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt

was four hundred and thirty years. At the end of

the four hundred and thirty years to the very day

all the Lord's divisions left Egypt. The traditional reconciliation, going

back at least to the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, treats

the four hundred years of Genesis as the period of

full oppression after Joseph's death, and the four hundred and

thirty years of Exodus as the total span from Jacob's

arrival in Goshen to the First Passover. Whether one reads

the numbers as exact, as round generational figures, or as

theological symbolism, the point of the text is unmistakable. The

captivity was long enough that no one alive at the

exodus had ever known freedom. The first non biblical mention

of Israel by name appears at the other end of

this period. The Menpta Stealay, a black granite victory inscription

erected by Pharaoh Menepta around twelfth and eight before Christ

and discovered by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in eighteen ninety six,

lists peoples defeated by Egypt in a levantine campaign. Among

them written with the Egyptian determinative for a people rather

than a place, is the name Israel. Whatever the date

one assigns to the exodus itself, by the late thirteenth

century before Christ, Israel is already a recognizable population in

Canaan outside Egypt, settled and known to Egyptian scribes. The

flight from the brick pits had happened. The exodus is

not a single event in the Biblical story. It is

the event. It supplies the language by which every later

prophet will describe deliverance, the legal framework by which Israel

will define justice toward foreigners and slaves, and the liturgical

core of the Passover. The Jewish families still celebrate three

thousand years later. But for the present arc, what matters

is what came before the deliverance, not after, Before Sinai,

before the conquest, before the judges and the king things,

there was bondage long enough to forget, structured enough to crush,

ended only by an act the Hebrews would credit not

to a general but to their God. The first exile

of Israel was Egypt. The pattern began there. The Exodus

delivered Israel from one foreign master. The conquest under Joshua,

narrated in the Book that bears his name, planted the

twelve tribes in the highlands of Canaan and gave each

its allotted territory. But the deliverance was not final. For

roughly the next three and a half centuries, From around

thirteen eighty before Christ down to the rise of Saul

around ten fifty, Israel lived through a recurring nightmare that

the Book of Judges treats as the spiritual signature of

the era. The tribes never went into foreign exile. During

this period, they never left the land, and yet again

and again foreign powers occupied that land around them, levied

tribute from them and reduced them to subjugation in the

very inheritance God had given. The Book of Judges puts

the diagnosis at the front. In chapter two, verses fourteen

through nineteen, the narrator pulls back from any single episode

and describes the cycle as a whole. In his anger

against Israel, the Lord gave them into the hands of

raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands

of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer

able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the

hand of the Lord was against them, to defeat them,

just as he had sworn to them. They were in

great distress. Then the Lord raised up judges who saved

them out of the hands of these raiders. Yet they

would not listen to their judges, but prostituted themselves to

other gods and worshiped them. They quickly turned from the

ways of their ancestors, who had been obedient to the

Lord's commands. Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them,

he was with the Judge and saved them out of

the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived,

for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those

who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the Judge died,

the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those

of their ancestors, following other gods and serving and worshiping them.

They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways.

That passage describes a four beat cycle. The rest of

the book plays out six times in sequence apostasy, oppression,

cry to the Lord, deliverance through a judge. Each oppressor

comes from a different direction, testing every border of the

new nation. Together they constitute what some commentators call exile

inside the land. The first oppressor comes from the far northeast.

Judges Chapter three names him Kushan Rishathaim, king of Aram Naharim,

a region the Hebrew text places in Upper Mesopotamia between

the Tigris and the Euphrates, the same world from which

Abraham himself had once been called out for eight years

somewhere around thirteen seventy before Christ, Israel paid tribute to

a Mesopotamian overlord. The deliverer. The text raises up is Othniel,

a nephew of Caleb from the tribe of Judah, who

breaks the Mesopotamian grip and gives the country forty years

of rest. The detail is brief but theologically loaded. The

very land of Israel's ancestors becomes the source of its

first foreign humiliation. The second oppression comes from the immediate southeast. Egglun,

king of Moab, allied with Ammonites and Amalekites, crosses the Jordan,

takes the city of Palms Jericho, and holds Israel under

tribute for eighteen years. The Book of Judges spends almost

an entire chapter on his death, narrating how a left

handed Benjamin named Ehoud delivers a tribute payment, requests a

private audience, and drives an eighteen inch dagger into the

king's belly. Egglund's death triggers an Israelite uprising at the

fords of the Jordan. Moab's army is cut down, and

the land has rest for eighty years. The geographic point matters.

The Moabites had not stayed across the river. They had

pushed into the Jordan valley itself, occupying a city Joshua

had reduced to Ruin a few generations earlier, and using

it as a forward base inside Israelite territory. The third

oppression comes from the far north. Jabin of Hazor commands

a coalition described in Judges chapter four as having nine

hundred iron chariots under his general Sisera. For twenty years,

Cicera's chariot army dominates the lowlands of the Jezreel Valley

and cuts the northern tribes off from the central highlands.

The deliverance comes through the judge Deborah, the warrior Barrak,

and a nomadic woman named Jail, who drives a tent

peg through Sisera's skull while he sleeps in her tent.

The Song of Deborah, one of the oldest poems in

the Hebrew Bible, describes the chariot army being washed away

by the swollen torrent of the Kishan River. Haeser itself

has been excavated for over seventy years. Yigael Yadin's expedition

in the late nineteen fifties, continued by Amnon Bentur and

Sharon Zuckerman through the present, have laid bare a massive

late bronze age city fortified palatial with cuneiform archives in Acadian,

destroyed by a violent fire late in the thirteenth century

before Christ. Whether that destruction layer belongs to Joshua's earlier

conquest or to a later phase of fighting is debated,

but the archaeological reality of Hazer as the largest Canaanite

city of its era, confirms the kind of regional power

Judges describes. The fourth oppression is the Midianites. For seven years,

raiders from the deserts east of the Jordan sweep into

the agricultural valleys of central Israel at every harvest, stripping fields,

slaughtering livestock, and forcing the population into caves. Judges Chapter six,

verses one through six, describes the conditions the Israelites did

evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven

years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites.

Because the power of midian was so oppressive, the Israelites

prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves, and strongholds.

Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites, and

other Eastern peoples invaded the country. They camped on the

land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza,

and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep,

nor cattle, nor donkeys. They came up with their livestock

and their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible

to count them or their camels. They invaded the land

to ravage it. The deliverer is Gideon, a wheat thresher

from the small clan of Abeza in Manassa, who who

routes the Midianite host with three hundred men, torches and

trumpets at the Spring of Harod. The detail of camels

in that passage is more historically dense than it first appears.

The militarized use of domesticated camels for desert raiding emerges

in the archaeological record across the southern Levant and Arabia,

precisely in the early Iron Age, the period Judges describes.

The fifth oppression treated in Judges Chapters ten and eleven

comes from the Ammonites, who for eighteen years subject the

Israelite tribes east of the Jordan, Reuben Gad and the

half tribe of Manassa, and begin pushing west into Ephraim

and Judah. The deliverer is Jephtha, a Gileadite outcast and

bandit chief whom the elders of his tribe recall from

exile to lead the war against Ammon. Jeftha wins the war,

but pays for it with the life of his only daughter,

owing to a rash vow he had sworn before the campaign.

The episode preserves a memory of Israel's eastern frontier under

sustained pressure from a kingdom whose capital, Rabbith Ammon modern Amen,

still carries the name today. The sixth and final oppression

is the Philistines. Judges Chapter thirteen, verse one summarizes it

in a single sentence, again, the Israelites did evil in

the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them

into the hands of the Philistines for forty years. Forty

years is the longest oppression of the entire book, and

it does not end with a clean deliverance. The judge

associated with the Philistine period is Samson, whose career is

a long sequence of personal feuds, betrayals, and violent reprisals

against Philistine cities along the host plane, feuds that weaken

the Philistines but never break them. The Philistine threat will

pass on into the Books of Samuel and only be

decisively contained generations later under King David. The Philistines themselves

were newcomers. They appear in Egyptian records on the mortuary

temple of Rameses the Third at Medinet Habu as one

of the Sea Peoples, a coalition of Aegean groups who

descended on the Eastern Mediterranean around eleven seventy five before

Christ collapsing the Hittite Empire, raiding Egypt and settling in

five cities along the coast of Canaan, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron,

and Gath. Excavations at tel Es Safi, identified with Biblical

Gath by Aaron Mayor of Barylan University, have produced a

Gean style pottery, hearths, and an early inscription of a

name cognate with Goliath, all dated to the late twelfth

and eleventh centuries before Christ. The era of Philistine oppression

aligns precisely with the consolidation of Philistine cities in the

archaeological record. The Biblical figures for the period, taken at

face value and added end to end, exceed four hundred years,

too long to fit easily between the conquest and saul.

Scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen and Eugene Merrill argue that

several of the oppressions and deliverances overlap regionally, compressing the

total period into roughly three centuries. Israel. Finkelstein and others,

working from surface surveys of small, unwalled hill country villages

that appear suddenly in the Central Highlands around twelve hundred

before Christ, describe the era as the slow emergence of

an Israelite identity out of a fragmented Canaanite landscape. Whichever

reconstruction one prefers, the picture is the same, a small,

decentralized people under recurring foreign pressure, surviving by alternating between

collapse and charismatic deliverance. What the Era of the Judges

teaches the rest of the Biblical story is the category

of exile in place. Israel was not transported, it was

not deported. Its tabernacle at Shiloh was not yet destroyed,

and yet a Mesopotamian king collected its tribute. A Moabite

king occupied its city, a Canaanite chariot army cut its highways,

Midianite raiders stripped its fields, an Ammonite kingdom subjugated its

eastern tribes, and a Philistine confederacy ruled its coast for

forty years and was theirs only in name. When the

next phase of the story arrives, the demand for a king,

like all the other nations, it arrives out of the

long memory of these centuries, and the prophets who later

interpret the destruction of the kingdom will reach back to

the cycles of Judges too, argue that exile in its

fullest form was already happening here four hundred years before Babylon.

By the eighth century before Christ, the Israel that had

pleaded for a king in the days of Samuel had

become two kingdoms. Solomon's empire had split at his death

around nine thirty before Christ into a southern kingdom called

Judah ruled from Jerusalem by the descendants of David, and

a northern kingdom that retained the name Israel, ruled successively

from Shechem, Tirza, and finally Samaria by a sequence of dynasties.

The Books of Kings treat as illegitimate. From the start,

the two kingdoms quarreled, sometimes allied, occasionally fought each other

in open conflict, and watched the rise of a new

power to their northeast that would eventually absorb one of

them whole. That power was Assyria, from its heart land

on the upper Tigris around the cities of Asher, Nineveh

and Kola. The Neo Assyrian Empire had risen under a

sequence of warrior kings Usha Nasirple the second, Shalmanesa the

third adad Nirari the third, who methodically extended Assyrian rule

westward through the petty kingdoms of northern Syria. By the

middle of the ninth century, Israel was already paying tribute.

The black obelisk of Shulmanates of the Third, discovered at

Kala by Austin Layard in eighteen forty six and now

in the British Museum, depicts the Israelite kings King Jehu

or his envoy, kneeling before the Assyrian throne and presenting silver,

gold and tin. That submission brought time, it did not

by permanence. The man who turned tribute into territory was

Tigleth Piliser the Third, who took the Assyrian throne in

seven forty five before Christ and spent the next two decades,

professionalizing the army, reorganizing the provinces, and inaugurating a policy

that would change the political map of the Near East.

That policy was mass deportation. Earlier empires had taken hostages,

exacted tribute, and sometimes slaughtered populations. Tiglath Pilisa systematized something different,

the wholesale uprooting of conquered peoples and their resettlement in

distant provinces deliberately mixed with other deportees severed from ancestral

land and bound to the Assyrian crown by sheer dislocation.

The Israeli scholar Bustonet Odad, in his nineteen seventy nine

study of mass deportation in the Neo Assyrian Empire, calculates

from Assyrian sources that more than four million people were

forcibly relocated by this method over the course of three centuries.

Israel was one of its earliest northern victims. The first

deportation of Israelites took place in the year seven hundred

thirty four before christ Becca, King of Israel, had joined

a coalition with resin of Damascus against Assyria and had

attempted to coerce King a has of Judah into joining them.

AHAs instead called Tiglath Pileisa South. The Assyrian campaign of

seven hundred and thirty four to seven thirty two swept

through the Galilee, over ran Damascus, and removed entire regions

from Isla Israelite control. Second Kings, Chapter fifteen, verse twenty

nine records the result with a single grim sentence. In

the time of Peker, King of Israel, Tiglath Pilisa, King

of Assyria, came and took aijon Abel, Beth Maka, genoah

Kadesh and Hazer. He took Gilead and Galilee, including all

the land of Naftali, and deported the people to Assyria.

That single verse erases the northern third of the Israelite

kingdom Nafdali Zebulun and the Transjordanian tribes east of the

Jordan are stripped from the map and their populations marched

to Assyrian provinces. Tiglath Pilisa's own annals, recovered in fragments

from the ruined palace at Kayla and reconstructed by the

assyriologist heim Tadmar, claimed the deportation of more than thirteen

thousand inhabitants of the gas Pekkar was assassinated by Hoshea,

the last king of Israel, who took the throne under

Assyrian patronage and resumed paying tribute. But Hoshea too miscalculated

around seven hundred and twenty five before Christ, judging that

Egypt might prove a more useful patron than Assyria, he

stopped sending tribute and reached for an Egyptian alliance. Tiglathpeleaser

was now dead, succeeded by his son Chalmanes of the Fifth,

who responded by marching directly on the Israelite capital. Samaria,

founded by Omri a century and a half earlier on

a steep hill in the central Highlands, was a fortified

city built around a royal acropolis. It held out for

three years. The siege began in roughly seven twenty five

and ended in seven twenty two. Schalmones of the fifth

died in the closing months of the campaign, and the

conquested was completed by his successor, Sargon the Second, who

would claim the credit in his official inscriptions Second Kings,

Chapter seventeen, verse six opens the obituary. In the ninth

year of Hushea, the king of Assyria, captured Samaria and

deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halla,

in Gozan on the Haba River, and in the towns

of the Meads. Hala and Gozan have been located in

northeastern Syria on the upper waters of the Habor and

Balk Rivers. The towns of the Meads lie far to

the east in what is now western Iran. The deportees

were scattered across a band of empire stretching from upper

Mesopotamia to the Zagros Mountains, deliberately dispersed so that no

concentrated population of Israelites could form a new center of resistance.

Sargon's own version of events is record ordered on the

walls of his palace at Corsabad and on a number

of clay prisms recovered from Nimroud and Nineveh. The Nimroud prism,

discovered in nineteen fifty two gives the figure most often cited,

twenty seven thous who one hundred and ninety inhabitants of

Samaria deported, the city's chariots impressed into the Assyrian army.

The cult objects of Samaria carried off, and foreigners from Babylonia,

Hamath and elsewhere settled in the depopulated land. Reliefs from

Corsabad now in the Louver, and the British Museum depict

Assyrian soldiers leading away long columns of bound captives past

the burned remains of conquered cities. Whether or not the

specific scenes depict Samaria, the iconography of mass deportation is unmistakable.

Israel had become one of those columns. The Book of

Second Kings, having narrated the fall, pauses for what is

essentially a theological autopsy. Verses seven through twenty three of

chapter seventeen list the reasons the Lord allowed his people

to be uprooted. They had worshiped other gods, followed the

religious customs of the nations that had been driven out

before them, set up sacred stones and a share of

polls on every high hill, served idols, practiced divination, and

rejected every prophet the Lord had sent to warn them.

The chapter closes in verse twenty three. So the people

of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria,

and they are still there. The phrase still there was

true at every moment the chapter was being read in

every generation that followed. The prophets had said as much

before it happened. Amos, who preached in the Northern Kingdom

during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam the Second, a generation

before the fall, had told the citizens of Bethel and

Samaria that their cult of golden calves and their oppression

of the poor had set them on a course they

could no longer reverse. Amos chapter five, verse twenty seven

names the destination directly. Therefore, I will send you into

exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord whose name is God Almighty.

The Assyrian provinces to which Israel was deported lay precisely

beyond Damascus on the road northeast. Hoseiah, prophesying through the

chaos of the kingdom's last decades, was equally specific about

the outcome. In Hoseiah chapter nine, verse seventeen, the prophet

pronounces the verdict in a single line, My God will

reject them because they have not obeyed him. They will

be wanderers among the nations. That phrase wanderers among the

nations captures in advance the sociological reality of the deportation.

The deportees were not annihilated. They were dispersed, intermixed, and

absorbed into populations that were not theirs. What happened to

the deportees afterward is one of the great unresolved questions

of Biblical history. The Assyrian policy of dispersal and intermixing

was effective within two generations. The deported Israelite population had

no continuing political identity in the historical record. A few

personal names from the Haber region recovered on later cuneiform

tablets preserve the divine element of the Hebrew name of God,

evidence that some Israelite families maintained their identity in the diaspora,

but as a corporate people, the Ten Tribes of the

North dissolved into the population of the Empire. The foreigners

settled in their place, in turn intermarriage with the Israelites

who had remained behind in the central highlands, and produced

the population that would later be known as the Samaritans,

distrusted by Southern Jews and worshiping the Lord on Mount

Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. The legend of the Ten

Lost Tribes that they survived intact somewhere beyond the rivers

of Assyria awaiting an eschatological return, emerged in apocryphal literature

in the centuries that followed and has had a long

life since, attaching itself at various times to populations as

far afield as the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, the Bene Israel

of India, and the Lember of Southern Africa. As history,

the evidence does not support survival as a corporate ethnic

body theology. The figure persists in the later prophets as

a wound in the people of God that has not

yet been healed. In the year seven hundred twenty two

before Christ, then the Northern Kingdom of Israel ceased to exist.

Its capital was emptied, its royal house extinguished, its territory

administered as an Assyrian province under the new name Samarina.

Its citizens scattered from the Upper Harbor to the foothills

of the Zagros. Of the twelve tribes that had crossed

the Jordan with Joshua, ten were now gone. Only Judah remained,

and Judah's reckoning was not far off. The seventh century

before Christ was the Indian summer of the Southern Kingdom.

While the Assyrian provinces to the north absorbed their deportees

and forgot their old name, Judah survived. Jerusalem still stood,

the Temple of Solomon still stood the line of David

still occupied the throne. The reformer king Hezikia had withstood

an Assyrian siege under Sir nacarib in Sevan Hogan before Christ,

and a century later his great grandson Josiah had presided

over the most thorough religious reform in the sir Kingdom's history,

recovering a long lost scroll of the law from the

temple archives and purging the high places. To any one

living in Jerusalem in six twenty two, the future of

Judah looked secure. It was not. Within a single generation

the city would be undone, the temple torn down, and

the population of the kingdom marched east to a new

capital on the Euphrates. The destroyer would not be Assyria,

by then a fading power. It would be Babylon, the

resurgent Southern Mesopotamian empire that had overthrown Assyria in Sia

six hundred and twelve before Christ, when the armies of

NEBOPOLASA of Babylon and the Meads brought down Nineveh. The

new heir of Mesopotamian dominion was Nebopalasa's son nebukud Neza

the Second, who took the throne in six o five

and set about systematically extending Babylonian control over the entire Levante.

The first blow fell in the same year. In the

spring of six o five, nebucud Nezer, still crown Prince,

met an Egyptian army under Pharaoh Necho the Second at

Carcamish on the Upper Euphrates and routed it. The Babylonian Chronicle,

housed in the British Museum Tablet number two one, nine

forty six and edited by Donald Wisemann in nineteen fifty six,

narrates the campaign in Laconic Accadian. Nebukud Nezer crossed the river,

broke the Egyptian forces at Carcamish, pursued the survivors as

far as Hammoth, and then conquered the whole land of

Hatti Syria Palestine for Judah. The consequences were immediate. The

Book of Daniel opens in the aftermath. Daniel, Chapter one,

verses one through four, sets the scene. In the third

year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, nebuchad Nezar,

king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it, and

the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, King of Judah, into his hand,

along with some of the articles from the Temple of God.

These he carried off to the temple of his God

in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his God.

Then the king ordered Ashburnhaz, chief of his court officials,

to bring into the King's service some of the Israelites

from the royal family and the nobility. Young men without

any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every very kind

of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to

serve in the King's palace. He was to teach them

the language and literature of the Babylonians. That brief description

is the first deportation, small in numbers, but immense and

symbolic weight. Sacred vessels from the Jerusalem Temple were now

sitting in the treasury of the Babylonian god Marduk. Royal

sons of Judah, including Daniel and his three companions, were

being trained to serve a foreign king. Jehoiakim left on

the throne as a Babylonian vassal, paid tribute for several years,

and then revolted. He died before Nebukudnez's punitive expedition reached

the city. His son Jehoiakin, an eighteen year old boy,

took the throne for three months and surrendered the city

in March of five ninety seven before Christ. The Babylonian

Chronicle records the surrender in two crisp lindes. In the

seventh year of nebukud Nezzar, the King of Babylon mustered

his troops marched to the city of Judah, captured the

city on the second of Adah took the king prisoner

and appointed a king of his own choice. The Biblical

account in Second Kings Chapter twenty four, verses fourteen through

sixteen gives the human numbers. He carried all Jerusalem into exile,

all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled

workers and artisans, a total of ten thousand. Only the

poorest people of the land were left. Nebukudnzer took Jehoyakin

captive to Babylon. He also took from Jerusalem to Babylon

the king's mother, his wives, his officials, and the prominent

people of the land. The King of Babylon also deported

to Babylon the entire force of s seven thousand fighting men,

strong and fit for war, and a thousand skilled workers

and artisans. Among that second wave of deportees was a

young priest named Ezekiel. Five years after his arrival in Babylonia,

settled in a refugee community by an irrigation canal called

the Kabah in the southern Plain, Ezekiel received the call

that would make him the great prophet of the exile.

Ezekiel Chapter one, verses one through three places the moment

exactly in my thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on

the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by

the Kaba River, the heavens were opened, and I saw

visions of God. On the fifth of the month. It

was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiakin.

The word of the Lord came to Ezekiel, the priest,

the son of Rusi, by the Kaba River in the

land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the Lord

was on him. The vision that followed wheals within wheels,

four living creatures, a throne of sapphire above the firmament,

is delivered deliberately in the diaspora. Back in Jerusalem, the

King nebukud Nezza had installed in Jehoiachin's place was Zedekiah,

an uncle of the deposed king. Zedekiah held the throne

for eleven years. Under increasing pressure from a pro Egyptian

faction at court. The prophet Jeremiah, who had been preaching

since the days of Josiah, warned him relentlessly that resistance

to Babylon was not only politically suicidal, but theologically wrong.

The Lord himself had handed the city over to nebukud

Neza for a fixed period of judgment. In Jeremiah Chapter

twenty five, Verses eleven and twel the prophet had named

the duration in advance. This whole country will become a

desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the King of

Babylon seventy years. But when the seventy years are fulfilled,

I will punish the King of Babylon and his nation,

the land of the Babylonians for their guilt, declares the Lord,

and will make it desolate forever. Zedekiah did not listen.

In five eighty nine before Christ, encouraged by promises of

Egyptian help, he rebelled the Babylonian army marched south, sealed

off Jerusalem, and reduced the surrounding fortified cities one by one.

The agony of those last months survives in a remarkable find,

the Lakish Letters, a small archive of Ostrica pottery fragments

inscribed in ink, discovered in the gatehouse of the fortified

city of Lakish during excavations led by James Starkey in

nineteen thirty five. The letters of field reports from Judean

officers back to a commander in Lakish. One of them,

Ostracon four, ends with the line, we are watching for

the signal fires of Lakish, according to all the signs

my Lord has given, because we cannot see a Zeka.

Jeremiah chapter thirty four names Lakish and Azeka as the

last two fortified cities holding out alongside Jerusalem. The Lakish

letters were written as though signal fires were going dark.

Jerusalem itself fell in the summer of five and eighty

six before Christ. Second Kings Chapter twenty five, verses eight

through twelve, records the end with administrative precision. On the

seventh day of the fifth month in the nineteenth year

of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. Nebu's Arudan commander of the

Imperial Guard, an official of the King of Babylon, came

to Jerusalem. He set fire to the Temple of the Lord,

the Royal Palace, and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every

important building he burned down. The whole Babylonian army under

the commander of the Imperial Guard, broke down the walls

around Jerusalem. Nebrazarad and the commander of the Guard carried

into exile the people who remained in the city, along

with the rest of the populace and those who had

deserted to the King of Babylon. But the commander left

behind some of the poorest people of the land to

work the vineyards and fields. The Saijohi Temple that Solomon

had built, the building that had stood for nearly four

centuries as the architectural center of Israelite worship, was now ash.

The Ark of the Covenant disappears from the historical record

at this moment and is never mentioned again. Zedekiah, captured

at the fords of the Jordan trying to flee, was

brought before nebuchad Netta at his field headquarters in Ribla,

and led in chains to Babylon. The line of David

having ruled Jerusalem for more than four hundred years was

extinguished as a political reality in a single afternoon. What

life looked like for the deportees is no longer a

matter of speculation. Beginning in the late nineteen nineties, the

assyriologists Lorrie Pearce and Cornelia Vunch began publishing a corpus

of cuneiform tablets that had appeared on the antiquities market

and were eventually acquired by an Israeli collector. The tablets,

more than two hundred of them, dating to the sixth

and fifth centuries before Christ, record the daily transactions of

a Judean community settled at a place the texts call

El Yahoudo, the city of the Judeans in the southern

Babylonian Plain. The tablets showed Judeans buying and selling fields,

leasing oxen, paying taxes to the Persian crown, lending silver

to neighbours, and naming their children with Hebrew names that

include the divine element of the Lord. They are not

the records of slaves. They are the records of a

settled community with property contracts and an internal life exiles

who had built something on foreign soil. The seventy years

Jeremiah had named were already running. In five point thirty

nine before Christ, when the city of Babylon would fall

to a Persian king named Cyrus, the count would be

nearly complete. Babylon did not last long. Less than fifty

years after Nebuchadnezar's army had reduced Jerusalem to ash, the

city that had carried the deportees east was itself overrun.

In October of the year five thirty nine before Christ,

the army of a Persian king named Cyrus, the second

founder of the Achaemenid Empire, marched into Babylon along the

channel of the Euphrates and took the city with almost

no fighting. The Babylonian Chronicle and the contemporary Greek historians

described the takeover as nearly bloodless. The city's last king, Nabonidus,

had been absent from the capital for years, residing in

the Arabian oasis of Tama. The Babylonian priesthood alienated from

him opened the gates. The Neo Babylonian Empire ended in

a single autumn afternoon. Cyrus governed differently the Assyrian and

Babylonian kings before him had been billed as of empire

by deportation. Cyril reversed the policy. Where his predecessors had

uprooted populations and scattered them, he restored where they had

carried off cult statues from conquered cities and stored them

in Babylonian treasuries. He sent them back to their original sanctuaries.

The shift was not theological, Cyrus was not a worshiper

of the God of Israel, but it was structural, and

it transformed the political conditions of the Jewish exile within

months of the Persian conquest. The most famous artifact from

this moment is a clay barrel inscribed in Cuneiform Akcadian,

discovered by Homers Rassam in eighteen seventy nine in the

ruins of the Assegula Temple at Babylon and now in

the British Museum under the catalog number nine O nine Tousero.

The Cyrus Cylinder, as it is called, was deposited as

a foundation document when Cyrus restored the Temple of Marduk.

Its forty lines of text described Cyrus's conquest of Babylon

as a liberation, list the cities to which he returned

cult statues, and announce a general policy of allowing displaced

populations to return to their homelands. The text does not

name Jerusalem specifically, but it announces in royal voice exactly

the kind of decree that the Book of Ezra credits

to Cyrus in the same year. Ezra Chapter one, verses

one through four gives the Jewish version. In the first

year of Cyrus King of Persia, in order to fulfill

the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord

moved the heart of Cyrus, King of Persia, to make

a proclamation throughout his realm, and also to put it

in writing. This is what Cyrus King of Persia says.

The Lord, the God of Heaven, has given me all

the kingdoms of the earth, and he has appointed me

to build a temple for him at Jerusalem inn Judah.

Any of his people among you, may their God be

with them, and let them go up to Jerusalem in

Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God

of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and in

any locality where survivors may now be living. The people

are to provide them with silver and gold, with goods

and livestock, and with free will offerings for the Temple

of God in Jerusalem. That edict dated to the first

year of Cyrus's rule over Babylon, five and thirty eight

before Christ closes the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible.

The book of Second Chronicles ends with the same proclamation

in its final verses, leaving the reader on a note

of return. The seventy years Jeremiah had wanted out from

the first deportation under Nebuchadnezza were nearing there end. What

is striking is that the prophet Isaiah, working in Jerusalem

more than a century and a half before Cyrus was born,

had named him by name. The Book of Isaiah, chapter

forty four, verse twenty eight include Cyrus by name in

a divine speech, who says of Cyrus, he is my shepherd,

and will accomplish all that I please. He will say,

of Jerusalem, let it be rebuilt, and of the temple,

let its foundations be laid. Critical scholarship typically attributes that

passage to a sixth century anonymous prophet writing during the

exile itself, often called Jutero Isaiah, who would have been

a contemporary of Cyrus. Conservative readings hold that the eighth

century Isaiah of Jerusalem himself wrote it predicted. Either way,

Cyrus enters the biblical record as the unwitting servant of

a God whose plan he is executing. The first wave

of returnees set out from Babylonia in five hundred thirty

eight or five hundred thirty seven before Christ, under the

leadership of a Davidic prince named Sheesh Bazaar, identified in

some readings with the figure also called zerube Bell. The

Book of Ezra gives a list of the returning families

that totals just under fifty thousand people, a fraction of

the Jewish population now scattered through Babylonia. They carried with

them the temple vessels Nebuchadnezza had taken sixty years earlier.

They reached Jerusalem, set up an altar on the ruins

of the old temple platform, and began to lay the

foundations of a new sanctuary, construction stalled for almost two decades,

hindered by opper position from the surrounding population. The prophets

Hagai and Zechariah preaching in Jerusalem in five twenty before

Christ pushed the project forward. The second Temple was completed

in five hundred sixteen before Christ, almost exactly seventy years

after the destruction of the first. A second wave came

in four hundred fifty eight under Ezra, a priestly scribe

with a royal commission from the Persian king art Exerxes,

the first to reorganize the religious life of the province.

Ezra's mission was textual and disciplinary. He brought a copy

of the Law of Moses, taught it publicly, and presided

over a painful covenant renewal. A third wave came in

four hundred forty five under Nehemiah, a Jewish layman serving

as cupbearer to art Exerxes, who returned to Jerusalem with

imperial authorization to rebuild the city walls. The Book of

Nehemiah opens with the moment of his commission. Neemiah Chapter one,

verses one through three, describes how he received the news

that prompted his return the words of Nahemiah, son of Hakalaiah.

In the month of Kislef in the twentieth year, while

I was in the citadel of Susa, Hannanni, one of

my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and

I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived

the exile, and also about Jerusalem. They said to me,

those who survived the exile and are back in the

province are in great trouble and disgrace. The Wall of

Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned

with fire. The walls were rebuilt in fifty two days.

The province of Yehood, as it was now called, was

a small Persian administrative unit with a tiny population, a

rebuilt temple, a restored law, and a refortified capital. From

a Jewish theological standpoint, the return was real. From a

demographic standpoint, it was something else. The majority of the

deportees never came back. The Babylonian Jewish community settled at

Al Yahudu and other sites in the Southern Plain, persisted

under Persian, Hellenistic, Parthian, and Sasanian rule, and would eventually

produce the great rabbinic academies of Sura and Pumbadita that

gave the Jewish world the Babylonian Talmud. A thousand years later,

a separate Jewish population descended from refugees who had fled

to Egypt. During the years around five and eighty six

persisted in the Nile Delta. Most strikingly, an entire Jewish

military colony existed at the southern frontier of the Persian Empire,

on an island in the Nile called Elephantine, near modern Assoan.

The Elephantine Papyri, a corpus of Aramaic documents excavated between

the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties and edited in

modern times by the Israeli scholar bezelel Porten, document the

inner life of this colony in detail. The Jewish soldiers

there had a temple to the God they called Yahoo,

distinct from the Jerusalem Temple they observed Passover. In four

and ten before Christ, that temple was destroyed in a

local riot, and the community wrote a letter preserved on

papyrus to the Persian governor Bogous in Jerusalem, requesting assistance

with rebuilding it. Even in the late fifth century before Christ,

more than one hundred years after the supposed return, large

Jewish populations were not in Judah. The pattern would only

intensively after Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in

the three hundred and thirties before Christ, his successors founded

new Greek style cities across the Eastern Mediterranean, and Jewish

populations migrated into them in large numbers. By the third

century before Christ, the Jewish quarter of Alexandria in Egypt

was perhaps the largest Jewish community in the world. It

was for the Greek speaking Jews of Alexandria that the

Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in the work known

as the Septuagint. Jewish communities thrived in Antioch, Ephesus, Syrene,

and dozens of other cities by the first century of

the Christian era. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria estimated

that as many Jews lived outside the Land of Israel

as inside it, possibly more. Josian return then did not

undo the exile. It rebuilt a small province around a

small temple. It restored the cult, the law, and the

city walls, but it did not restore the people to

a single homeland. From five hundred thirty eight before Christ onward,

the Jewish people were a people of many homes, one

of them in Judah. The rest scattered from the Tigris

to the Nile. The next blow when it came, would

not return any of them to Jerusalem, it would empty

Jerusalem itself. The Persian period gave way to the Greek,

and the Greek period gave way eventually to the Roman.

After Alexander the Great's empire fragmented in the late fourth

century before Christ, the land of Judah passed through the

hands of his successors, first the Potolemies of Egypt, then

the Seleucids of Syria, whose attempt to suppress the practice

of Judaism in the second century before Christ provoked the

Maccabean Revolt and a brief eighty year period of Jewish

self rule under the Hasmanian dynasty. That independence ended in

sixty three before Christ, when the Roman general Pompey marched

into Jerusalem and incorporated Judea into the Roman provincial system.

For roughly a century and a half, the arrangement was

uneasy but workable. The Romans installed local clients, most famously

Herod the Great, who massively expanded the Second Temple between

nineteen before Christ and sixty four of the Christian era

and ruled the province through procurators based at Caesarea. Tensions

accumulated heavy taxation, procurator misconduct, The rise of armed Zealot factions,

and a series of provocations between Jews and the gentile

populations of mixed cities pushed the province toward a confrontation

that finally broke out in the spring of sixty six

of the Christian Era. The First Jewish War began with

the expulsion of the Roman garrison from Jerusalem and the

seizure of the fortress of Masada by Jewish rebels. Nero,

then Emperor, dispatched the experienced general Vespasian with three legions

to suppress the revolt. By the year sixty eight, Vespasian

had brought Galilee, the Golan, and the coastal Plain back

under Roman control. The chronicler of those campaigns is the

Jewish priest and aristocrat Joseph ben Mattathias, who became a

Roman client under the name Flavius Josephus and wrote The

Jewish War, the most detailed eyewitness account of the conflict

to survive from antiquity. His seven books, composed in Greek

for a Roman audience in the seventies and eighties, remained

the principal source for everything that follows. Vespasian was preparing

to march on Jerusalem, when the political turmoil that followed

Nero's death in sixty eight pulled him back. After a

year of civil disorder among rival claimants, the so called

Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian was acclaimed emperor by

his troops in the East. He left the Judean campaign

in the hands of his son Titus, who arrived before

Jerusalem with four legions in the spring of seventy. The

siege lasted from April to August. Jerusalem was packed with

pilgrims who had come for Passover and were trapped behind

the Roman lines. When the encirclement was completed, factional rivalry

between the Jewish leaders John of Gishala, Simon Bargiura, and

Eliezer Benson Simon paralyzed the city's defense and consumed the

food stores. Famine set in. Jesus of Nazareth had described

all of this almost forty years earlier. The Gospel of Luke,

chapter twenty one, verses twenty through twenty two preserves his

prediction in the days before his death. When you see

Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its

desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea,

flee to the mountains. Let those in the city get out,

and let those in the country not enter the city,

for this is the time of punishment, in fulfillment of

all that has been written. Two verses later, the same

chapter ends with the line that Jerusalem will be trampled

on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles

are fulfilled. Tradition records that the Christian commune Unity of

Jerusalem heeded that warning and left the city before the

encirclement was completed, taking refuge in the decapitalist town of

Pella across the Jordan. The fourth century church historian Eusebius

preserves the tradition in his Ecclesiastical History. A second prediction

is preserved in the Gospel of Matthew chapter twenty four,

verses one and two. The disciples have just left the

Temple complex and are pointing out its monumental masonry. Jesus replies,

do you see all these things? Truly? I tell you,

not one stone here will be left on another. Everyone

will be thrown down on the ninth of av the

same date in the Jewish calendar on which the First

Temple had been brought down by nebucud Nezar six hundred

and fifty six years earlier, the Second Temple was lost

to fire. The flames spread to the surrounding precincts, The

god old furnishings melted into the masonry, and the building

was gone. Josephus records the date precisely the tenth of

the Macedonian month of Laos, year three of Vespasian's reign.

The aftermath left visible monuments in Rome itself. Titus celebrated

a triumph through the streets of the capitol in the

year seventy one, parading the temple treasures, the golden table

of the Showbread, the seven branched Manora, and the silver

trumpets of the priests before the assembled citizens. Vespasian and

Titus then issued a series of bronze and silver coins

that circulated throughout the empire, bearing the inscription Ivdea Capta

Judea Captured, typically depicting a mourning Jewish woman seated under

a palm tree. Forty years later, Domitian completed the marble

triumphal arch that still stands today at the eastern end

of the Roman Forum, the Arch of Titus, on whose

interior reliefs the procession of temple spoils is preserved in stone.

The end of the Second Temple did not end the

Jewish presence in the land. Jews continued to live in Galilee,

in the coastal Plain, and in Jerusalem itself, now ruled

directly as part of the Roman Province of Judea. Rabbinic

Judaism began to take shape at Yavne on the coastal Plain,

where the Pharisaic teacher johann And Benzarchai, who had left

Jerusalem before the siege closed, established an academy that would

consolidate Jewish religious life around Torah and prayer rather than

around the Lost Temple. The new center held for two generations.

In the year one hundred thirty two of the Christian era,

a second Jewish revolt erupted. Its causes are disputed. The

Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing about a century later in

his Roman History, attributes it to the Emperor Hadrian's decision

to refound Jerusalem as a pagan colony called Alia Capitolina,

including a temple to Jupiter on the site of the

Lost Jewish Temple. Other ancient sources point to Hadrian's prohibition

of circumcision. The result was a coordinated uprising across Judea,

led by a charismatic commander named Simon bar Kosiba, renamed

Bar Kokbah, son of a Star by the rabbinic teacher Akiva,

who proclaimed him the Messiah of Israel. The revolt achieved

early military successes that no later observer fully understood until

the twentieth century. In nineteen fifty two, the Israe Ralely

archaeologist Jigael Yadin began excavating caves in the Judean wilderness

above the Dead Sea, in particular the Cave of Letters

at Nahal Haveva, and recovered a remarkable archive dispatches signed

by Barr Cockbar himself, administrative orders to his commanders, marriage contracts,

and personal effects of refugees who had hidden in the

caves at the rebellion's end. The letters are written in Hebrew, Aramaic,

and Greek, and they show a functioning rebel administration that

levied taxes, organized supply, and corresponded across a defensible territory

for nearly three years. Hadrian had to recall his most

experienced general, Sextus Julius Severus, from Britain to suppress the revolt.

The Roman campaign was methodical. Cassius Dio reports that fifty

fortified strongholds and nine eighty five villages were lost in

the course of the war. The final Jewish stronghold, the

fortress of Betha in the Judean Hills, fell in the

summer of one hundredred and thirty five. Barkokba did not

survive its fall. Hadrian's response was to ratify and extend

the very policies that had provoked the war. Jerusalem was

rebuilt as Alia Capitalina. A Temple of Jupiter rose on

the Temple Mount. Most significantly for the long history of

the Jewish people, the emperor issued an edict barring Jews

from entering the city. The province of Judea was renamed

Syria Palestina, the latinized form of the Philistines, deliberately chosen

to erase the older Jewish toponym. For the next eighteen centuries,

with brief and partial exceptions, no organized Jewish community would

live in Jerusalem. The longest exile of Jewish history began

at that moment. The catastrophes of seventy and one hundred

and thirty five of the Christian era did not deport

the Jewish people in the ordered Assyrian or Babylonian fashion.

They scattered them. Surviving populations migrated to communities across the

Roman Empire and beyond, to Italy, Spain, North Africa, the Rhineland,

Southern Arabia, the Persian East, and there built the institutions, languages,

and forms of life that would carry Jewish identity through

the long medieval and early modern centuries. The temple was gone,

the land was renamed, Jerusalem was forbidden, and yet the

people scattered persisted. The arc of this video has run

from the brick pits of the Nile Delta to the

rebuilt city of Alia Capitalina, from the famine that drew

Joseph's family into Goshan to the edict that emptied Jerusalem

of Jews. Six great displacements Egypt, the cycles of the Judges,

the Assyrian removal, the Babylonian deportations, the Roman dispersion, the

aftermath of Bar Kokbah, separated by centuries, executed by different empires,

ending in different geographies. Considered as a whole, the pattern

suggests something the prophets themselves recognized. Exile is not an

interruption of the story of Israel. It is the terrain

on which the story is told. Jeremiah had already named

the counter current. In a letter to the first Babylonian deportees.

The prophet wrote what now stands in chapter twenty nine,

verses ten through fourteen. This is what the Lord says.

When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come

to you and fulfill my goodes. 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. Then you will call on me and

come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

You will seek me and find me. When you seek

me with all your heart, I will be found by you,

declares the Lord, and will bring you back from captivity.

I will gather you from all the nations and places

where I have banished you, declares the Lord, and will

bring you back to the place from which I carried

you into exile. Ezekiel gave the same principle visual form

in Ezekiel Chapter thirty seven, verses twenty one, and twenty two.

The Lord interprets a vision of two sticks joined in

the prophet's hand. I will take the Israelites out of

the nations where they have gone. I will gather them

from all around and bring them back into their own land.

I will make them one nation in the land on

the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over

all of them, and they will never again be two

nations or be divided into two kingdoms. Isaiah, writing earlier

in Jerusalem, had used the same language a century before

the first deportation. Isaiah Chapter eleven, verses eleven and twelve

places the gathering on the lips of God himself. In

that day, the Lord will reach out his hand a

second time to reclaim the surviving remnant of his people

from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush,

from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hammeth, and from the islands

of the Mediterranean. He will raise a banner for the

nations and gather the exiles of Israel. He will assemble

the scattered people of Jews from the four quarters of

the earth, from the Nile to the Tigris, from the

Haber to the Tiber, the people of Israel kept being scattered,

and from the Nile to the Tigris, the prophets kept

naming a return. Whether one reads those texts as historical hope,

a scatological promise, or both, they are inseparable from the

experience of exile that produced them. The sorrow and the

hope were composed together. The harps hung on the poplars

by the rivers of Babylon were never broken. They were

waiting