ALL the Exiles Israel Suffered in Chronological Order

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Sometime around the year 586 BC in the alluvial plains east of the Tigris and Euphrates, a group of survivors sat down by a canal and wept.

[00:00:12]The city was gone.

[00:00:14]Jerusalem, the city of David, lay 700 miles behind them in ash. The temple that Solomon had built four centuries earlier [clears throat] had been pried apart stone by stone by Babylonian soldiers. Its bronze pillars cut up for transport. Its gold and silver vessels carried off as imperial loot. One of those survivors wrote down what they felt.

[00:00:40]The poem is preserved in the Hebrew scriptures as Psalm 137.

[00:00:45]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 demanded songs of joy. They said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.'"

[00:01:06]"How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?"

[00:01:14]Image, harps hung silently on poplars by a foreign river, is for many readers of the Bible the defining picture of exile.

[00:01:24]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 600 years after the Babylonian captives are allowed to go home.

[00:01:43]Long before the rivers of Babylon, there were the brick kilns of the Nile Delta where Hebrew slaves under Egyptian foreman made the bricks of Pithom and Raamses.

[00:01:55]Long before Nebuchadnezzar, there were the cycles of the judges.

[00:02:00]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-Pileser III, Shalmaneser V, Sargon II emptied the northern kingdom in a sequence of deportations that produced what later tradition would call the 10 lost tribes.

[00:02:34]After the Persian return, came the Greeks.

[00:02:37]And after the Greeks came Rome.

[00:02:40]Vespasian and Titus in the year 70 of the Christian era, Hadrian and his legions in 135, sealing the longest dispersion of all.

[00:02:52]The Hebrew scriptures themselves had foreseen the pattern. In Deuteronomy 28:64, Moses warns the assembled tribes before they have even crossed the Jordan into the land they are about to receive.

[00:03:07]"Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations from one end of the earth to the other."

[00:03:14]That sentence became the lens through which Israel would later read every loss it suffered.

[00:03:21]What follows is the chronological order of those losses.

[00:03:26]Every captivity, every deportation, every dispersion, from the brick pits of Egypt to the smoking ruins of Bar Kokhba's last fortress.

[00:03:37]Not as a list of disasters, but as the spine of a single continuous story.

[00:03:43]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.

[00:04:01]Around the year 1876 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 70 souls and walked into Egypt because his sons could no longer feed their flocks.

[00:04:25]The grain was in Egypt.

[00:04:27]Jacob's son Joseph was in Egypt, too, in the second highest office in the kingdom. After a sequence of betrayals, accusations, and providential reversals that the book of Genesis takes 13 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 arrangement 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 coffin still above ground, awaiting an Exodus that has not yet come. And Exodus opens with a single sentence that reverses everything.

[00:05:25]In Exodus chapter 1, verses 8 through 14, the Hebrew text reads, "Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, [music] came to power in Egypt. Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we We deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous.

[00:05:49]And if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.

[00:05:58]So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor.

[00:06:03]And they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.

[00:06:09]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.

[00:06:31]That paragraph is the entire architecture of the first captivity in summary.

[00:06:38]A demographic threat, a political pretext, a program of forced labor, and two store cities, Pithom and Rameses, whose names are not symbolic.

[00:06:50]They are real Egyptian sites that archaeologists have been digging for over a century. Pithom is most often identified with [music] Tell el-Maskhuta in the Wadi Tumilat, a chain of New Kingdom storehouses on the eastern edge of the Delta.

[00:07:07]Rameses is identified with Pi-Ramesses, the great capital city built by Pharaoh Ramesses II around 1270 BC near modern Qantir. Excavations there by Edgar Pusch and Manfred Bietak over the past 40 years have uncovered enormous mudbrick complexes, military stables for thousands of horses, and a population profile that included Asiatic Semites laboring in royal construction. What that labor looked like day-to-day is not [music] something we have to imagine.

[00:07:44]Egyptian scribes recorded it. The Anastasi papyri, a group of New Kingdom administrative texts now [music] in the British Museum, preserve the daily quotas of brick makers in Pi-Ramesses.

[00:07:58]The number of bricks expected [music] from each man, the supervisors who counted them, the punishments [music] meted out when quotas were missed. The Leiden Papyrus 348 mentions distributions of grain to laborers called Apiru hauling stone for the building projects of Ramesses [music] the second.

[00:08:19]The word Apiru, related etymologically to the term Hebrew, designated a class of stateless workers used as construction labor across the eastern Mediterranean. Whether or not every Apiru was an Israelite, the Egyptian record confirms the institutional reality the Book of Exodus describes.

[00:08:40]Asiatic Semites in the eastern Delta working clay into bricks under foremen 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 6, >> [music] >> dates the Exodus 480 years before the fourth year of Solomon, which would place it around 1446 BC, the so-called early date, defended by scholars such [music] as Bryant Wood and the late John Bimson. The geographic detail of Pithom and Ramesses, however, fits the Egyptian 19th Dynasty under Ramesses the second, suggesting a late date around 1260 to 1260 BC, the position held by Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeier.

[00:09:36]Both camps agree on one point that matters here. The pattern of Asiatic Semites 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 Hyksos, Asiatic rulers, predominantly West Semitic in language and culture, who governed northern Egypt from the city of Avaris between roughly 1650 and 1550 BC.

[00:10:14]Avaris is the same site that would later be rebuilt as Pi-Ramesses. When the Theban dynasty under Ahmose drove the Hyksos out, native Egyptian rule reasserted [music] itself with vehement xenophobia, and Asiatic populations who remained in the eastern delta found themselves recategorized from settlers to servants.

[00:10:38]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.

[00:10:58]In Genesis 15, verses 13 and 14, the Lord tells Abraham, while the patriarch is still alive in Canaan, "Know for certain that for 400 years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.

[00:11:19]But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions."

[00:11:27]The Book of Exodus, chapter 12, verses 40 and 41, gives us slightly fuller figure.

[00:11:34]Now, the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the Lord's divisions left Egypt.

[00:11:48]The traditional reconciliation, going back at least to the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, treats the 400 years of Genesis as the period of full oppression after Joseph's death and the 430 years of Exodus as the total span from Jacob's arrival in Goshen to the first Passover.

[00:12:12]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.

[00:12:35]The Merneptah Stele, a black granite victory inscription erected by Pharaoh Merneptah around 1208 BC, and discovered by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896, lists peoples defeated by Egypt in a Levantine campaign.

[00:12:55]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 13th century BC, Israel is already a recognizable population in Canaan outside Egypt, settled and known to Egyptian scribes.

[00:13:19]The flight from the brick pits had happened.

[00:13:22]The Exodus is not a single event in the biblical story. It is the event.

[00:13:29]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 that Jewish families still celebrate 3,000 years later. But for the present arc, what matters is what came before the deliverance, not after.

[00:13:55]Before Sinai, before the conquest, before the judges and the kings, there was bondage.

[00:14:02]Long enough to forget, structured enough to crush.

[00:14:07]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.

[00:14:22]The conquest under Joshua, narrated in the book that [music] bears his name, planted the 12 tribes in the highlands of Canaan and gave each its allotted territory. But the deliverance was not final.

[00:14:36]For roughly the next three and a half centuries, from around 1380 before Christ down to the rise of Saul around 1050, Israel lived through a recurring nightmare that the book of Judges treats as the spiritual signature of the era.

[00:14:55]The tribes never went into foreign exile during this period. They never left the land.

[00:15:01]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.

[00:15:18]In chapter 2, verses 14 through 19, 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.

[00:15:41]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.

[00:15:51]Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hands of these raiders.

[00:15:57]Yet they would not listen to their judges, but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshipped 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 worshipping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and [music] stubborn ways.

[00:16:43]That passage describes a four-beat cycle the rest of the book plays out six times in sequence.

[00:16:50]Apostasy, oppression, cry to the Lord, deliverance through a judge.

[00:16:56]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.

[00:17:12]Judges chapter 3 [music] names him Cushan-Rishathaim, king of Aram Naharaim, a region the Hebrew text places in upper Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

[00:17:25]The same world from which Abraham himself had once been called out. For eight years, somewhere around 1370 before Christ, Israel paid tribute to a Mesopotamian [music] overlord. The deliverer the text raises up is Othniel, a nephew of Caleb from the tribe of Judah, who breaks the Mesopotamian [music] grip and gives the country 40 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. Eglon, king of Moab, allied with Ammonites and Amalekites, [music] crosses the Jordan, takes the city of palms, Jericho, and holds Israel under tribute for 18 years.

[00:18:18]The Book of Judges spends almost an entire chapter on his death, narrating how a left-handed Benjamite named Ehud delivers a tribute payment, requests a private audience, and drives an 18-in dagger into the king's belly. Eglon's death triggers an Israelite uprising at the fords of the Jordan.

[00:18:39]Moab's army is cut down, and the land has rest for 80 years.

[00:18:45]The geographic point matters. The Moabites had not stayed across the river.

[00:18:52]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.

[00:19:06]The third oppression comes from the far north. Jabin of Hazor commands a coalition described in Judges chapter 4 as having 900 iron chariots under his general Sisera. For 20 years, Sisera's chariot army dominates the lowlands of the Jezreel Valley and cuts the northern tribes off from the central highlands.

[00:19:30]The deliverance comes through the judge Deborah, the warrior Barak, and a nomadic woman named Jael 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 Kishon River. Hazor itself has been excavated for over 70 years.

[00:19:58]Yigael Yadin's expeditions in the late 1950s, continued by Amnon Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman through the present, have laid bare a massive Late Bronze Age city, fortified, palatial, with cuneiform archives in Akkadian, destroyed by a violent fire late in the 13th 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 Hazor as the largest Canaanite city of its era confirms the kind of regional power Judges describes.

[00:20:39]The fourth oppression is the Midianites.

[00:20:43]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.

[00:21:00]Judges chapter 6 verses 1 through 6 describes the conditions the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for 7 years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites.

[00:21:15]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.

[00:21:32]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.

[00:21:50]They invaded the land to ravage it.

[00:21:53]The deliverer is Gideon, a wheat thresher from the small clan of Abiezer in Manasseh, who routs the Midianite host with 300 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.

[00:22:28]The fifth oppression, treated in Judges chapters 10 and 11, comes from the Ammonites, who for 18 years subject the Israelite tribes east of the Jordan, Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and begin pushing west into [music] Ephraim and Judah.

[00:22:46]The deliverer is Jephthah, a Gileadite outcast and bandit chief, whom the elders of his tribe recall from exile to lead the war against Ammon. Jephthah 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, Rabbath-Ammon, modern Amman, still carries the name today. The sixth and final oppression is the Philistines.

[00:23:22]Judges chapter 13 verse 1 summarizes it in a single sentence.

[00:23:28]Again, the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. So, the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years.

[00:23:38]40 years [music] is the longest oppression of the entire book, and it does not end with a clean deliverance.

[00:23:46]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 coastal plain. Feuds that weaken the Philistines, but never break them. The Philistine threat [music] will pass on into the books of Samuel, and only be decisively contained generations later under King David.

[00:24:15]The Philistines themselves were newcomers.

[00:24:18]They appear in Egyptian records on the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu as one of the sea peoples, a coalition of Aegean groups who descended on the eastern Mediterranean around 1175 BC, collapsing the Hittite empire, raiding Egypt, and settling in five cities along the coast of Canaan.

[00:24:44]Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath.

[00:24:49]Excavations at Tel es-Safi, identified with biblical Gath by Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University have produced Aegean-style pottery, hearths, and an early inscription of a name cognate with Goliath, all dated to the late 12th and 11th centuries before Christ, the era of Philistine oppression, aligns precisely with the consolidation of Philistine cities [music] in the archaeological record.

[00:25:20]The biblical figures for the period, taken at face value and added end to end, exceed 400 years, too long to fit easily between the conquest and Saul.

[00:25:32]Scholars [music] such as Kenneth Kitchen and Eugene Merrill argue that several of the oppressions [music] and deliverances overlap regionally, compressing the total period into roughly three centuries.

[00:25:45]Israel Finkelstein and others, working from surface surveys of small unwalled hill country villages [music] that appear suddenly in the central highlands around 1200 before Christ, describe the era as the slow emergence of an Israelite identity out of a fragmented Canaanite landscape. [music] Whichever reconstruction one prefers, the picture is the same.

[00:26:11]A small, decentralized people under recurring foreign pressure, surviving by alternating between collapse [music] 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 [music] confederacy ruled its coast for 40 years.

[00:26:59]The land 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.

[00:27:19]>> [music] >> Argue that exile in its fullest form was already happening here, 400 years before Babylon. By the 8th 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 930 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, Tirzah, 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.

[00:28:20]From its heartland on the upper Tigris, around the cities of Ashur, Nineveh, and Calah, the Neo-Assyrian empire had risen under a sequence of warrior kings: Ashurnasirpal the second, Shalmaneser the third, Adad-nirari the third, who methodically extended Assyrian rule westward through the petty kingdoms of northern Syria. By the middle of the 9th century, Israel was already paying tribute. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, discovered [music] at Calah by Austen Layard in 1846 and now in the British Museum, depicts the Israelite King Jehu, or his envoy, kneeling before the Assyrian throne and presenting silver, gold, and tin. That submission bought time. It did not buy permanence. The man who turned tribute into territory was Tiglath-Pileser III, who took the Assyrian throne in 745 BC 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.

[00:29:36]Earlier empires had taken hostages, exacted tribute, and sometimes slaughtered populations.

[00:29:44]Tiglath-Pileser 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.

[00:30:05]The Israeli scholar Bustenay Oded, in his 1979 study of mass deportation in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, calculates from Assyrian sources that more than 4 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 734 BC.

[00:30:34]Pekah, king of Israel, had joined a coalition with Rezin of Damascus against Assyria and had attempted to coerce King Ahaz of Judah [music] into joining them.

[00:30:46]Ahaz instead called Tiglath-Pileser south. The Assyrian campaign of 734 to 732 swept through the Galilee, overran Damascus, and removed entire regions from Israelite control.

[00:31:01]Second Kings chapter 15 verse 29 records the result with a single grim sentence.

[00:31:08]In the time of Pekah, king of Israel, Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, came and took Ijon, Abel-Beth-Maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, and Hazor. He took Gilead and Galilee, including all the land of Naphtali, and deported the people to Assyria.

[00:31:28]That single verse erases the northern third of the Israelite kingdom.

[00:31:33]Naphtali, Zebulun, and the Transjordanian tribes east of the Jordan are stripped from the map and their populations marched to Assyrian provinces. Tiglath-Pileser's own annals, recovered in fragments from the ruined palace at Calah, and reconstructed by the Assyriologist Hayim Tadmor, claim the deportation of more than 13,000 inhabitants of the Galilee. Pekah was assassinated by Hoshea, the last king of Israel, who took the throne under Assyrian patronage and resumed paying tribute.

[00:32:11]But Hoshea too miscalculated. Around 725 before Christ, judging that Egypt might prove a more useful patron than Assyria, he stopped sending tribute and reached for an Egyptian alliance.

[00:32:26]Tiglath-Pileser was now dead, succeeded by his son Shalmaneser 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 3 years. The siege began in roughly 725 and ended in 722.

[00:32:54]Shalmaneser the fifth died in the closing months of the campaign and the conquest itself was completed by his successor Sargon the second, who would claim the credit in his official inscriptions.

[00:33:07]Second Kings chapter 17 verse 6 opens the obituary. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River, and in the towns of the Medes. Halah and Gozan have been located in northeastern Syria on the upper waters of the Habor and Balikh rivers.

[00:33:35]The towns of the Medes 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.

[00:33:57]Sargon's own version of events is recorded on the walls of his palace at Khorsabad and on a number of clay prisms recovered from Nimrud and Nineveh.

[00:34:08]The Nimrud prism, discovered in 1952, gives the figure most often cited, 27,290 inhabitants of Samaria deported. The city's chariots [music] impressed into the Assyrian army, the cult objects of Samaria carried off, and foreigners from Babylonia, Hamath, and elsewhere settled in the depopulated land.

[00:34:33]Reliefs from Khorsabad, now in the Louvre and the British Museum, depict Assyrian soldiers leading away long columns of bound captives past the burned remains of conquered cities.

[00:34:46]Whether or not the specific scenes depict Samaria, the iconography of mass deportation is unmistakable.

[00:34:55]Israel had become one of those columns.

[00:34:58]The book of Second Kings, having narrated the fall, pauses for what is essentially a theological autopsy.

[00:35:06]Verses 7 through 23 of chapter 17 list the reasons the Lord allowed his people to be uprooted. They had worshipped other gods, followed the religious customs of the nations that had been driven out before them, set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill, served idols, practiced divination, and rejected every prophet the Lord had sent to warn them.

[00:35:33]The chapter closes in verse 23. So, the people of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria, and they are still there.

[00:35:43]The phrase still there was true at every moment the chapter was being read in every generation that followed.

[00:35:51]The prophets had said as much before it happened.

[00:35:55]Amos, who preached in the northern kingdom during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II, 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.

[00:36:15]Amos chapter 5 verse 27 names the destination directly. Therefore, I will send you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is God Almighty.

[00:36:28]The Assyrian provinces to which Israel was deported lay precisely beyond Damascus on the road northeast.

[00:36:37]Hosea, prophesying through the chaos of the kingdom's last decades, was equally specific about the outcome.

[00:36:46]In Hosea chapter 9 verse 17, 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."

[00:36:59]That phrase, "wanderers among the nations," captures in advance the sociological reality of the deportation.

[00:37:09]The deportees were not annihilated.

[00:37:12]They were dispersed, [music] 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.

[00:37:32]Within two generations, the deported Israelite population had no continuing political identity in the historical record. A few personal names from the Habor region, >> [music] >> 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.

[00:37:56]But as a corporate people, the 10 tribes of the north dissolved into the population of the empire. The foreigners settled in their place, in turn intermarried 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 worshipping the Lord on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. The legend of the 10 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 Lemba of Southern Africa.

[00:38:53]As history, the evidence does not support survival as a corporate ethnic body.

[00:38:59]As 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 722 BC, then, the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. [music] Its capital was emptied, its royal house extinguished, its territory administered as an Assyrian province under the new name Samerina. Its citizens scattered from the upper harbor to the foothills of the Zagros. Of the 12 tribes that had crossed the Jordan with Joshua, 10 were now gone.

[00:39:37]Only Judah remained, and Judah's reckoning was not far off. The 7th century BC was the Indian summer of the southern kingdom. While the Assyrian provinces to the north absorbed the deportees and forgot their old name, Judah survived.

[00:39:55]Jerusalem still stood.

[00:39:57]The Temple of Solomon still stood.

[00:40:00]The line of David still occupied the throne. The reformer King Hezekiah had withstood an Assyrian siege under Sennacherib in 701 BC, and a century later, his great-grandson Josiah had presided over the most thorough religious reform in the kingdom's history, recovering a long-lost scroll of the law from the temple archives and purging the high places. To anyone living in Jerusalem in 622, the future of Judah looked secure.

[00:40:35]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.

[00:40:52]It would be Babylon, the resurgent southern Mesopotamian empire that had overthrown Assyria in 612 before Christ when the armies of Nabopolassar of Babylon and the Medes brought down Nineveh. The new heir of Mesopotamian dominion was Nabopolassar's son, Nebuchadnezzar II, who took the throne in 605 and set about systematically extending Babylonian control over the entire Levant. The first blow fell in the same year.

[00:41:26]In the spring of 605, Nebuchadnezzar, still crown prince, met an Egyptian army under Pharaoh Neco II at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates and routed it. The Babylonian Chronicle, housed in the British Museum, tablet number 21946 and edited by Donald Wiseman in 1956, narrates the campaign in laconic Akkadian. Nebuchadnezzar crossed the river, broke the Egyptian forces at Carchemish, pursued the survivors as far as Hamath, and then conquered the whole land of Hatti, Syria-Palestine.

[00:42:06]For Judah, the consequences were immediate.

[00:42:10]The Book of Daniel opens in the aftermath.

[00:42:13]Daniel chapter 1 verses 1 through 4 sets the scene.

[00:42:19]In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, 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 Ashpenaz, 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 kind of learning, well-informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace.

[00:43:07]He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians.

[00:43:12]That brief description is the first deportation, small in numbers but immense in 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 Nebuchadnezzar's punitive expedition reached the city.

[00:43:48]His son, Jehoiachin, an 18-year-old boy, took the throne for 3 months [music] and surrendered the city in March of 597 before Christ. The Babylonian Chronicle records the surrender in two crisp lines.

[00:44:04]In the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon mustered his troops, marched to the city of Judah, captured the city on the 2nd of Adar, took the king prisoner, and appointed a king of his own choice. The biblical account in 2 Kings chapter 24 verses 14 through 16 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 10,000.

[00:44:38]Only the poorest people of the land were left.

[00:44:41]Nebuchadnezzar took Jehoiachin 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 7,000 fighting men, strong and fit for war, and 1,000 skilled workers and artisans.

[00:45:08]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 Kebar in the southern plain, Ezekiel received the call that would make him the great prophet of the exile.

[00:45:31]Ezekiel chapter 1 verses 1 through 3 places the moment exactly.

[00:45:37]In my 30th year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar 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 Jehoiachin.

[00:45:55]The word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the [music] priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There, the hand of the Lord was on him.

[00:46:07]The vision that followed, wheels within wheels, four living creatures, a throne of sapphire above the firmament, is delivered [music] deliberately in the diaspora.

[00:46:19]Back in Jerusalem, the king Nebuchadnezzar had installed in Jehoiachin's place was Zedekiah, an uncle of the deposed king. Zedekiah held the throne for 11 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 Nebuchadnezzar for a fixed period of judgment. In Jeremiah chapter 25, verses 11 and 12, the prophet had named the duration in advance. "This whole country [music] will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon 70 years.

[00:47:13]But when the 70 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."

[00:47:27]Zedekiah did not listen. In 589 BC, encouraged by promises of Egyptian help, he rebelled.

[00:47:36]The Babylonian army marched south, sealed off Jerusalem, and reduced the surrounding fortified cities one by one.

[00:47:45]The agony of those last months survives in a remarkable find, the Lachish letters, a small archive of ostraca, pottery fragments inscribed in ink, discovered in the gatehouse of the fortified city of Lachish during excavations [music] led by James Starkey in 1935.

[00:48:04]The letters are field reports from Judean officers back to a commander in Lachish.

[00:48:10]One of them, ostracon four, ends with the line, "We are watching for the signal fires of Lachish according to all the signs my lord has given because we cannot see Azekah."

[00:48:23]Jeremiah chapter 34 names Lachish and Azekah as the last two fortified cities holding out alongside Jerusalem.

[00:48:34]The Lachish letters were written as though signal fires were going dark.

[00:48:38]Jerusalem itself fell in the summer of 586 before Christ.

[00:48:45]Second Kings chapter 25:8-12 records the end with administrative precision.

[00:48:52]On the seventh day of the fifth month in the 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan, commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.

[00:49:07]He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace, and all the houses of Jerusalem.

[00:49:14]Every important building he burned down.

[00:49:17]The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem.

[00:49:26]Nebuzaradan, 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.

[00:49:44]The Shai Johei 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 Nebuchadnezzar at his field headquarters in Riblah and led in chains to Babylon. The line of David, having ruled Jerusalem for more than 400 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.

[00:50:30]Beginning in the late 1990s, the Assyriologists Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch began publishing a corpus of cuneiform tablets that had appeared on the antiquities market and were eventually acquired by an Israeli collector.

[00:50:47]The tablets, more than 200 of them, dating to the 6th and 5th centuries before Christ, record the daily transactions of a Judean community settled at a place the texts call Al Yahudu, the city of the Judeans, in the southern Babylonian plain.

[00:51:07]The tablets showed Judeans buying and selling fields, leasing oxen, paying taxes to the Persian crown, lending silver to neighbors, and naming their children with Hebrew names that include the divine element of the Lord. They are not the records of slaves.

[00:51:26]They are the records of a settled community with property, contracts, and an internal life. Exiles who had built something on foreign soil.

[00:51:37]The 70 years Jeremiah had named were already running.

[00:51:42]In 539 before Christ, when the city of Babylon would fall to a Persian king named Cyrus.

[00:51:49]The count would be nearly complete.

[00:51:52]Babylon did not last long.

[00:51:54]Less than 50 years after Nebuchadnezzar's army had reduced Jerusalem to ash, the city that had carried the deportees east was itself overrun. In October of the year 539 before Christ, the army of a Persian king named Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, marched into Babylon along the channel of the Euphrates and took the city with almost no fighting.

[00:52:23]The Babylonian Chronicle and the contemporary Greek historians describe 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 Tema.

[00:52:40]The Babylonian priesthood, alienated from him, opened the gates. The Neo-Babylonian Empire ended in a single autumn afternoon.

[00:52:51]Cyrus governed differently. The Assyrian and Babylonian kings before him had been builders of empire by deportation. Cyrus reversed the policy.

[00:53:02]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.

[00:53:18]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 [music] of the Jewish exile within months of the Persian conquest. The most famous artifact from this moment is a clay barrel [music] inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian, discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1879 in the ruins of the Esagila temple at Babylon and now in the British Museum under the catalog number 90920.

[00:53:54]The Cyrus Cylinder, as it is called, was deposited as a foundation document when Cyrus restored the temple of Marduk. Its 40 lines of text describe Cyrus' 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.

[00:54:30]>> [music] >> Ezra, chapter 1, verses 1 through 4, gives the Jewish version.

[00:54:38]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.

[00:54:53]And also to put it in writing.

[00:54:56]This is what Cyrus, king of Persia, says.

[00:55:00]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 in 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.

[00:55:24]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' rule over Babylon, 538 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.

[00:55:57]The 70 years Jeremiah had counted out from the first deportation under Nebuchadnezzar were nearing their end.

[00:56:05]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 44, verse 28, includes Cyrus by name in a divine speech, who says of Cyrus, "He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please.

[00:56:30]He will say of Jerusalem, 'Let it be rebuilt, and of the temple, let its foundations be laid.'"

[00:56:39]Critical scholarship typically attributes that passage to a sixth-century anonymous prophet writing during the exile itself, often called Deutero-Isaiah, who would have been a contemporary of Cyrus. Conservative readings hold that the eighth-century Isaiah of Jerusalem himself wrote it predictively. 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 538 or 537 before Christ under the leadership of a Davidic prince named Sheshbazzar, identified in some readings with the figure also called Zerubbabel. The book of Ezra gives a list of the The families that totals just under 50,000 people, a fraction of the Jewish population now scattered through Babylonia. They carried with them the temple vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken 60 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.

[00:57:55]Construction stalled for almost two decades, hindered by opposition from the surrounding population.

[00:58:03]The prophets Haggai and Zechariah, preaching in Jerusalem in 520 before Christ, pushed the project forward. The Second Temple was completed in 516 before Christ, almost exactly 70 years after the destruction of the first.

[00:58:20]A second wave came in 458 under Ezra, a priestly scribe with a royal commission from the Persian king Artaxerxes the first to reorganize the religious life of the province.

[00:58:35]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 445 under Nehemiah, a Jewish layman serving as cupbearer to Artaxerxes, who returned to Jerusalem with imperial authorization to rebuild the city walls. The Book of Nehemiah opens with the moment of his commission.

[00:59:04]Nehemiah chapter 1, verses 1 through 3, describes how he received the news that prompted his return.

[00:59:12]The words of Nehemiah, son of Hacaliah.

[00:59:16]In the month of Kislev, in the 20th year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani, 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.

[00:59:33]>> [music] >> 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."

[00:59:46]The walls were rebuilt in 52 days.

[00:59:50]The province of Yehud, 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.

[01:00:04]From a Jewish theological standpoint, the return was real. From a demographic standpoint, it was something else.

[01:00:12]The majority of the deportees never came back. The Babylonian Jewish community, settled at Elephantine 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 Pumbedita that gave the Jewish world the Babylonian Talmud a thousand years later.

[01:00:41]A separate Jewish population, descended from refugees who had fled to Egypt during the years around 586, 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 Aswan.

[01:01:04]The Elephantine papyri, a corpus of Aramaic documents excavated between the 1890s and the 1930s and edited in modern times by the Israeli scholar Bezalel 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.

[01:01:32]In 410 before Christ, that [music] temple was destroyed in a local riot, and the community wrote a letter, preserved on papyrus, to the Persian governor Bagoas in Jerusalem, requesting assistance with rebuilding it. Even in the late 5th century before Christ, [music] more than 100 years after the supposed return, large Jewish populations were not in Judah.

[01:01:58]The pattern would only intensify. After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the 330s before Christ, his successors founded new Greek-style cities across the eastern Mediterranean, and Jewish populations migrated into them in large numbers.

[01:02:16]By the 3rd 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.

[01:02:36]Jewish communities [music] thrived in Antioch, Ephesus, Cyrene, and dozens of other cities.

[01:02:44]By the 1st 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.

[01:02:59]The Persian return, then, did not undo the exile. It rebuilt [music] 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.

[01:03:15]From 538 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.

[01:03:27]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 [music] the Greek, and the Greek period gave way eventually to the Roman. After Alexander the Great's empire fragmented in the late 4th century before Christ, the land of Judah passed through the hands of his successors.

[01:03:52]First, the Ptolemies of Egypt, then the Seleucids of Syria, whose attempt to suppress the practice of Judaism in the 2nd century before Christ provoked the Maccabean revolt and a brief 80-year period of Jewish self-rule under the Hasmonean dynasty. That independence ended in 63 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.

[01:04:28]The Romans installed local clients, most famously Herod the Great, who massively expanded the Second Temple between 19 before Christ and 64 of the Christian era, and ruled the province through procurators based at Caesarea.

[01:04:45]Tensions accumulated.

[01:04:48]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 66 of the Christian era.

[01:05:09]The First Jewish War began with the expulsion of the Roman garrison from Jerusalem.

[01:05:15]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.

[01:05:29]By the year 68, 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 Josephus ben Matthias, 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.

[01:05:57]His seven books, composed in Greek for a Roman audience in the '70s and '80s, remain the principal source for everything that follows. Vespasian was preparing to march on Jerusalem when the political turmoil that followed Nero's death in '68 pulled him back.

[01:06:16]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 '70.

[01:06:38]The siege lasted [music] from April to August. Jerusalem was packed with pilgrims who had come for Passover and were trapped behind the Roman lines when the encirclement [music] was completed.

[01:06:51]Factional rivalry between the Jewish leaders, John of Gischala, Simon bar Giora, and Eleazar ben Simon, paralyzed the city's defense and consumed the food stores.

[01:07:06]Famine set in. Jesus of Nazareth had described all of this almost 40 years earlier.

[01:07:13]The Gospel of Luke, chapter 21, verses 20 through 22, 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."

[01:07:44]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.

[01:07:57]Tradition records that the Christian community of Jerusalem heeded that warning and left the city before the encirclement was completed, taking refuge in the Decapolis town of Pella across the Jordan. The 4th century church historian Eusebius preserves the tradition in his Ecclesiastical History.

[01:08:18]A second prediction is preserved in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verses 1 and 2. The disciples have just left the temple complex and are pointing out its monumental masonry.

[01:08:30]Jesus replies, "Do you see all these things?

[01:08:35]Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another. Everyone will be thrown down." On the 9th of Av, the same date in the Jewish calendar on which the first temple had been brought down by years earlier, the second temple was lost to fire.

[01:08:56]The flames spread to the surrounding precincts. The gold furnishings melted into the masonry, and the building was gone. Josephus records the date precisely, the 10th 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 capital in the year 71, parading the temple treasures, the golden table of the showbread, the seven-branched menorah, and the silver trumpets of the priests before the assembled citizens.

[01:09:34]Vespasian and Titus then issued a series of bronze and silver coins that circulated throughout the empire, bearing the inscription IVDAEA CAPTA, Judaea captured, typically depicting a mourning Jewish woman seated under a palm tree.

[01:09:54]40 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 [music] in stone. The end of the Second Temple did not end the Jewish presence in the land.

[01:10:18]Jews continued to live in Galilee, in the coastal plain, and in Jerusalem itself, now ruled directly as part of the Roman province of Judaea. Rabbinic Judaism began to take shape at Yavneh, on the coastal plain, where the Pharisaic teacher Johanan ben Zakkai, 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. [music] The new center held for two generations.

[01:10:57]In the year 132 of the Christian era, a second Jewish revolt erupted.

[01:11:03]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 Aelia 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 Judaea led by a charismatic commander named Simon bar Kosiba, renamed bar Kokhba, son of a star, by the rabbinic teacher Akiva, who proclaimed him the Messiah of Israel.

[01:11:49]>> [music] >> The revolt achieved early military successes that no later observer fully understood until the 20th century. In 1952, the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin began excavating caves in the Judaean wilderness above the Dead Sea. In particular, the Cave of Letters at Nahal Hever, and recovered a remarkable archive. Dispatches signed by bar Kokhba 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 3 years. Hadrian had to recall his most experienced general, Sextus Julius Severus, from Britain to suppress the revolt.

[01:12:52]The Roman campaign was methodical.

[01:12:55]Cassius Dio reports that 50 fortified strongholds and 985 villages were lost in the course of the war. The final Jewish stronghold, the fortress of Betar in the Judean Hills, fell in the summer of 135.

[01:13:13]Bar Kokhba did not survive its fall.

[01:13:16]Hadrian's response was to ratify and extend the very policies that had provoked the war. Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina.

[01:13:27]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, [music] the Latinized form of the Philistines, deliberately chosen to erase the older Jewish toponym.

[01:13:50]For the next 18 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 70 and 135 of the Christian era did not deport the Jewish people in the ordered Syrian or Babylonian fashion. They scattered them.

[01:14:15]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.

[01:14:41]The land was renamed. Jerusalem was forbidden.

[01:14:44]And yet the people scattered persisted.

[01:14:47]The arc of this video has run from the brick pits of the Nile Delta to the rebuilt city of Aelia Capitolina. From the famine that drew Joseph's family into Goshen 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 Kokhba separated by centuries, executed by different empires, ending in different geographies.

[01:15:24]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 countercurrent.

[01:15:42]In a letter to the first Babylonian deportees, the prophet wrote what now stands in chapter 29 verses 10 through 14.

[01:15:51]This is what the Lord says, "When 70 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.

[01:16:14]Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

[01:16:19]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.

[01:16:42]Ezequiel gave the same principle visual form. In Ezequiel chapter 37:21 and 22, the Lord interprets a vision of two sticks joined in the prophet's hand.

[01:16:54]I will take the Israelites out of [music] the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land.

[01:17:04]I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them.

[01:17:12]And they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. [music] Isaiah, writing earlier in Jerusalem, had used the same language a century before the first deportation.

[01:17:26]Isaiah chapter 11:11 and 12 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 Hamath, 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 Judah from the four quarters of the earth.

[01:18:03]From the Nile to the Tigris, from the Habor 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, eschatological 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.