With the help of this somewhat unreliable material,we shall now try to tell you what you ought to know if you are to understand the great spiritual drama which was to follow so soon afterwards.
Exile,in the case of the Judaean people,did not mean slavery.
From a purely worldly point of view,the change from Palestine to Mesopotamia was an improvement for the great majority of the Jews.The Israelites,a century and a half before,had been taken to four or five widely separated villages and towns and had been lost among their Babylonian neighbours.But the Judaean exiles of the year 586were allowed to remain together and to settle in the same spot which became an honest-to-goodness Jewish colony.
They were in reality a band of involuntary pilgrims,travelling from the overcrowded slums of Jerusalem to the open spaces of Chebar.They left the sterile fields and valleys of the old land of the Canaanites to find a new home among the highly irrigated pastures and gardens of central Babylonia.
Nor did they suffer undue violence at the hands of a foreign taskmaster,as they had done in Egypt a thousand years before.
They were allowed to retain their own leaders and their own priests.
Their religious customs and ceremonies were not disturbed.
They were permitted to correspond with those of their friends who had remained in Palestine.
They were encouraged to practice the old arts with which they had been familiar in Jerusalem.
They were free men and were given the right to have servants and slaves of their own.No profession or trade was closed to them and soon a large number of Jewish names began to appear among the lists of rich merchants in the Babylonian capital.
Eventually,even the highest offices in the state were opened to Jewish ability and Babylonian kings more than once begged for the favour of Jewish women.
In short,the exiles had everything that can make men happy,except the liberty to go and come at will.
By going from Jerusalem to Tel-Harsha,they had shed many of the ills of the old country.
But now,alas,they suffered from a new ailment.
It was called homesickness.
This affliction,ever since the beginning of time,has had a strange influence upon the human soul.It throws a glowing light of happy reminiscences across the old country.It kills with sudden abruptness all recollection of past injuries and former suffering.Inevitably it turns “the old times”into “the good old times”and bestows upon the years spent amidst the old surroundings the dignified name of “the golden age.”
When a man is a victim of homesickness,he refuses to see anything good in his new home.His new neighbours are inferior to the old ones (with whom,to tell the truth,he was for ever in open warfare).The new city (although ten times as large and twenty times as brilliant as his former village)is a mean and miserable hamlet.The new climate is only fit for savages and barbarians.
In short,everything “old”suddenly becomes “good”while everything “new”is just “bad”and “wicked”and “objectionable.”
A century afterwards,when the exiles were given permission to return to Jerusalem,very few availed themselves of this opportunity.But as long as they were in Babylon,the land of Palestine was their lost Paradise and this attitude is reflected in everything they said or wrote.
Generally speaking,the lives of the Jews during this half-century of exile were dull and uneventful.The exiles went about their daily affairs and they waited.
In the beginning,they waited with the eager hope of those who expect that something “sudden”is going to happen.The words of doom of the great Jeremiah,who had predicted this terrible disaster,were still ringing in their ears.
But Jeremiah was dead and his place had never been quite filled.
In the earlier Chapters,we have said a few words about the nature of the Jewish prophets.Since time immemorial,they have been the moral leaders of their people.Upon several occasions they had been the concrete expression of the national conscience.
But times were changing.The Jews no longer depended for their religious instruction upon the spoken word.They now had an alphabet of their own,and their lan-guage had acquired a formal grammar.
This alphabet,in the beginning,was rather crude.It had no vowels.It left a great deal to the imagination.
The same can be said of the rules governing the construction of written sentences.No clear distinction was made between the perfect and the imperfect tenses.One and the same verb could indicate that something had already happened or that it was about to happen.We have to guess at the real meaning from the contents of the sentence.
Such a form of expression lent itself very well to poetry.Hence the beauty of so many of the psalms.It was much less successful when the writer had to deal with con-crete ideas or tried to give an account of the events of the past.
It does not quite show us where prophecy ceases and history begins.
But it was the best the Jews could do until they learned the current Aramaic alphabet of their neighbours,and with all its crudities and imperfections,it served an excellent purpose.
It gave those prophets who had new ideas a chance to reach all their fellow Judaeans,whether they lived in Egypt,in Babylonia,or on the islands of the Egean Sea.It allowed them to bring order into the old and vague forms of worship.It made possible that great system of codified religious and civil law which we find in the Old Testament and in the Talmud.And it turned the prophet into something which he had never quite been before.He began to explain the written words of their ancestors to the children of the new generation.From a man of action,he became a contemplative sage who lived and died,surrounded with books.Now and then we shall still hear of prophets who walked among their fellow men and who spoke the language of the market-place.But as the number of schools where prophets were trained increased,the influence of their graduates diminished in proportion.