By The Waters Of BabyLon”: The Promise Fails

Abstract

Abstract The Babylonian exile is a watershed in the history of the Jewish people. The Davidic kingdom had come to an end. The Jerusalem temple was in ruins; the people, exiled. Although many remained in the land, life could not continue as normal. The social institutions of monarchy and temple that had dominated Judaean life for four centuries had vanished. A new imperial world order replaced them. Key religious, commercial, and administrative leaders were either killed, exiled, or fled to Egypt. Life-could not continue as it had before. The Babylonian exile precipitated a crisis that affected the sense of meaning and order. Not the least of the crisis was the failure of the Promise to David as it had come to be read. The Promise was a focal point for the institutional structure of Judah by the late monarchy, and consequently the need to make sense of the Promise during this crisis was acute. In the present chapter, we begin with observations about the sociopolitical context of the Babylonian exile before moving on to a specific analysis of the Promise.