The Templeless Age: an Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the ‘Exile’. By Jill Middlemas

Abstract

Pp. x, 174 , Louisville/London , Westminster John Knox Press , 2007 , $25.00. ‘Exile’ is a term that describes the experience of those Hebrews forcibly transferred to Babylon; it does not describe the experience of the people left on the land, or the refugees and voluntary expatriates in Egypt. For this reason Middlemas proposes ‘templeless age’ as a more accurate title to capture the common experience of all the children of Israel between 587 and 515 BCE. She claims it was never a question of losing belief in Yahweh; the question was whether Yahweh would choose to re-establish a relationship with the people he had abandoned. The loss and destruction of the Temple was thus not only the common experience of all Hebrews during this period, but points to the sharpest thorn of concern and anxiety. Middlemas masterfully charts the stages of shock, grief and lamentation, giving way to reflection and repentance, culminating in hope and finally renewed confidence in the perpetual love and imminent intervention of Yahweh for his people, as these are played out in the literature produced during this period. At the same time the response to this catastrophe laid the foundation for the transition from sacrificial Israelite religion to ‘Judaism’ by stressing a heightened ‘otherness’ or transcendence in Yahweh, his universal sovereignty (from ‘monolatry’ to ‘monotheism’) with a purpose explicitly embracing all nations, as well as his non-institutional and extra-sacrificial availability through prayer and obedience to the law. The Jews were poised between two alternatives: to return to the condition of their ancestors under Moses in the wilderness as their ‘true’ or God-intended state, given Yahweh's cool response to David's proposal to build a temple, or to push forward to the ‘new thing’ or ‘second covenant’ Ezekiel speaks of, searching for something ‘greater’ that Yahweh may have in mind.