It was the year 597BCE, and Jehoiachin, the 18-year-old king of the land of Judah knew the game was up. His decision to defy the mighty Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had been a grave mistake. More or less as soon as the siege of his capital city, Jerusalem, began, Jehoiachin surrendered. The rash decision to break the treaty with Babylon meant that his reign had lasted just three months and ten days.
Not only was Jehoiachin hauled off to Babylon, but so were thousands of his subjects, leaving only the ‘poor of the land’ behind. Jehoiachin’s 21-year-old uncle Zedekiah was installed as a vassal king, but after a few years he too switched allegiance to Egypt in rebellion against Babylon, eventually facing yet another siege in which Nebuchadnezzar finally destroyed Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The importance of the temple to the exiles can’t be overstated: it was the absolute centre of their religion. Back in Babylon, exiled scribes and scholars frantically pored over the scrolls and parchments they’d brought with them from Jerusalem, trying to make sense of things.
The documents they had brought into exile with them were live, written down versions of older oral narratives, they were still being edited and reconciled, added to and revised. And it was during this time of feverish study, in a determined bid to come to terms with their distressing reality, that a key piece of what would become the Bible was written: drawing from a very ancient mythic tradition found too in the Babylonian myth called Enuma Elish, the exiled Priestly writer(s) developed their most famous work, the first verses of the book of Genesis.
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Header image is used under a Creative Commons license.
Orginal photo by bcps on morguefile.com
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