At the time that the scribes were working hard in Babylon’s libraries, the country, its empire, and its mighty King Nebudchadnezzar were the bona fide superpower in what we now know as the Middle East. Perhaps in the world. Formed by the king’s father, the late Nabopolassar, after he took his opportunity to seize power in the aftermath of the death of the Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal in 627BCE, the Babylonian empire and its patron God Marduk were greatly to be feared.
But the ancient world was replete with Gods and monsters, positively heaving with the brutes. Each national group had its own favoured deity, or two. As much political entities as metaphysical ones, these divine beings had their own specialities, some were good at war, others delivered good harvests, and so on. The problem for the exiles mourning their destroyed temple, was that their warrior God, Yahweh – legendary slayer of sea serpents and creator of the world, had suffered something of a smackdown defeat by Marduk.
What this called for was a re-understanding of the way the whole thing worked, and in that context one can understand just how comforting it was to see how Yahweh stood outside and above the military power of Marduk, whose own creation myth involved mighty violence. For Yahweh creation came not by the wielding of a sword or the defeat of an enemy, but by the speaking of a word. This was not just a comfort, but a shrewd move by the exiles. Vowing allegiance to a God who wasn’t at war with other deities, they declared themselves to be walking another path. And it was good.
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