The concept of exile in ancient Israel and its historical contexts

In ancient Israelite literature Exile is seen as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts "the Exile" is a central ideological concept. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms that YHWH punished Israel/Judah for having abandoned his ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain "Return". As the Exile comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH's proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. The concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.

Frontmatter --; Table of Contents --; Abbreviations --; Introduction --; Military Threat and the Concept of Exile in the Book of Amos --; The Exiled Gods of Babylon in Neo Assyrian Prophecy --; What Do Archaeological Remains Reveal of the Settlements in Judah during the Mid Sixth Century BCE? --; The Empty Land in Kings --; The Exile and the Exiles in the Ezra Tradition --; The Concept of the Empty Land in Jeremiah 37-43 --; Total Exile, Empty Land and the General Intellectual Discourse in Yehud --; The Voice and Role of a Counterfactual Memory in the Construction of Exile and Return: Considering Jeremiah 40: 7-12 --; The Un-Empty Land: The Concept of Exile and Land in P --; A Prophetic View of the Exile in the Holiness Code: Literary Growth and Tradition History in Leviticus 26 --; Images of Exile in the Book of Judges --; Exile in the Book of Isaiah --; Reading, Writing, and Exile --; Playing with Maps of Exile: Displacement, Utopia, and Disjunction --; Myth of the Exilic Return: Myth Theory and the Exile as an Eternal Reality in the Prophets --; Images of Exile: Representations of the "Exile" and "Empty Land" in Sixth to Fourth Century BCE Yehudite Literature --; Backmatter