Three central ideas of the Bible, part 3
Date
587BCE
587–332 BCE
For the Bible, crises in the relationship with God can be overcome: exile is punishment for unfaithfulness, but the writers look ahead to the restoration of Judah and all Israel.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
5 statements
01From catastrophe to hope
Tradition or narrative
A third basic point is that crises in Israel's bond with God are survivable. The Bible lays out what keeping that bond requires, yet it also stages how readily it breaks, as Israel, misled by its rulers, regularly breaks its duties. Prophets were supposed to sound the alarm, but even Moses struggled to make the changeable Israelites pay attention.
Tradition or narrative
In the Bible's telling, Israel finally fails in its part of the covenant and estranges God so completely that he lets foes wipe out the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and carry the people away. Much biblical writing wrestles with the nation's misfortunes and asks why a just God permits such suffering. The book of Job proposes that humans cannot grasp God's ways; Job, a righteous non-Israelite, stands for every believer who suffers without comprehension. Other texts name the cause outright: God is punishing the sins of the people or of their forebears.
Tradition or narrative
Biblical writers look beyond catastrophe to a time when Judah and all Israel are restored. Beside their condemnations, the prophetic books picture a coming reconciliation in which God rescues Israel from its enemies, gives back what it lost and renews the covenant. This is the root of the end-time vision of later Jews and Christians. Yet the restoration is not guaranteed; the prophets keep urging the people to reform, as though their destiny rested with them.
Later Jews held that the Torah itself preserves the chance of correcting course, because in it Israelites could find what God requires of them and how to atone. That helps explain the Bible's great value to Jews after the Babylonian and Persian conquests: scripture showed how much their forebears' sins had cost them, and it also offered hope and direction.
Context
Scholars debate whether the Babylonian conquest was really as ruinous as the Bible implies, but most see it as a turning point. Once the Davidic dynasty ended, Judah was no longer independent, and its people's fate came to depend on foreign governments.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Michael Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Introduction to the contents of the Hebrew Bible · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 60
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 57inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 57; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 57inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 57; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 57inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 58; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 58inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 34; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 34; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.