LECTURE 7: The Babylonian Exile and Prophetic Books
To answer the question “Who wrote the Bible?” is not simply to think about the people who had their hands in it, but also to consider the events that may have precipitated the formation of the Bible. The Babylonian exile of the 6th century B.C.E., when the Judean elite were exiled from their land by their Babylonian conquerors, is one such event; it touched off an unparalleled political and religious crisis in Israel’s history. How did this crisis, in turn, influence Israel’s process and practice of writing its traditions? How would the Babylonian exile, for example, catalyze the recording of the words of Israel's great prophets, like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel? And how would biblical writers rework these traditions to fit new contexts, an essential aspect of “scripture”?
Key texts:
Broken covenant: Jer 11:1–13
Failure to learn from Israel: Jer 2:6–9
God has given Judah over: Jer 12:7–8, 15:1–9, 16:9–13
Submission to Babylon: Jeremiah 27
The Flight of the Prisoners, James Tissot, 1896, Wikimedia Commons
I mention briefly that there are 15 prophetic books in the Jewish canon. You can learn more about the different canons and compare the Christian ordering of books (which includes Daniel) here and review our canon lists chart here. In the Jewish canon, these books are arranged more by length than chronology, so that the three longest books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, come first and are followed by the last twelve, which, because they are short enough to fit onto one scroll, are often referred to as “the Book of the Twelve.” At points, these come across as anthologies—the prophetic books contain lots of different sorts of materials and sometimes the logic for the arrangement of these materials is hard to detect. They don’t begin at the beginning and end at the end—sometimes the account of how a prophet was called to be a prophet is at the start of a book but other times it is buried, out of seeming order, in a later chapter. And, yet, they make their meaning: the words have, for centuries, been meeting their hearers and their readers “where they are”—lifting their spirits, capturing their sense of what is going on in the world, offering a sense of cosmic order.
We know from Assyrian archives that temple scribes recorded the oracles that prophets delivered there and placed them in their archives. At the ancient city of Mari, too, a rich collection of prophetic oracles were preserved in order to see if they might be fulfilled. If this were true in ancient Israel, too, the words of prophets that we have, we imagine, would have been collected along with others whom we no longer know, whose words did not survive to become a part of the Bible.
I mentioned briefly that archaeologists may have found the clay seal, of the sort to seal letters and scrolls, of Baruch son of Neriah, Jeremiah’s scribe. You can read more about that discovery and the debate around its association with Baruch here.
I mentioned that there are narrative episodes about Isaiah, often written in the style of the Deuteronomistic scribes, suggesting that these passages were added by those writers and editors at a later date. Those passages are Isaiah 7, 20, and 36–39. Additionally, some further proposed that these later chapters include a third author starting in chapter 56, that Second Isaiah was active during the Babylonian exile and a Third Isaiah wrote in Jerusalem, after the return from exile.