Rainer Albertz on the Return of the Jews

by Doug Mason 2 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Doug Mason

  I will appreciate comments on the following OCR scan.

  Thanks,

  Doug

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  However, we must ask how a single event, hardly imaginable more than a few years before, could spawn such an extensive tradition of Baby­lon oracles. The conclusion is inescapable: probably most of the oracles against Babylon came into being after 539 and were employed for years in secular or sacred convocations. Two considerations make this assump­tion plausible. First, Babylon was most certainly not destroyed in 539; the just vengeance that the Judeans had every right to expect from Yahweh was still to come. Second, the return of the exiles did not take place, as expected, immediately after 539. The first substantial group of returnees probably did not arrive in Jerusalem until 520 BCE . Many members of the Babylonian golah clearly could not recognize the uneventful transfer of power from the Babylonians to the Persians as a sign from God that a new age had dawned. In this situation, the reuse and repeated recitation of oracles against Babylon after 539 were meant to provoke Yahweh's long-awaited retribution on Babylon, which would show to all the world that Yahweh was at work in world history as a just judge. As the many calls to flee from Babylon (Jer 50:8-10; 51:6, 45, 50) show, these oracles were also intended to persuade the Babylonian golah finally to return, since Yahweh's judgment on Babylon was imminent. When 50:33 says that those who had deported the people of Israel and Judah would refuse to let them go, and when 51:33 says that in "just a little while" the time of harvest would come for Babylon, we can hear a direct refer­ence to the problems that arose after 539: the failure of the golah to return and the delay of God's judgment.

  Gosse and Berges propose dating the Babylon oracles in Isa 13-14 and Isa 47 in the years 522-520. Whether this dating is correct for Isa 47 is uncertain. However, substantial evidence supports dating much of the Babylon composite Jer 50-51 in this period. These years are particularly likely because from 522 to 520, after the murder of Gaumata, an epidemic of revolts against Darius convulsed the entire central and eastern region of the Persian Empire.

  (Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century BCE, pages 194-195, Rainer Albertz. Society of Biblical Literature)
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  Leolaia

  It's well-argued and reasonable. I definitely agree that the point is to get the settled golah motivated to leave Babylon. I'm still not convinced however that the date of Jeremiah 50-51 couldn't be from within the Neo-Babylonian period. Jeremiah 51:46 seems to refer to a then-present circumstance of political instability in Babylon: " Do not lose heart or be afraid when rumors are heard in the land; one rumor comes this year, another the next, rumors of violence in the land and of ruler against ruler". This fits very well the situation in 522 BC re the revolt of the usurper Bardiya, but it also fits the situation in 556-555 BC re the quick succession of Neriglissar, Labashi-Marduk, and Nabonidus. The reference to " the kings of the Medes, their governors and all their officials, and all the countries they rule" (v. 28) imo best fits the period of Median hegemony that ended in 550 BC with the fall of Ecbatana and the dethroning of Astyages by Cyrus of Persia, so that seems to favor the earlier date. So also the complete silence on the Persians seems to point to a date before 550. And the rhetoric seems more appropriate if the "king of Babylon" here was of Chaldean stock (50:17-18), rather than a foreign king ruling as "king of Akkad" (see 51:2). So a date between 555-550 seems quite plausible to me, although it is also possible (even probable) that such oracles would have been redacted later, perhaps in 522 when the political situation again seemed to fit the expectations of the prophecy.
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  kepler

  Doug Mason,

  Greetings.

  Re:

  Gosse and Berges propose dating the Babylon oracles in Isa 13-14 and Isa 47 in the years 522-520. Whether this dating is correct for Isa 47 is uncertain. However, substantial evidence supports dating much of the Babylon composite Jer 50-51 in this period. These years are particularly likely because from 522 to 520, after the murder of Gaumata, an epidemic of revolts against Darius convulsed the entire central and eastern region of the Persian Empire.

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  Admittedly, I am an a disadvantage of having not yet read or seen this book, but nonetheless...

  Several years ago, when my fiancee insisted that I read "What the Bible Really Teaches", a pamphlet that is used perhaps only locally, and then later when I sat with an Elder and his understudies for several months of weekends of studies, the matter of Babylon's "non-destruction" according to account was one of the issues that immediately leaped out of the pages.

  I could find no evidence for the claims of the Isaiah text for quite some time - And then suddenly, the text explained itself.

  Isaiah was highly edited and quoted extensively from a PAST destruction, not to mention merged with at least one later author's ruminations. If all of Isaiah was written before captivity, then at the very least the name of Cyrus should have caused a general Neo-Babylonian panic.

  Whether Isaiah was alive when Sennacherib flooded and leveled Babylon in 689 BC is difficult to verify. But there is a tradition that Manesseh (687-642) had done Isaiah in, independent of the issue at hand. But when the pamphlet quotes Isaiah at 14:22,23 "I will sweep her with the broom of annhilation...", It neglects to quote in full,

  "I shall turn it into the haunt of hedgehogs, A SWAMP, I shall sweep it with the broom of destruction, declares Yahweh Saboath." My New Jerusalem Bible has a note to the effect that "These two verses seem to have been added to give emphasis to the [preceding verses] poem."

  But check into the other campaigns of Sennacherib and the resulting discord in the empire that resulted when he "desolated" Babylon. Had Saddam Hussein rolled into Mecca with tanks in the 1990s and desecrated the centers of pilgrimages, on the Arab world it would have had the same effect. Sennacherib was assassinated by his sons and one of them, Esarhaddon, moved to reverse his actions on Babylon. Obtained an account of this from:

  The Black Stone of EsarhaddonAuthor(s): D. D. Luckenbill

  Source: The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Apr.,1925), pp. 165-173Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/528697 .

  It turns out that the "70-year desolation" convention was inherited from the Assyrians. That was Sennacherib's ruling on
  Babylon in accordance with provisions of rule by the grace of the god Marduk. When Esarhaddon amended the sentence he did so by having a priest read the number of years (70) upside down, which in the cuneiform turned the interval into eleven years. So construction and re-settlement could get under way right away.

  Luckenbill quotes Jeremiah 25:12 and 29:10 and II Chronicles 36:21 and Daniel 9:2 without becoming involved in any further controversy about whether Jerusalem or Judea were held to the same standards as the Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians held each other. But it was clear from the translation of the stone that the 70-year sentence was a punitive convention already a century old and more mercy was displayed by the apparent originators than the interpreters of the text that I was being exposed to.

  As to later destructions in accordance with the text, I could see no evidence. Herodotus was already on my book shelves. It appeared that Persia had seveal capitals that included Babylon. Xenophon's mercenary service was a march toward it. And Alexander intended to restore it as a capital. He died there, among the hedgehogs, I guess. There were subsequent revolts against Persian rule that included Babylon, but none of them resulted in suppressions anything like that experienced by the Assyrian-Babylonian war.

  If you look in the back of the New World Translation, there are some tables for the historical origins of the books of the Bible. The chronology dates are a topic all their own, but in this context, it should be noted that compilers indicate the epistles of Peter to have originated at Babylon. ...Well, because Peter sends his regards from Babylon in I Peter 5:13: "Your sister in Babylon, who is with you among the chosen, sends you greetings, so does my son Mark." This is inferred to be a church or congregation - and elsewhere considered a reference to Rome rather than Babylon.

  How my instructors sorted this out, I never did find out. If Babylon had been destroyed, what was Peter doing there with his family and a church. It was not part of the Roman Empire. But if he was referring to Rome as Babylon, why would he do so unless he had survived until the time of Jerusalem's destruction by a Roman "Nebuchadnezzar"? Anachronistic, to say the least.