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)