The Great Chronicles Cliffhanger
In our morning prayer lectionary this week we’ve reached the end of the book of Chronicles, bringing us to perhaps the greatest cliffhanger in the Hebrew Bible…
2 Chron 36:23 “Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up-
…and that’s it!
This strange fracture in the text has been explained by scholars in a multitude of ways, but in the rest of this newsletter we’re going to use it to explore a greater fracture: that of the Babylonian exile.
This text comes at the end of the chapter which records the way in which Jerusalem was destroyed and its people taken captive to Babylon. This lasted for 70 years according to v 21, and is known as ‘the Babylonian exile’.
After this point comes our cliffhanger - Babylon has fallen and been replaced by the next great superpower: the Persian empire. It is Cyrus, king of Persia who declares that the people may return to Jerusalem. We know this from the beginning of the book of Ezra and it is also indicated by the text of the Cyrus cylinder. This is helpful, because the end of 2 Chron 36 reads like an unfinished sentence!1
Cyrus Cylinder (wikimedia.commons)
In comparison, the end of the Deuteronomistic history leaves the reader in Babylon. In 2 Kings 25 we find Jehoiachin, the final king of Judah, released from his imprisonment by the king Evil-merodach of Babylon. At this point, the rising kingdom of Persia is unknown and we are left with a picture of the former monarch eating the scraps from the table of the king of Babylon.
vv 29-30 tells us
‘Every day of his life he dined regularly in the king’s presence. 30 For his allowance, a regular allowance was given him by the king, a portion every day, as long as he lived’
This is a far cry from the heights of the monarchy in which King David reigned over the united kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This was a disaster on both a political and a spiritual scale.
Chronicles skips over those 70 years of exile without giving much detail, but they are extremely important. As Rafael Furman states
'The Babylonian exile constitutes a turning-point in the history of the Jewish people in the biblical period. Many of the biblical books deal with exile from different vantage points - as a future punishment in the words of the prophets, as the reality in which a prophet lives, or as "exilic literature" originating in the historical reality that generated the exile’2
For this reason, it is something that will help us in our understanding of a vast amount of Biblical texts. In a previous newsletter, I discussed the way in which the trauma of the exile is one way in which we can understand some of the stranger aspects of the book of Ezekiel.
In order to fill the gap that Chronicles leaves, it is helpful for us to turn to texts such as Ezekiel, Lamentations and Jeremiah for reflections on what the exile meant for the people on a political and spiritual level. These texts powerfully capture the pain of dislocation and disenfranchisement
Next up in the morning prayer lectionary, we will be reading the book of Micah - a text influenced hugely by the Assyrian invasion.
Tune in next time for more on that!
If you enjoy this newsletter, you might be interested in a piece I recently wrote for the Church Times about women’s protest in the Hebrew Bible. You can find it here;
For more on the Cyrus Cylinder and what it might tell us about the return from exile, see Becking, Bob ""We All Returned as One!": Critical Notes on the Myth of the Mass Return". In Lipschitz, Oded; Oeming, Manfred (eds.). Judah and the Judeans in the Persian period. (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, 2006)
Furman, Refael, ‘Trauma and Post-Trauma in the Book of Ezekiel’, Old Testament Essays, 33.1 (2020), p 32
Great article. Just a minor point. The Babylonian Exile didn't last seventy years, the Babylonian Kingdom did (609-539 BC).
Even if one considers Daniel taken as a servant to Babylon's king in 605 BC, Cyrus conquers Babylon in October 539 BC, which would be sixty-six years of Exile. But Daniel and his three buddies in Nebuchadnezzar's palace can't technically be an Exile.
If you start the Babylonian Exile from Ezekiel and 10,000 other princes, artisans, and intellectuals taken by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC, that would still be an exile of only fifty-eight years.
But as you know, most correctly date the Babylonian Exile from the summer of 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple built by Solomon and leveled Jerusalem, burning the city to the ground. The Jews were marched to Babylonian for an Exile that lasted only forty-seven years.
The confusion of the 70 years arises from the words of Jeremiah the prophet.
Read closely (below) what Jeremiah says. He does NOT say the Babylonian Exile will last 70 years. YHWH prophesies through Jeremiah that the Babylonian Kingdom will last 70 years.
"9 I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon,” declares the YHWH, “and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin. 10 I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom, the sound of millstones and the light of the lamp. 11 This whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
12 “But when the seventy years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians, for their guilt,” declares YHWH, “and will make it desolate forever." - Jeremiah 25:9-12
Under General Nebuchadnezzar in 609 BC in the plains of Har Megiddo (Armageddon), the Babylonians defeated the combined forces of Assyria and Egypt (see II Kings 23 and II Chronicles 35), and became the world's second Empire (following Assyria) in 609 BC.
The Babylonian Empire came to an end (see Daniel 5) in October 5, 539 BC when "The Handwriting on the Wall" appeared in the palace of Babylon, and Daniel the prophet told the Babylonian King had been "weighed in the balances of God's justice and was found wanting." The king's life would be required that night.
Outside the palace, Cyrus, King of Persia, had diverted the Euphrates to allow his soldiers to crawl under "The Great Walls of Babylon." The Persian army killed the Babylonian king that very night, and conquered the Babylonian Kingdom (539 BC).
As you beautifully point out, Cyrus' Cylinder, displayed at the British museum, is a masterpiece of history. Cyrus let the Jews go home (as well as all other peoples the Babylonians had conquered and enslaved).
But the 70 years is the time of the kingdom of "Babylon."
I believe that's why "mystical Babylon" in Revelation is the chosen metaphor for the captivity and bondage of GOD'S people. Jesus, King of kings, and the Messiah of the world, breeches the walls of the Babylon in our hearts, frees us from our bondage to sin and death, and brings us home to our heavenly Zion.
Once again, thank you for your fantastic article.