NOTES for Ch2 36:14-16

People have thought and spoken in different ways about the fall of Jerusalem and its causes. Immediately after 589 BC, when the Babylonian army took the city by storm, many believed that this was some historical misunderstanding that God would soon put right, and everything would again be as it had been. That was what the majority thought at the time, and of all the public figures of the age only the prophet Jeremiah warned his compatriots that what had happened was no accident and that the exile would be long, though not endless.

The prophet was not heeded. Judean patriots launched an anti-Babylonian revolt; after it was defeated, the city was finally destroyed and all its inhabitants were deported to Babylon. This happened precisely because the prophet had been right. In essence, the Babylonian soldiers merely made visible what had previously been hidden: there was no longer any room for God in Jerusalem, in His own Temple, among His own people.

This, of course, did not happen all at once. A movement towards the abyss always begins slowly and often imperceptibly, gathering speed towards the end. Such was the whole pre-exilic history of Israel and then of Judah: less and less room remained for God in its life, until at last He had to leave altogether. Of course, the people's life in the pre-exilic period did not consist solely of spiritual decline: there were also upswings, when it seemed that the days of David were returning, David with whom God had made a special covenant, promising him that his descendants would rule in Jerusalem for as long as the city and the country existed.

Unfortunately, however, these upswings were short-lived and could not alter the overall spiritual direction characteristic of the pre-exilic age. Acting through the prophets, God tried to reverse the situation, but all His efforts proved fruitless. A human being is free, as is every nation, including the people of God. Yet if the people of God betray their calling, their fate inevitably becomes worse than that of any other nation.

Of course, any nation that betrays its calling and abandons the spiritual and historical task God has set before it will, in one way or another, come to historical and spiritual disaster. But the people of God, whose sole task and sole calling were to preserve the revelation they had received and, by the very fact of their historical existence, to bear witness to it, were especially vulnerable: they had no other calling and could have none. If they ceased to be what God had conceived and created them to be, their continued existence simply lost its meaning.

That is what happened to the Jewish people, while the catastrophe of 587 BC was merely the consequence and culmination of the corresponding spiritual processes, including the unwillingness of those who witnessed and took part in the events to understand what was happening. Now the remnant of the people had to rediscover the meaning of its historical existence, not only through repentance for the sins committed and a renewed turning to God, but also through a spiritual interpretation of its own history. Only after this had been done could the remnant hope to become the nucleus of a new people with a new history.