The Exiled God

The fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE is probably the most disastrous and significant event in Israel’s history. As the prominent Israeli historian Yehezkel Kaufman once put it, with this event, “The life of the people of Israel came to an end; the history of Judaism began.”^[1]

And yet, when we look at the biblical writings from this period, we find a fascinating diversity in how it was interpreted. In particular, the older prophet Jeremiah saw Israel’s subsequent exile into Babylon as the thrusting of the Judeans from God’s presence, while the younger prophet Ezekiel saw God as departing from Jerusalem and going into exile alongside his people in Babylon.

In this post, I want to look at how two texts from this period, Jeremiah 7:1-15 and Ezekiel 8-10, reveal how the exile was seen differently by the Judeans who remained in Judah after Jerusalem’s destruction, and those who went into exile in Babylon.

I'll begin by briefly situating these passages in their historical context. I then offer a literary analysis of each, connecting important expressions and images therein with key events that happened before and during the Babylonian exile. I conclude by reflecting on how Jeremiah and Ezekiel both point to hope after the exile.

Background to the Exile

By the time Jeremiah and Ezekiel came onto the scene, it is safe to say that the people of Judah had developed a misplaced trust in the Temple of Jerusalem, an unhealthy "royal ideology."

Since Jerusalem was one of the only capital cities able to resist capture during Assyria’s subjugation of virtually the entire rest of the Near East from the ninth to seventh centuries, by the sixth century the people of Judah felt they were untouchable. They believed that since “Yahweh had chosen the Davidic dynasty, neither it nor its capital, Jerusalem, could ever be destroyed.”^[2] And, as the Old Testament scholar Michael Coogan observes, “The visible sign of this guarantee was the Temple, Yahweh’s own home.”^[3]

Thus, as the Assyrian empire declined towards the end of the seventh century and Babylon rose in its place, the Judeans believed they would be able to resist this latest Near Eastern superpower as long as they had God’s Temple — no matter what they did in it.

It is in the context of this misplaced trust in the Temple that Jeremiah gives the sermon found in Jeremiah 7:1-15, in which God is portrayed as remaining in Judah while the people are thrust from his presence.

It is clear that Jeremiah began this message early and that it spanned a significant number of years because while at the beginning of the sermon God calls for the people to “Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place” (Jer. 7:3; [NIV 2011]), by the end of the sermon a few verses later the opportunity for reform has now passed: “While you were doing all these things ... I spoke to you again and again, but you did not listen” (Jer. 7:13).

God tells the people of Judah that because they have done “detestable things” in the Temple and “shed innocent blood” (Jer. 7:6, 10), the Babylonians are now on their doorstep, and therefore he will now destroy “the house that bears my Name, the temple you trust in” (Jer. 7:14). God’s reference to “the temple you trust in” is especially stinging because it reveals the fact that, at this point, the people’s trust was no longer in their God, but only in the safety of his Temple. However, this trust will soon be shown to be illusory. God says that the people will no longer be able to say, “We are safe” in the Temple (Jer. 7:10), because “I will thrust you from my presence, just as I did all your fellow Israelites, the people of Ephraim” (Jer. 7:15).

God is thus forced to use Babylon as his instrument of judgement against the southern kingdom of Judah, just as a century earlier he was forced to use Assyria as the rod of his anger against the northern kingdom of Israel (“Ephraim”) in 722 BCE.

Interlude: where is God now?

When in 586 the Temple was destroyed, and “along with it the sense of unconditional divine protection”^[4] the question was surely raised: where does the presence of God now reside if his house has been destroyed? While we have seen in the older prophet Jeremiah an early interpretation of the Babylonian exile as the thrusting of the people of Judah from God’s presence, from the prophet Ezekiel’s perspective, God has in fact departed from the Jerusalem Temple and is headed eastward in the direction of Babylon. Thus, Ezekiel’s interpretation of the Babylonian exile is that God’s presence is “no longer linked to the land but rather [is] with the exiles in Babylon.”^[5]

This interpretation of the exile comes from his vision in Ezekiel 8-10. In chapter 8, Ezekiel sees a fiery figure “like that of a man” who takes him by the hair to the northern entrance of the Temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 8:2-4; cf. Ezek. 1:25-28). There he sees that the glory of the God of Israel is still currently at the Temple (Ezek. 8:4). However, Ezekiel is then shown a series of vignettes involving increasingly detestable things in the Temple, things that God says, “will drive me far from my sanctuary” (Ezek. 8:6). Each time, Ezekiel is taken a level deeper into the Temple and the fiery figure says that he “will see things that are even more detestable” (Ezek. 8:6, 13, 15).

Leaving the Temple – in stages

Ezekiel first sees an “idol that provokes to jealousy” standing in “the entrance of the north gate to the inner court” (Ezek. 8:3). Next, he digs through the wall and sees within “all kinds of crawling things and unclean animals and all the idols of Israel” and, in front of those, “seventy elders of Israel ... in the darkness” with shrine idols (Ezek. 8:10-12). Contrary to Jeremiah 7:11 where God says, “I have been watching!” the elders here say, “The LORD does not see us; the LORD has forsaken the land” (Ezek. 8:12).
Going further into the inner court, Ezekiel then sees twenty-five men with their backs to the Temple engaging in Solar worship (Ezek. 8:16).

Ezekiel 9 then describes six men who judge Jerusalem by killing all who are not marked on their foreheads by a man “clothed in linen”. The people marked by the man in linen are those who “grieve” about these detestable things alongside God (9:1-2). Earlier, in 6:9, God was also described as being “grieved” about these things. One translation puts God's words this way: "I was crushed when their roving hearts turned away from me ..." (Ezek. 6:9; CEB).

Our human actions can crush or grieve God? God can suffer, even in the Old Testament? Something definitely worthing pausing and reflecting on.

It is not clear in the text whether the man in linen ever finds any grievers to mark, but the fact that Ezekiel asks God, “Are you going to destroy the entire remnant of Israel in this outpouring of your wrath on Jerusalem?” (Ezek. 9:8) is not encouraging. The explanation ultimately provided for this judgement of Jerusalem is that “the land is full of bloodshed” which recalls the sins of Manasseh in 2 Kings 24:3-4 (cf. 2 Kings 21). The sins of Manasseh, which included child sacrifice, were also hinted at by Jeremiah in our passage from earlier (Jer. 7:6).

In Ezekiel 10, the glory of God finally “[departs] from over the threshold of the temple” (v. 18), and in Ezekiel 11 will eventually come to rest on the Mount of Olives towards the east (11:23), showing that “Yahweh himself had gone into exile.”^[6]

Conclusion

While the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel both lived during the destruction of the Temple, they encountered this traumatic event from two very different perspectives. As Coogan notes, “Until his emigration to Egypt in the late 580s, Jeremiah was in Judah, witnessing the catastrophe personally.”^[7] By contrast, “Ezekiel had been taken to Babylonia in the first deportation of 597”.^[8]

However, while both prophets wrestled to interpret the meaning of the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile, they also both offered hints of hope for after the exile. For Jeremiah, this is the acknowledgement that although God had plans to “uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow,” he also has plans to “build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10). For Ezekiel, the very fact that God is now with his people in exile and “grieves” along with them shows that the people of Judah are not alone; God suffers with them.