Institute for Travesty

Less than a century and a half after the Assyrian Captivity, the Babylonians overran Judah in three separate events over perhaps 15 years. The Exile began with the second thrust: in 597, “Nebuchadnezzar deported around 10,000 Jews to his capital in Babylon; all the deportees were drawn from professionals, the wealthy, and craftsmen. Ordinary people were allowed to stay in Judah” (Richard Hooker, “Ancient Jewish History: The Two Kingdoms,” The Hebrews: A Learning Module, reprinted in Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-two-kingdoms-of-israel. Last visited 3/3/2024).

By that time the Prophets were routinely excoriating Judean falling away from true godliness, but among the captives were all the orthodox priests and Levites, all of the sacred documents, all of the direct memory of protecting the Temple and the worship of God there. And it was from that orthodoxy that the Synagogue sprang upward as the heart of a nation in captivity.

Moreover, in captivity the Jews were not diluted. They were left to associate with their own, more or less the official policy of Babylon for subjugated peoples. As a polyglot empire, the Babylonians even quite consciously and from the beginning chose to recruit talented Jews into governmental service.

Amazing Fecundity

The details get important here. In both the Assyrian Captivity and in the Babylonian Exile, ordinary people are said to have been left behind. In the two captivities combined, there is little or no argument for more than 30,000 total deportees. Yet it has been estimated for about the reign of Augustus Caesar that there were 6 to 8 million Jews living as “sojourners” in the Roman Mediterranean. It is also asserted that the greatest Jewish population was not in Israel but in Mesopotamia, outside Roman territory altogether.

How did there get to be so many Jews in the half millennium separating the Exile from the time of Augustus? Yes, there were Judean commoners left in the South and field-working Israelites left in the North. But where did all the others—perhaps 5 million—dispersed around the Mediterranean come from? The explanation of proto-synagogues attracting Northerners during the Assyrian period and of sprouting Jewish synagogues during the Exile also attracting lost-tribe elements begins to answer the question where so many “Jews,” people associating with the Jewish faith as biological brethren, could possibly have come from.

Commercialism

Returning to Hebrew captives from the Southern Kingdom, in Babylon, they were allowed to learn from a cosmopolitan power all there was to know about cutting-edge commercialism in 6^th century B.C. Asia Minor.

While 6^th century B.C. Europe was struggling to build a first trade empire at Athens and trying to get rid of Etruscan kings in the small settlement at Rome, the trading empire of Babylon had already been on east-west trade routes for 2000 years!

Governmentally Babylon controlled the entire Fertile Crescent down to the Egyptian border, and commercialism, probably with the help of Phoenicians, followed land and sea routes from the Mediterranean shores perhaps to the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic. (As far back as the time of David, Hebrew/Phoenician interests may have visited the West Coast of Africa through the Mediterranean and the East Coast via the Gulf of Aqaba.)

Mesopotamian Jews looking east could probably learn from trade all the way down the Indian coast via the Persian Gulf. We have direct archeological evidence that Jews were active in such international trade. The knowledge they gained seems to have been key to Jewish success and survival in secular affairs ever since.

Cosmopolitanism

But again, were these “Jews” in Babylon all from the Southern Kingdom? Or had their synagogues served to recall many descendants of the Northern tribes to their ancient religious faith?

There is much indirect evidence that many of these deported Northerners, already alienated from their own relationship to God, became thoroughly secular. But there is also very direct biblical evidence that true, courageous God-believers always carrying Jerusalem and the Temple in their hearts, were in close Mesopotamian proximity to Judean Exiles.

Centrality of Daniel

We get glimpses of that cosmopolitan, Mesopotamian melting pot or stew in three conical books, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Esther. Of the three, Daniel is the most centrally important to the present argument, and therefore it is unfortunate that Daniel is such a controversial book.

The book is universally referred to in Sunday Schools, and everyone, it seems, knows of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, as well as of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego—amazing that everyone knows such incomprehensible names and that even computers know how to spell them after all these years! If everyone has heard of Daniel and the Lions’ Den, a great many have also heard of handwriting on the wall. Many even know “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” (Dan. 5.24), what the hand wrote. And if we forget the details, there’s always the expression “seeing the handwriting on the wall” that gets the point across simply by implication.

A consistent scholarly attempt, however, has been made to argue that the whole book of Daniel was a fiction written hundreds of years after the supposed events.

Nevertheless, Daniel became canonical and made it into the Bible. And there is much in Daniel that is important but uncontroversial and largely unnoticed that would have been hard for Diasporan Jews—who considered Daniel canonical-- to ignore.

Political Realities

First, Daniel asserts that God was imminent and powerfully working in the Babylonian court.

Second, Daniel asserts that the Jews, or at least Jews like Daniel in Babylon, did not hide their faith, starting with the faith assertion that God is one.

Third, Jews were subject to persecution for their faith. Polytheists and fashioners of the newest fad in man-made idolatry weren’t happy with the Jews.

Fourth, some believing Jews made their way up the bureaucratic totem pole in Mesopotamia.

Fifth, they became known as useful administrators in the same way that Joseph did as a God-directed servant of the state in Egypt.

Hebrew Influence on the Head of State

Sixth, the head of state came to be influenced by strongly believing Jews who put their lives at risk for their faith. And the head of state found it expedient to publicly declare his relationship to God (see all of Daniel 4, particularly 4:37: “Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honor the king of heaven, all whose works are truth and his ways, judgment! And those that walk-in pride he is able to abase.”)

After all the arguments over veracity and authenticity, the text clearly claims that a non-Jewish, imperial head of state could have a relationship to God, could want or need to affirm that reality, and could say impressively true things about the God of Israel based in his personal experience. And there is every indication that in later Silent Years, orthodox Jews could believe the essential truth therein. Whatever the literal truth of Daniel, believing Jews accepted the general picture of the Babylonian court and could apply it to Silent Years’ Diasporan realities.

In terms of sprouting symbolism, Nebuchadnezzar’s blooming profession of faith is staggering. The date of his profession is approximately 560 or 570 B.C., almost immediately after the Exile took place. Equally staggering is Daniel’s insistence that Nebuchadnezzar had heard the fundamental truths of Judaism from Daniel and his three friends. But probably most staggering is not only that Nebuchadnezzar has heard, but that his confession of faith by his own account is more directly related to God’s hand miraculously upon him, Nebuchadnezzar himself, personally, first destroying his sanity and then restoring his sanity and empire.

Flowering Stage Effect on the Romans

Modern scholarship, of course, rather debunks all of Daniel rather than dealing with it. For the thesis of the present study, however, all such debate is a red herring.

We know that Daniel had been long accepted into the canon of Jewish Scripture. There is no evidence of Diasporans doubting the Daniel account. And thus, in the full flowering stage of Diasporan reality in the Roman Empire, what would the typically “superstitious” Roman people think when they were informed that Daniel was Scripture believed by the Jews?

Such a line of thinking quite reasonably leads to the thought that Romans would be much happier trying to compromise with the Jews than to oppose them. Exactly such a flowering seems to characterize Roman attitudes during the reign of Herod the Great in Israel.

In other words, Daniel reveals the seeds of developments that Jews later in the Silent Years were actually living through or seeing blossom and flower in the world around them.

Similarities in Esther

Moreover, there are immense similarities at this level of analysis with what we find in the Book of Esther, even though the court represented in Esther is a Persian, not a Babylonian, court.

Like the Babylonian society, the Persian Empire let Jews exist as an ethnic reality, dispersed but not diluted. In good times, the government seems to have been benevolent. According to the Book of Esther, however, there was, an undercurrent resentment of the Jews—again as unabashed monotheists in a polytheistic society—that could be nursed into something terrible and genocidal.

Within that general framework, we can compare the six major realities we asserted for Daniel’s Babylon.

1) God is imminent and powerfully working in Esther as much as in Daniel, despite the fact that the setting is entirely outside Israel, outside relationship to Jerusalem or to a Jewish Temple, and entirely dominated by a society fundamentally outside Judaism.

2) At least some Jews like Mordecai are recognized as believing Jews.

3) Jews face a consistently real possibility of persecution of the most vicious kind and at least partly motivated by greed.

4) Mordecai, like Joseph, Daniel, and Nehemiah, rises to high imperial rank. Esther becomes Queen.

5) Mordecai and Esther, like Daniel, make major national differences outside Israel.

6) The head of state gets involved and is, in fact, a witness to the general account.

Daniel and Esther are oddities in the Old Testament, books explicitly devoted to entirely Diasporan experiences. Both books were officially aknowledged as part of canon before the start of the Silent Year period. It is unreasonable to think that Diasporan Jews of the late Silent Year period were either uninterested or uninfluenced by the kind of Diasporan worldview these two books present. Presumably, such Diasporan attitudes developed over centuries in the Silent Years.

A Mirror to the Gentiles

It is also reasonable to assume that word of Daniel and Esther seeped out of the Diasporan Synagogue and into the Gentile world.

Roman history at the flowering stage of the Silent Years can be read for a rather tortured attempt by the Romans to include Judaism in the Pax Romana. Why were the Jews given their own king? Why did that king build so extravagantly with Roman assent to enhance the Jewish Second Temple? Why are there signs of Roman reluctance to bring the Jews into line before the 60’s A.D.?

Is the answer perhaps that they had heard of Daniel (as Alexander is said to have heard of Daniel) and to have appreciated Daniel’s prophecies about Rome? These prophesies are, after all, some of the most impressive prophesies ever recorded.

Is it also possible that the Romans had heard through Daniel and Esther respectively that not only the Babylonian court under Nebuchadnezzar but also the Persian court under Artaxerxes had undergone tribulations that ended with resounding affirmations of the Jewish monotheistic faith.

Presumably that would give the practical Romans reason to pause and consider.

In short Old Testament Scriptures themselves work at length to substantiate key aspects of Diasporan reality including: witness at the highest levels of society to a particular monotheistic God; commercial talent developed by exile to the center of the mercantile world; governmental influence in governments entirely outside Israel and founded as Gentile nations; an undercurrent of anti-Jewish feeling that could easily become vicious; and palpable indications that such persecution had not been at all good for the perpetrators’ health and survival.

Evangelism: The Samaritan Anomaly

So, Old Testament Scriptures, simply as history and entirely neglecting prophesy, speak amply to Diasporan realities that should concern us if we are seriously interested in understanding the Mediterranean world that in the Silent Years is claimed to have been the birthplace of almost all the modern arts and sciences.

There is one additional Diasporan reality, directly attested by Scripture, the conversion of the heathen, which is often ignored and which is most fully explored in the New Testament rather than in the Old as the reality of Samaritan faith in the Jewish God.

It should also be noted that the Assyrians shifted people into Israel when it took the upper-class Northerners out. These “Assyrian” elements no doubt lorded it over the field-hand people of the ten supposedly lost tribes. Soon, in typical pagan fashion, they were worshipping Yahweh, the God of Israel alongside other gods.

Syncretism, however, wasn’t a success formula wherever Yahweh became involved. Within two hundred years or so, Assyrians in the Northern Kingdom-that-was were worshipping Yahweh as the one and true God.

If we are trying to establish that there would be growth stages for Diaspora which could be symbolized by plant growth stages, the growth of Samaritan Yahwist traditions between 700 and 500 B.C. would obviously be an early stage of sprouting and springing up out of the earth, not of the Diaspora itself, but of formal Diasporan influence on Gentiles. In contrast, the possibility of slave proto-synagogues throughout the Assyrian Empire would be early stage sprouting and perhaps springing up of a Diasporan Hebrew reality.

The early monotheistic Samaritans can be thought of as early leaves springing up in the reality of Hebrew influence on the Gentile nations. Within the four Gospel accounts of the New Testament, only John relates the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well. She may be disreputable, but she has a solid religious background that allows her to know and debate the Temple versus other- temple distinction that separates her from Jews and to immediately recognize the question of the Messiah as relevant to her discourse about water with a stranger-Jew.

She is definitely separate from the Diaspora. At the same time, her religious sophistication is not just an early stage springing up but rather a full flowering of Hebrew influence on the Nations by the end of the Silent Year period.

For our purposes, the Samaritans are a primary example of “Jewish” influence on the Gentile Nations. The Samaritans are atypical only in that they came into Israel from the outside and were evidently evangelized through the medium of “lost-tribe” elements anything but lost, still tending their ancient plots of land in Israel.

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