The Memory of Exile

When the modern Christian reads the Gospels, the air in the room is generally hopeful. The wise men arrive. The angel announces good news of great joy. The carpenter’s son grows up in Nazareth, preaches the kingdom, performs healings, draws crowds. The mood is forward-leaning, expectant, somewhere between Advent and Easter. The story has weight, but the weight is the weight of new things beginning.

The mood in the room when Jesus actually began preaching was different. The room was tired. The room had been waiting six hundred years — for the prophets’ promises to come true, for God to come back and rule his people himself, for the real end of the long wandering that began when Babylon broke Jerusalem in 586 BC. Politically the wandering had ended in 538 BC, when the Persians let the Jews come back to Judea. Theologically — by the testimony of the Jewish prayers, the Jewish scriptures, and the Jewish literature of the period — the wandering hadn’t ended at all. The people were back in the land. But the curses of Deuteronomy 28 were still in effect. Foreign empires still ruled. God hadn’t returned to his temple in the way the prophets had described his return. The exile, in the senses that mattered, was still going on.

This is a theological mood the modern Christian usually has no access to. It’s also one of the most important moods the New Testament writers assume their audiences already share. The gospel of restoration, the gospel of the kingdom has come, the gospel of good news to the captives and release to the prisoners — all of it lands differently when you can hear the six-hundred-year wait underneath.

the sentences that need an ongoing exile

There are sentences in the New Testament — and in the Second Temple Jewish writings the New Testament emerged from — that only make full sense if the reader can hear the still-in-exile mood underneath them.

We are slaves today, slaves in the land you gave our ancestors (Nehemiah 9:36, NIV). The line is from Nehemiah’s prayer at the rededication of the wall of Jerusalem, more than a hundred years after the return from Babylon. Nehemiah is in the land. The temple has been rebuilt. The walls are going up. By every external measure, the exile is over. And yet Nehemiah says — to God, in prayer, on a public occasion — we are slaves today. Slaves under Persian rule. Slaves still living under the consequences of the original disaster. The land has been restored. The status has not. The theological exile continues even though the geographical exile has ended.

Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him (Mark 1:3, NIV; quoting Isaiah 40:3). The Gospel of Mark opens with this quotation. The verse is from one of the most famous passages in Hebrew prophecy: Isaiah 40, the beginning of the so-called book of comfort, where the prophet announces — to a people in exile — that the exile is about to end. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for (Isaiah 40:1-2, NIV). The whole point of the passage is that the exile is ending. Mark opens his Gospel by quoting it. Six centuries after Isaiah wrote those words to exiles in Babylon, Mark applies them to John the Baptist preaching by the Jordan. The Gospel of Mark is announcing, in its very first sentences, that the long-promised end of exile has arrived.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19, NIV; quoting Isaiah 61:1-2). Jesus’s inaugural sermon in Nazareth, the passage he chose to read on his first Sabbath back in his hometown. The scripture he chose was from Isaiah 61, the Jubilee passage — the prophetic vision of the great release. The year of the LORD’s favor in Isaiah 61 is the year the captives come home, the year the prisoners are freed, the year the long bondage ends. Jesus read it aloud, sat down, and announced Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21, NIV). He was claiming, in front of his hometown synagogue, that the end of exile he was reading about was beginning, in him, now.

The Nehemiah prayer reaches across centuries to the Mark and Luke passages. They’re doing the same work in different keys. The work is the maintenance and the fulfillment of one of the central theological framings of first-century Jewish life: the long wait is real, the long wait is still in effect, and now the long wait is ending. To miss the mood is to miss the news.

what scholars mean by “still in exile”

The most influential modern treatment of this material is the work of the British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, particularly in his major monographs Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996) and The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992). Wright’s argument, much-cited and much-debated for the past thirty years, can be summarized like this. By the first century AD, most Jews would have understood themselves — in all the senses that mattered theologically — to still be living in exile. Yes, they were physically in the land. Yes, the Second Temple had been rebuilt and was standing. But the prophets’ promises about the end of exile — God returning to his temple in glory, the foreign empires being driven off, the Davidic king ascending the throne, the nations streaming to Zion, the curses of Deuteronomy 28 being lifted, the people being given new hearts and the Spirit — hadn’t been fulfilled. The first-century Jew, looking around, saw a Roman garrison in Jerusalem, a Herodian puppet on a throne that should have belonged to David’s house, and a temple still functioning but with no visible cloud of glory inside it. Whatever had happened in 538 BC, the theological exile was still going on.

The thesis is influential but not uncontested. Some scholars — Maurice Casey, Steven Bryan, Douglas McComiskey, and others — have argued that Wright pushes the still-in-exile category too hard, and that many first-century Jews didn’t think of themselves as still in exile but as living, however imperfectly, in the post-exilic restoration. The Catholic biblical scholar Brant Pitre, in Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Baker, 2005), worked through a great deal of the Second Temple Jewish evidence and concluded that the still-in-exile reading is well-supported by the texts — including Daniel, Tobit, Baruch, 4 Ezra, the Qumran literature, and the prayers of the Second Temple period. Other scholars sit somewhere between, holding that some strands of first-century Judaism worked with a still-in-exile frame while other strands worked with a partial-restoration frame. The debate continues. What’s no longer in dispute is that the still-in-exile framing was a real and important strand of Second Temple Jewish thought — not a scholarly invention. The first-century Jewish prayers themselves bear it out.

The evidence Wright and Pitre and others marshal includes the following.

The continuing prayer of confession that Israel is still under the curses of the law. Daniel 9, written in the second century BC but set in the sixth, includes a long prayer of confession in which Daniel pleads with God on the basis of the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against you (Daniel 9:11, NIV). The prayer treats the exile as a chapter still being written, not a chapter that is finished. The Deuteronomic curses are still in effect.

The seventy weeks of Daniel. In response to that prayer, the angel Gabriel tells Daniel that the seventy years of exile prophesied by Jeremiah will, in fact, be extended into seventy weeks of years — four hundred and ninety years — before the full restoration arrives (Daniel 9:24-27). The Second Temple imagination took this seriously. The end of exile isn’t 538 BC. The end of exile is some longer reckoning, still in the future from where Daniel sits. Various Second Temple groups did the math differently and arrived at different end-dates. The Qumran community, the apocalyptic writers, and (later) the early Christians all calculated the seventy weeks toward a moment they expected to be in their own near future.

The Second Temple literature is full of texts that frame Israel as still suffering the consequences of exile. The book of Tobit (third or second century BC) is set during the Assyrian exile but presents the post-exilic situation as theologically continuous with that exile. The book of Baruch (second century BC), written in the voice of Jeremiah’s scribe, prays for restoration as if the exile is still in progress. 4 Ezra (late first century AD, written after the destruction of the Second Temple) explicitly treats the period from the Babylonian exile through the Roman occupation as one long unbroken catastrophe. The Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly the Damascus Document and Pesher Habakkuk, treat the present (in their case the late Second Temple period) as still inside the curse-period, awaiting the visitation of God.

The prayers said in the temple and the synagogue. The Amidah, the standing prayer that ran through every synagogue service, includes petitions for the regathering of the exiles, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and the restoration of the Davidic throne — petitions that wouldn’t have been said if the petitioners thought the exile was already over. Every Sabbath in every synagogue, the prayer rose: gather us together from the four corners of the earth, restore our judges as at the first, return in mercy to Jerusalem your city, dwell in her midst as you have promised, build her up as an everlasting habitation. The prayer is a still-in-exile prayer.

This is the mood the New Testament writers assume their first audience already knows. They don’t need to argue it. They quote scripture in ways that take the still-in-exile framing for granted and treat Jesus’s coming as the long-awaited end of it.

the gospel as the long wait ending

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem (Isaiah 40:1-2, NIV). Mark begins his Gospel by setting John the Baptist inside Isaiah 40 (Mark 1:2-3). The reader who knows the mood of Isaiah 40 — a prophet announcing to exiles that the hard service has been completed, that the sin has been paid for, that the LORD himself is now coming back to his people — hears, in Mark’s opening lines, that the long wait is ending and the LORD is on his way. The gospel is the announcement of the end of exile. Mark doesn’t have to argue it. He quotes Isaiah and lets the mood do the work.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19, NIV; quoting Isaiah 61:1-2). Luke gives Jesus an inaugural sermon built entirely on Isaiah 61 — the Jubilee passage, the great release. In the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25), debts were forgiven, slaves were freed, ancestral land was returned to its original families. Isaiah 61 takes that legal institution and gives it eschatological weight: the year of the LORD’s favor is the year of the great release at the end of the long bondage. Jesus reads it aloud in his hometown synagogue and announces that today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21, NIV). The end of exile isn’t a future hope. It’s a present announcement.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13, NIV). Paul is interpreting Jesus’s death inside the Deuteronomic frame. Deuteronomy 28 lists the curses that follow disobedience, culminating in exile. Deuteronomy 27:26 pronounces a curse on anyone who does not uphold the law. Paul reads Jesus’s death on the cross — under the Roman pattern of execution that included the language anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:23) — as Jesus taking the Deuteronomic curse onto himself. The exile happens because of the curse. Christ takes the curse. The exile, in its theological substance, ends at the cross.

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf (Hebrews 6:19-20, NIV). The writer of Hebrews develops the still-in-exile picture into a Christological frame. The temple curtain had hidden the inner sanctuary from the people for centuries. Jesus is the forerunner who has now entered. The exile of the people from God’s full presence — the exile that began in Eden and ran through Babylon — has been ended by his entrance. The full restoration is no longer ahead. It has, in him, arrived.

The New Testament’s whole architecture, once the still-in-exile mood is audible, reads as one long announcement: the wait is over. The kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1:15) not in the sense of a vague spiritual reality drawing close, but in the sense of the long-prophesied end of the long bondage finally happening, in Jesus, now. Paul’s gospel — calling all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith (Romans 1:5, NIV) takes the prophetic vision of the nations streaming to Zion (Isaiah 2:2, Micah 4:1) and announces its fulfillment outside the temple, in the cities of the empire, in households where the LORD is being worshiped by Jews and Gentiles together. The final vision of Revelation — God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God (Revelation 21:3, NIV) — is the long-prophesied end of exile delivered in its completed form. God dwelling with his people. The long wandering finished. The promise kept.

The recovery this chapter is after isn’t historical curiosity. It’s the recovery of a mood without which the New Testament’s most central announcements lose their weight. The gospel of the kingdom has come is, in its first-century setting, the gospel of the six-hundred-year wait is over. The gospel of release to the prisoners is the gospel of the long bondage is ending. The gospel of God with us — Immanuel — is the gospel of the God who left the temple in Ezekiel’s vision is now returning to dwell with his people. Strip the still-in-exile mood out of the New Testament and the announcements still read, but they read as quieter and gentler than they were. Put the mood back in and the announcements read as the news a long-waiting people had been praying for through every synagogue service for six hundred years.

What this means for the modern reader is something her tradition has often had trouble keeping in mind. The Christian gospel didn’t arrive into a religious blank space, or into a generic spiritual hunger, or into the abstract longing of every human heart for meaning. The Christian gospel arrived into a specific six-hundred-year wait, in a specific people, with specific prayers and specific prophetic promises and specific theological grief over a specific unresolved exile. When the New Testament writers announced that the wait was over, they weren’t making a poetic gesture. They were closing a chapter that had been left open in the sixth century BC. The temple that had been destroyed was finally being rebuilt — not in Jerusalem but in the body of Christ and the gathered church. The land that had been forfeited was finally being inherited — not as a geographical possession but as a new creation. The curses of Deuteronomy that had hung over the nation for six hundred years were finally being lifted — not by political restoration but by the one who became a curse so the curse could end. The wait was over. The wait was over. The wait was over.

And so the prophet’s words, written down by candlelight in a foreign country in the sixth century BC, finally found their hearers. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. For six hundred years the words sat there waiting. For six hundred years they read like a promise not yet kept. And then a Galilean rabbi stood up in his hometown synagogue, read another Isaiah passage from the same long arc of comfort, sat down, and said today. The wait was over. The promise was kept. The God who had once departed from the temple in glory had come back — not in a cloud over the holy place, but in the body of a carpenter’s son standing in front of his neighbors. The exile had ended. The LORD had returned to his people. The long, long, long six-hundred-year wait was over. Blessed be the God of Israel, who has come and redeemed his people.