612 BC to 539 BC
Babylon and the exile
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
612 to 539 BC
The world at this moment
What everyone else was doing while this part of the story was happening.
Babylon
Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
Egypt
Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
Judah
Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
Further afield
An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
Ordinary life
Exiles settled in communities along the canals of Babylonia, farming, trading, and keeping records in Aramaic, which becomes the everyday language and stays that way into the New Testament. Without a temple, worship reorganises around reading, prayer, sabbath, and circumcision, which is where the shape of the synagogue begins.
What you would be reading
15 books sit here. Open any of them and every card in the margin will describe itself at this moment.
Who was alive
12 of the people written up in the Hall of Witnesses belong to this stretch of the story.
A young nobleman deported to Babylon and trained for imperial service, who kept his integrity through three regimes. He is remembered for the lions' den and for the visions of successive kingdoms that make his book one of the most closely studied and most differently interpreted in Scripture.
The Babylonian king who destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and carried Judah into exile. Daniel records his dreams, his furnace, his descent into madness, and his eventual acknowledgment of the God of heaven.
The king who threw a feast using vessels looted from the Jerusalem temple and saw a hand write on the plaster. Daniel read it for him: weighed, and found wanting. Babylon fell that night.
The ruler who reluctantly signed the decree that put Daniel in the lions' den, then spent the night fasting and came running at first light. His identity is one of the standing puzzles of Old Testament history, with proposals including Cyrus himself under another title, or a governor named Gubaru.
He wrote Jeremiah's words on a scroll, read them publicly when the prophet was barred from the temple, and rewrote the whole thing after the king cut it up and burned it. He gets one short oracle of his own, telling him not to seek great things for himself.
A foreigner in the palace who heard that Jeremiah had been lowered into a muddy cistern to die, went to the king about it, and pulled him out with ropes and old rags for padding under his arms. He was promised his life for trusting God.
Daniel's companions, who would not bow to the golden image and told the king that their God was able to save them, but that even if he did not, they still would not bow. The furnace was heated seven times hotter and a fourth figure was seen walking in it.
Daniel's three companions, given Babylonian names in place of their Hebrew ones: Hananiah became Shadrach, Mishael became Meshach, Azariah became Abednego. Their Hebrew names all contain a word for God, and their Babylonian ones honor Babylonian gods, which is the point of renaming captives.
The figure in Ezekiel 38 and 39 who leads a coalition from the remote north against a restored and unwalled Israel, and is destroyed there. Ezekiel calls him the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, of the land of Magog.
The officers and priests who move through Jeremiah's later chapters. Johanan son of Kareah warned Gedaliah of the plot against him, avenged him, and then led the survivors into Egypt against Jeremiah's explicit word, taking the prophet with them. Seraiah son of Neriah, Baruch's brother, carried a scroll of judgment to Babylon and threw it in the Euphrates.
Ahikam's son, appointed by Babylon to govern the few people left in Judah after Jerusalem fell. He told them to settle down, gather the harvest, and serve the king of Babylon, and it was working.
The only two angels Scripture names. Gabriel appears as a messenger, interpreting Daniel's visions and announcing the births of John and of Jesus. Michael is called a prince and an archangel, and is described contending for Israel.
The world as it stood
28 entries describe themselves differently at this moment than at any other. These are the same notes that appear in the margin while you read.
The land
Cities, regions, rivers, and kingdoms, as they stood.
Besieged, starved, broken open, and burned in 586 BC, its temple destroyed and its walls pulled down. Lamentations is written over the ruin.
Where Josiah rode out to stop Pharaoh Necho and was killed, which the Chronicler treats as a catastrophe Judah never recovered from.
Destroyed in 612 BC by a Babylonian and Median coalition and never rebuilt. Nahum's oracle is about that fall, and within two centuries Greek writers passing nearby did not know what the mounds were.
The world power. Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem in stages, deports its leadership, and burns the temple in 586 BC. For the exiles this is not only defeat but a theological crisis: the temple was gone, the Davidic king was in chains, and the promises had to be understood again from scratch.
Briefly resurgent under the 26th Dynasty. Pharaoh Neco marched north and killed King Josiah at Megiddo, then set up and deposed kings in Jerusalem, before Babylon beat him decisively at Carchemish. Jeremiah spent his career telling Judah that betting on Egypt against Babylon was suicide, and after Jerusalem fell he was carried down to Egypt against his will.
Collapsing fast. Nineveh fell in 612 BC to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes, and the empire was gone within a few years. Nahum's book is the sound of a people who had lived under that fear watching it end.
Besieged by Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years, which Ezekiel comments on with unusual candor: the army got nothing for it. Ezekiel's lament over the city is the most detailed picture of ancient commerce anywhere.
Independent enough to meddle. It was an Ammonite-backed assassin who killed Gedaliah, the governor Babylon left in charge of Judah, which triggered the flight to Egypt that Jeremiah opposed.
The river the exiles sat beside and wept, and the one Seraiah threw a scroll of judgment into with a stone tied to it.
The peoples
A nation's name outlives its power, often by centuries.
The grievance that never healed. Edom stood by, and by some accounts joined in, when Jerusalem fell. Obadiah's whole book is about that day, and Psalm 137 remembers it.
Briefly resurgent under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Necho killed Josiah at Megiddo and then lost the east to Babylon at Carchemish. Judah's last kings gambled on Egypt anyway, and Jeremiah told them it would fail.
Gone, and faster than anyone expected. Nineveh fell in 612 BC to a Babylonian and Median coalition, and the book of Nahum is the sound of that news arriving.
The empire. Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem in stages, deported its leadership, and burned the temple in 586 BC. This is the world of Daniel's court chapters and of Ezekiel by the Chebar canal.
A rising power on the eastern edge, which Isaiah names in advance through Cyrus and Daniel sees as the second beast.
The name widens in exile, because Judah is who is left. The Babylonian setting is where Jewish identity gets reorganized around text, Sabbath, and gathering rather than around a temple that no longer stands.
The tribes
Where each stood, and which of them can still be traced.
Deported, and survives the deportation. The name outlives the kingdom and eventually gives the words Judean and Jew to everyone descended from the exiles, regardless of which tribe they actually came from.
Worship and institution
The temple in Ezra is not the temple in Kings, and neither is the one Jesus taught in.
One of the few practices that survives without a temple or a country, which is how it turns from a rest day into a marker of who you are.
Kept, if at all, without a temple and therefore without the sacrifice at the centre of it. What to do about that is one of the questions the exile forced and never fully answered.
This is most likely where it begins, though nobody can date the first one. With the temple in ruins and the exiles hundreds of miles from the site, worship reorganises around what can be done anywhere: reading, prayer, sabbath, and simply gathering.
It disappears. The detailed inventory of what Babylon looted from the temple does not mention it, and no source records what became of it. Jeremiah says plainly that a day is coming when nobody will miss it or make another.
The exile makes them central. With no temple to serve, preserving and copying the texts becomes the work that holds the community together.
Ezekiel pictures the fallen nations lying in it in ranks with their swords beneath their heads, which is the most vivid description the Old Testament gives of the place.
With no king on the throne, the promise made to David becomes a question instead of a fact. The prophets start speaking of a shoot coming out of a felled stump, an image that only works once the tree is down.
Burned in 586 BC. The bronze pillars were broken up and carried off as scrap metal, which the account records by weight, and the vessels went to Babylon, where Belshazzar later drinks from them at a feast. For fifty years there is no temple at all, and that absence is what forces worship into shapes that do not require one.
The gods of the nations
What was actually on offer, and how strong the pull was just then.
Jeremiah says the practice never entered God's mind and never came from him, which is an unusually direct denial, and Josiah defiles the site so it cannot be used again.
Ezekiel is shown women sitting at the north gate of the temple weeping for Tammuz, a dying and rising vegetation god of Mesopotamian religion. It is listed as one of the greater abominations, and its setting inside the temple precinct is the point.
The chief god of the city, carried in procession on New Year with the king holding his hand to renew the right to rule for another year. To be king of Babylon was to be Bel's tenant.
Jeremiah confronts Judean refugees in Egypt about baking cakes for her, and they answer him directly: things went well while we did it, and the trouble started when we stopped. It is one of the few places in Scripture where the other side of the argument is quoted at length and allowed to sound reasonable.
And then
Babylon falls to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC without a serious fight, and Persian policy on captive peoples turns out to be the opposite of Babylonian policy.