Israel, Exodus, Babylonian Exile
by Ulrich Utiger

Sébastien Bourdon, Moses and the brazen serpent

Page description
About the early history of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt and the Babylonian exile.

Contents of this page
The Exodus of Israel from Egypt
From the kingdom of Israel to the rest of Judah
The Babylonian exile

Short summary of the previous pages
We have seen that The Life Cycle of the Angels and Man is composed of the four phases of peace, sin, judgment and return to peace. We discovered the same phases in The Account of the Flood and The Ancestors of Israel Abrahm and Joseph. On the following pages we try to demonstrate that the whole salvation history is composed of eras with four cycles, which in turn are composed of the four phases mentioned above (see Summary of Salvation History). On this page we relate the first tree cycles of the era of the Israelite people.

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JUDAS MACCABEUS

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THE ANCESTORS OF ISRAEL

Page 6

3. THE ERA OF THE ISRAELITE PEOPLE

3.1. FROM THE EXODUS TO THE BABYLONIAN EXILE

The Exodus of Israel from Egypt

Becoming a people among the Egyptians, a new era of four cycles begins, namely that of the Israelite people. The era of the patriarchs therefore came to end, since in the center of the history of salvation is no longer found an individual man but a whole people united by a physical kinship, since it had Abraham as common ancestor. This kinship prefigures the spiritual kinship that began with Christ. The initial peace of the Israelites, extending on many generations during their stay in Egypt, institutes the first phase.

It reigned until the day when a new king came to power, Ramesses II, who feared for the future of Egypt because of the fertility of the Israelites becoming almost more numerous than the Egyptians. This is why he oppressed them with hard work (Ex 1:8-14). Yet this did not change anything and the Hebrews continued to grow. He then ordered that all newborn boys be thrown in the Nile (Ex 1:15-22).

This is why God called Moses as redeemer for the Israelites and as avenger for the Pharaoh, who hindered the Israelites to make sacrifices in the desert because their chores were of great use to him (Ex 5:1-5). This is why God inflicted ten terrible plagues upon him and his people, so that he was finally obliged to let them leave the country (Ex 7-13)1 and to go back there where they originally came from, that is from Canaan, the promised land of Abraham. But Pharaoh persisted and got them chased by his army. Thus Egypt attracted its supreme judgment, for its whole army was drowned in the sea (Ex 14:15-28).

However, this Exodus is not the revival yet, although it holds the characteristic and constitutes a precursory sign. For the divine anger changed on the Israelites, who, in the middle of the desert, began to murmur against God because of the lack of water (Ex 15:24; 17:3; Num 20:2-5) and food (Ex 16:2-3; Num 11:4-6) – although God gave them all they needed – and because they felt threatened by war (Num 14:2-10). They wondered why God had led them into the desert and refused to believe that it was to hold the promise made to Abraham to drive his descendants into the country where he himself had already been taken (Gen 15; 28:10-22; 50:24; Num 11:10-12). Because of this restive behavior, God did not permit the generation he had delivered of the Egyptian yoke to conquer the promised land, so that the Israelites were obliged to still languish in the desert during forty years (Num 14:20-24; Deut 1:34-36).

Only after a new generation, the Israelite people conquered Canaan in 1250/30 (Jos 1-11), the country where their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob once lived, "a land flowing with milk and honey" (Deut 26:9). This is the phase of revival that brings us to the phase of beginning of the next cycle.

From the kingdom of Israel to the rest of Judah

The first phase of this second cycle goes from the first organization of the country to its development to a kingdom, which attained its zenith with Solomon (965-926). During this time the Israelites indeed regularly abandoned the God of their fathers and served other gods, which provoked the divine anger each time, so that they were regularly delivered to their enemies. But thereafter, they always returned to God, who immediately delivered them from the hands of their oppressors (Jgs 2:11-23; 3:7-15; 4; 6:1-16; 10:6-16). In sum, they consequently nevertheless attached themselves to God, as long as charismatic men of faith like Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Samuel, and David reigned over them.

This however changed with the reign of Solomon, who paradoxically incarnated the kingdom in its greatest splendor, for his numerous "wives turned away his heart after other gods" (1 Kgs 11, 4). So God decided to remove the reign over the major part of Israel from his son Rehoboam, who became king after Salomon, and to only leave him the tribe of Judah, this in consideration of David and Jerusalem (1 Kgs 11:4-13). Solomon hence practiced apostasy.

Yet this was only an apostasy that provoked an even larger one: as predicted, the northern part of Israel separated from Judah under Jeroboam after the death of Solomon (1 Kgs 12:1-25). And because Jeroboam feared that the people could return to Judah and Jerusalem, he also decreed the religious separation from Judah by obliging the rest of Israel to serve other gods, for Jerusalem, thanks to its temple, still formed the religious center of all tribes, despite the political split, and thereby still had a large influence over all Israel (1 Kgs 12:26-33). The apostasy of Solomon and especially that of Jeroboam caracterize the phase of sin of this cycle, for almost all kings of this period are compared to Jeroboam and to his apostasy because they all made like him "what was evil in the sight of the Lord" (1 Kgs 15:34; 16:19+26+31; 22:53; 2 Kgs 13:2+11; 14:24; 15:9+18+24+28).

The judgment then arrived with the occupation of the northern kingdom, that is to say of Samaria, and the deportation of its habitants by Shalmanesar V, king of Assyria, in 722 (2 Kgs 17:5-6; 18:9-12). This whole context of the apostasy of the Northern Kingdom, provoking the deportation by the Assyrians, is confirmed by 2 Kgs 17:7-23.

The phase of revival consists of the survival of Judah, which, thanks to its king Hezekiah, was not only successful in facing the Assyrian imperialism, but Hezekiah also introduced a religious reform and later could, with the assistance of the prophet Isaiah, make Sennacherib retreat, the new powerful king of Assyria, who had already conquered all cities of Judah, except Jerusalem (2 Kgs 18-19).

The Babylonian exile

This revival continued – although two impious kings still rose, which is to be considered as a presage to the new apostasy of this cycle – with the beginning phase of the following cycle, that is to say until the king Josiah (639-609), who suppressed all idols and sanctuaries of the pagans (2 Kgs 23:4-14) and thus expiated Jeroboam’s apostasy by destroying the sanctuary of Bethel, where Jeroboam had driven Northern Israel into the religious separation from Judah (1 Kgs 12:26-33; 2 Kgs 23:15-20). Josiah also celebrated Passover for the first time since the Judges (2 Kgs 23:21-25) and had renovations at the temple executed (2 Chron 34:8-33). This phase lasted as long as Josiah was king of Israel.

After his death, his son became king, who again made "what was evil in the sight of the Lord", as well as the following king (2 Kgs 23:29-36). In addition, "the Lord did not turn from his great anger which had been aroused against Judah for all the provocations whereby Manasseh had angered him", namely the return to pagan rites in the middle of the reform begun by Hezekiah and later continued by Josiah. Manasseh is one of the two impious kings mentioned above (2 Kgs 21; 23:26-27; 24:3-4). This is why from 597 to 587 the whole territory of Judah and Jerusalem was conquered little by little by the Babylonians under the king Nebuchadnezzar, the temple looted, and the habitants deported (2 Kgs 24-25).

The Babylonians have been conquered by the Persians in 539 and seventy years after the deportation – according to the prophecy of Jeremiah (Jer 25:11-12), which we will approach on the next page – the Israelites could return to their country. A new temple was built and the city of Jerusalem rebuilt and provided with new battlements. The Mosaic Law and all rites were observed (Ez; Neh). This reform rejoins the first phase of the next cycle.

NOTE

We can approximately situate this Exodus in history: the first years of the reign of Ramesses II (1301-1234) were especially occupied by the construction of the city to which he gave his name. It is probable that the Israelites underwent their chores, which finally caused them to escape from Egypt, precisely during this time. This is why one situates the Exodus toward 1290 BC (KELLER Werner, The Bible as History.).