Exile, Scripture and a People of the Book

Two destructions made the tradition what it became. The Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE removed Israel proper and left Judah, and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 587 BCE removed sanctuary, monarchy and land at once.

Exile forced a religion built on a place to work without one, and what emerged was a religion built on a text. The Torah was compiled and edited into something close to its received shape across the period spanning the exile and the return; the sabbath and circumcision took on a weight they had not previously carried, as marks of identity in a foreign setting; and assembly for reading rather than for sacrifice began the line that leads to the synagogue.

Grabbe's account is careful about how much of the return under Persian authority can actually be reconstructed, and about the fact that the biblical books describing it are themselves the principal evidence for it. What is clear is the result. A second temple stood until the year 70 of the common era, and by the time it fell the community had already learned how to continue without one. The Israelites are therefore not simply the ancestors of Jews, but the subject of a story that Jews, Samaritans and Christians all inherited and then read differently.