A great deal of the Hebrew Bible was shaped, edited or composed in and after this period, and the exile is the hinge on which its literary history turns. The historical books read the whole national story as leading to the catastrophe and explain it as the consequence of covenant infidelity. The priestly material sets out an ordered account of creation, sabbath and sanctuary for a community that had lost the sanctuary. Prophetic collections were assembled and extended, and the chapters of Isaiah addressed to a people about to be released speak of a God who created the ends of the earth and holds the nations as a drop in a bucket.
The return itself was partial and not triumphant. Cyrus permitted it in 538, a second temple was eventually built, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe a small, poor and quarrelsome restoration, preoccupied with boundaries and with who belonged. Many did not go back. The Babylonian community remained, prospered and became, a thousand years later, the setting of the Talmud that carries its name and that has shaped Jewish law more than any other book after the Bible.
This is the pattern the atlas records twice for Judaism, in 586 before the common era and again in 70 of it: the destruction of the centre, followed by the transformation of the religion into something that no longer needs one.