A Crisis of Exile

While most other nations of the ancient Near East would have been content to accept the verdict of history, stronger collective shoulders and transfer the reverence to the god of the victor, the later editors of the Deuteronomic history went back to the drawing board. So this period is marked by a resurgence in Jewish tradition, as the exiles looked back to their Mosaic origins in an effort to revive their original religion. It is most likely that the Torah took its final shape during this period or shortly afterward, and that it became the central text of the Jewish faith at this time as well. Much more than a collection of Bible stories, the Torah is the foundational text of Judaism, one of the most ancient of wisdom traditions. One of the most remarkable features of Mosaic legislation, always using the term in its widest sense, a sense of laws approved or introduced by Moses and developed in later Israel, is its humanity to man. It is the most humanitarian of all known bodies of laws before recent times. Since the Hebrew Bible is the founding document of second Temple Judaism and through it, Christianity and the broader Judeo-Christian civilization -our civilization- we’re all the beneficiaries, so to speak, of those highly sophisticated ancient authors.

The development of the monotheistic thought occurred during the Babylonian exile. This concept underscores some of the most significant truths of the Christian faith. The messianic kingdom is not limited to one geo-political community. Instead, God’s redemptive purposes embrace all the nations and peoples of the world. The god of ancient Israel the universal God of the world that resonates with people—at least in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition—to this very day.