ersist in the one thing Yahweh forbade: worshipping other gods. When they retreat into idolatry, Yahweh deserts them, or more precisely enables enemies of Israel to cut them off from their land both literally and figuratively. The captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt is one index of this, with Moses serving as a savior who actions enable the people to reinvigorate their quest for the promised land; the dynasty of David the King and "four centuries of Hebrew kingship" (Wells, 1971, p. 224) is another. The ancient culture of Israel coalesced and culminated in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC, after which the Assyrians carried the Jews off to Babylon. Out of the 50-year Babylonian Captivity emerged the tradition of Jewish messianism, which is a precursor of and linked conceptually with Christian eschatology. When in 538 BC the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great (who had conquered Babylon in 539), restored religious freedom to the Jews, work began on a second Temple in Jerusalem, but the Jewish state was not restored (Wells, 1971).
Wells's reading of the Babylonian Captivity is that it had the effect of lending cultural unity to the Jews, who in previous generations had been divided in their understanding of the covenant, a division represented by the fractiousness of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. As he puts it:
The Jews who returned . . . to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus were a very different people from the warring Baal worshippers and Jehovah [Yahweh] worshippers, the sacrificers in the high places and sacrificers at Jerusalem of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews went to Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They went a confused and divided multitude, with no national self-consciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive national spirit (Wells, 1971, p. 224).
A core feature of that spirit was the development of the "idea of a ...