by Bruce Feiler
The real Ishtar Gate appears at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep trench in the center of the city. The remains on display here, over thirty feet long, represent the lowest portion from one of the early gates that Nebuchadnezzar II built over. The final gate left standing was carted off to Berlin following excavations in 1902. The blue has long since disappeared from these bricks, and the surface is the color of cardboard. But the most striking feature is the vast number of bas-relief lions and dragons that cover the surface, like emblems on an Hermès tie. With their scaly pelts and curlicue tails, the creatures jut from the wall like three-dimensional tattoos. “With all these decorations, this is clearly a ceremonial gate,” Dr. Russell said. “Also, it was designed to intimidate visitors to the palace.”
I actually felt that the otherworldly quality of the beasts made Babylon seem more alluring than I had expected. In fact, I was struck by how much baggage I had brought to the site, expecting to find clues of some twisted, dark regime. Babylon must be evil, I thought; the Bible says it’s so. But the more I saw of the remains, and the more I read of its history, the more I realized I had to recalibrate my view of the defining episode of the second half of the Hebrew Bible. Babylon was not the evil empire; it may even have been Israel’s redeemer.
We pulled out our Bibles. The idea that Jerusalem was totally destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II, the kingdom of Judah wiped off the world stage, and the Israelites plunged into unconsolable despair is, in many ways, the creation of the Bible. One of the most evocative turns of phrase in the entire text, the opening verses of Psalm 137, is a searing portrait of sadness.
By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres,
for our captors asked us there for songs,
our tormentors, for amusement,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How can we sing a song of the Lord
on alien soil?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate
if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory
even at my happiest hour.
Psalm 137 was popular from the earliest years of Jewish liturgy and is still sung by devout Jews before the grace after meals. The Renaissance composer Salomone Rossi turned it into a lament for Jewish nationalism, and the nineteenth-century English composer Isaac Nathan wrote the melody popular in Jewish worship today. Some have tried to turn the verse that begins “If I forget you, O Jerusalem” into an Israeli pledge of allegiance. Psalm 137 is also one of the most popular psalms in Christian hymnals, used often during Vespers, or evening services, and put to plaintive melody in the musical Godspell.
Yet the impression this psalm leaves of the Exile is misleading at best. For starters, the Exile should be seen not as an isolated example of Israelite misfortune but as part of a sweeping period of global transformation. In the same way that the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land occurred amid large-scale upheaval in the twelfth century B.C.E., their exile to Babylon occurred amid a similar period in the sixth century B.C.E. Societies had grown far more complex since Sumer, which now allowed domineering nation-states to accrue more disposable income and, among other things, gave rise to a more influential intellectual class. The prophets in Israel reached their apogee at the same time Siddhartha Buddha was preaching in India and Nepal, Confucius was teaching in China, Zoroaster was gaining influence in Iran, and the Pythagorean philosophers were writing in Greece. Scholars have been unable to draw direct, causal relationships among these thinkers, but their confluence suggests broad social change was causing humans to reach for new sources of meaning in their lives.
Second, not that many Judaeans appear to have been shipped off to Babylon. Jeremiah puts the number at 4,600, though that probably refers only to men and, like all biblical numbers, is hardly reliable. More telling, Jeremiah talks of a “remnant” who stayed behind in Judah and reports that after the conflagration of 586 subsided, Judaeans returned from surrounding areas. In all likelihood only the most landed, the most learned, and the most monied of Israelites were deported, which means the turmoil to the society may have been great but so would that elite population’s ability to regroup in Mesopotamia have been.
Which leads to the third and most significant point: Babylon wasn’t that bad for the Israelites who lived there. Details are impossible to come by, and plenty of mournful remembrances survive in the Bible, such as Ezekiel’s famous plaint that Israel in exile had become “dry bones.” But far more clues suggest that the Israelites lived a full and fruitful existence in Babylon. Jeremiah 29 reproduces a remarkable letter that the prophet sent to “the priests, the prophets, the rest of the elders of the exile community, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon.” Jeremiah quotes God as commanding the Israelites:
Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.
Babylon is not anathema to Israelite prosperity, God suggests; in fact, Israelite prosperity depends on Babylon’s success. The defeated must strive to make their conquerors excel, for in so doing they ensure their own success. Exile, God reiterates, can be good. “I will single out for good the Judaean exiles whom I have driven out from this place to the land of the Chaldeans,” God says in Jeremiah 24, using the word Chaldean to suggest the deportees have returned to the birthplace of Abraham. “I will look upon them favorably, and I will bring them back to this land.”
The biggest challenge the Israelites faced in the Exile was answering the question Where is God? During the monarchy, the Israelites had believed that God dwelled in his house in Jerusalem and promised that the House of David would reign forever. If so, what happened to God when his house was sacked and David’s heir deported? Did God exist anymore? Here the prophets made their most profound contribution to Western religion. Ezekiel, writing during the Exile, declared that God’s real presence was not to be confused with his temporary presence on earth. Ezekiel speaks of watching God’s spirit leave the Temple Mount, then visit him in Babylon. Ezekiel relates the Israelites’ experience in exile to their experience in the Exodus: Just as God showed dominion over Israel no matter where they were, including Egypt, so God shows dominion in Babylon: “As I entered into judgment with your fathers in the wilderness in the land of Egypt, so I will enter into judgment with you.”
The importance of this message to the future of religion cannot be overstated. From the moment God promises land to Abraham until Moses’ death on Mount Nebo, the underlying theme of the biblical story is that wandering is only a temporary state for the Israelites. Their destiny lies on the land, where they will fulfill God’s vision and create a holy community on earth. This idea is consistent with Ancient Near Eastern religion at the time, in which gods were affixed to different locations. But the Israelites’ experience of living on the land goes horribly wrong, of course, and the prophets must deliver a different message: Wandering is holy, too. God is not exclusively a figure of the land; he’s also a figure of the wilderness. He’s a figure of all lands.
God is everywhere.
This simple idea changed the world because it meant the god of the Israelites did not reside just on a mountaintop in Jerusalem—he could live along the banks of the Euphrates, on the shores of the Nile, or alongside any river or mountain, anyplace in the world. This notion could have been a mere platitudinous response to the crisis, but it took hold because of how the Israelites responded to their national trauma. The towering significance of what happened by t
he rivers of Babylon is that the Israelites did not merely weep; they set about redefining what it meant to worship God. They invented Judaism.
The exact details of this birthing are not clear. Some of the exiled Judaeans clearly began to worship other gods; some seem to have suggested rebuilding the Temple in Babylon. But the majority seem to have understood that the bulk of their practices from Jerusalem were dead and that they needed new ways to honor, debate, and interact with God. One idea they adopted was to gather in small groups and discuss the words of the Lord. These congregations, “by the walls and in the doorways of their houses,” as Ezekiel puts it, were temporary human sanctuaries that could replace the displaced holy sanctuary. These congregations were also more populist than the Temple in Jerusalem, which was limited to the priests. Later these sanctuaries would mature into synagogues.
Another custom that rose to prominence was celebrating the Sabbath. The idea of taking one day a week to rest, renew, and honor God goes back to the first wilderness experience in the Sinai. But as Jeremiah notes, the tradition never stuck: “They would not listen or turn their ear; they stiffened their necks and would not pay heed or accept discipline.” So the prophets trot out the idea again and this time raise the stakes. As Isaiah notes, redemption now depends on obedience.
If you call the sabbath “delight,”
The Lord’s holy day “honored”;
And if you honor it and go not your ways
Nor look to your affairs, nor strike bargains—
Then you can seek the favor of the Lord.
With the loss of holy space, holy time becomes important.
A further notion that grew out of the Exile involved distinguishing the Israelites from their neighbors. Among so many different conquered people walking the streets of Babylon, the Judaeans were deeply concerned with maintaining their sacred identity. Ideas such as ritual purity, circumcision, and marrying only within their own community took on heightened, ritualistic meaning. We are witnessing the emergence of a religion.
But the sine qua non of this evolution was the elevation of text to the core of the faith. The importance of narrative and written law to Israelite religion had been emerging for many centuries, going back to the Ten Commandments, the first thing written down in the biblical story. This appreciation of recorded words continued to evolve through the monarchy, when portions of the written Bible began to enter Israelite public life. But the Exile accelerated this tendency. With no access to sacred sites, sacred text became Israel’s lifeline to its past. As Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles indicates, priests were becoming more important—and more focused on directly serving the population, not just worshiping God in the Temple. They began to edit the myriad of oral and written traditions of Israelite history and combined them into a unified canon. The Bible may not have been born in Babylon, but it certainly came of age here.
This maturation may be one reason why the final version of the Hebrew Bible contains so many references to Mesopotamia. “Here we are sitting by the Ishtar Gate,” Dr. Russell said. We had settled at the base of the ruin in one of the sharp shadows created by the midday sun. Dr. Russell spoke slowly, searching for each word carefully, but his thoughts came out as fully formed paragraphs.
“The Judaean population was here,” he continued. “It’s interesting that when they wrote down their early history, the stories have a very local flavor. The Garden of Eden got placed here. The Flood sounds indigenous. The same with the Tower of Babel. If you look past the palace”—he gestured to his left—“just down that street was the ziggurat. Traditionally, big imperial constructions were built by populations subjected by a king. So figure in 586, Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and brought the Judaean population into southern Mesopotamia and employed them to help with the ziggurat. And it must have been a struggle for those folks to maintain their identity, because you walk the streets of Babylon, and how many languages would you hear? Languages from Iran, from Turkey, from Arabia, from Egypt. You would have heard languages from everywhere. And it must have been interesting for the Israelites to speculate how it got that way. Here’s the greatest city in the world, with so many languages spoken, and this huge tower nearby. Maybe one of them started telling a story. . . .”
A minority of biblical scholars, cognizant of these influences, suggest the Israelite intelligentsia invented the early stories of Genesis during the Exile. More propose, as I have come to believe, that the stories have deep oral roots that stretch back to an earlier time, perhaps as early as the patriarchs, and the stories were just edited and written down during this period. But that option raises prickly questions as well.
“Setting these stories in Mesopotamia may make sense because the Israelites were here,” I said to Dr. Russell, “but it seems to contradict one goal of the Bible, which is to glorify the Promised Land. Part of me thinks the Bible prefers the Israelites when they’re not on the land to when they are.”
“The challenge for any exile population is not to assimilate,” Dr. Russell said. “To me, the biblical epic is a model for a people in exile. It gives the people a Mesopotamian origin, then describes one member of their family, Abraham, traveling west toward Israel. He becomes a role model to follow. ‘Here we are. Our ancestors started here. After some troubles, they ended up in the Promised Land. We should do the same thing as soon as we can.’ If you’re stuck here and you want to go back there, you start constructing your narrative so that people will see that as a desirable goal.”
“So given the fact that Babylon was the superpower of the day,” I said, “and the Israelites the vanquished minority, why is it that Babylonian culture did not survive and Israelite culture did?”
“There is something very compelling about the narrative of a people who are always in trouble, who are always facing adversity, but who have a common identity and a common God. You don’t find that in Babylonian religion. There’s not a single-minded devotion to a single theological figure. They’ve got a multitude of gods. You move from one city to another and different gods have authority.
“The Israelites, in Babylon, begin to develop a universal religion,” he continued. “When you begin to think you can practice a religion without it being tied to a single place, without God being in the Temple but being in other places, too, that’s a revolutionary idea. And it allows the religion, the god, to survive anywhere.”
I don’t really remember dreaming of Babylon as a child. The city doesn’t have an iconic building, like the pyramids or the Parthenon. It doesn’t have a huggable hero, like Sinbad or Aladdin. It doesn’t have a defining postcard image, like the Dome of the Rock or the carved temples of Petra. The only things readily associated with Babylon are its hanging gardens, but no one knows what they looked like. Thirty-five years behind Saddam’s iron curtain just made the situation worse. Virtually no pictures of Babylon appear in photo books. For all practical purposes, Babylon is anonymous. Even after years of studying the Bible, I had no idea what to expect when I entered its walls.
I was stunned. Babylon was a huge city, with evidence of power at every turn—thick walls, intricate carvings, elaborate canals, sophisticated architectural details. The Ishtar Gate, for example, is built with interlocking joints so it will not collapse if the ground softens during a flood. Most of all, I was struck by how the city reflects a mastery of advanced mathematics. Math has deep roots in Mesopotamia; the Sumerians were the first to parcel the day into twenty-four hours and the circle into 360 parts. The Babylonians went further, perfecting the use of the sundial, the water clock, and the lunar calendar, in which the year consisted of twelve months of either twenty-nine or thirty days with an extra month inserted regularly. The ziggurat of Babylon was oriented to the four cardinal points of the compass.
This sophistication surprised me, I think, because I still viewed the city through Bible-colored glasses. Despite years of studying ancient societies, part of me still instinctively looked down on Mesopotamian cultures as having a god of the sun, for
example, and a god of the moon. These ideas may have helped them invent civilization, but they are so outmoded today that they seem emblematic of a young society, still clinging to its agrarian roots.
But walking around Babylon, I could no longer sustain my knee-jerk superiority. The elaborate temple of Ninmakh, for example, the god of the underworld, and another to the god of the moon, Sin, reinforce the deep parallels between religion and science in the ancient world. Adoration of the moon and stars inspired the Babylonians to devise the most advanced astrology in the Fertile Crescent. Some scholars suggest ziggurats were built, in part, as observatories to assist priests in making astrological calculations.
Moreover, on rereading the Bible, I realized that the text doesn’t condescend to the accomplishment of the Mesopotamians at all. In fact, the Bible openly honors them. At the height of their power, in the sixth century B.C.E., the Babylonians were known across the region as Chaldeans. This name was taken from the Arabian tribe that settled in central Mesopotamia in the ninth century B.C.E. and eventually seized control over the kingdom. Both King Nabopolassar and his son, Nebuchadnezzar II, were from the Chaldean, tribe. Chaldeans, the term Genesis affixes to Abraham’s compatriots, is the name that Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets assign to the Babylonians. Herodotus, the Greek historian who described Babylon in the mid–fifth century B.C.E. as “surpassing in splendor any city of the known world,” also called its residents Chaldeans.
Far from an insult, Chaldeans was a term of respect. The Babylonians were so associated with cutting-edge scientific thinking that the word Chaldean came to mean “astronomer” across the Fertile Crescent and into Greece. That the editors of Genesis appear to have retroactively applied this term to Abraham nearly fifteen hundred years earlier suggests the Israelites, far from condescending to their captors, wanted to show they were descended from them. The Babylonians were not barbarians. They were not philistines. They were the Oxonians of their day. And since the Israelites could not defeat them, they decided to join them.
