Abstract
Until quite recently, ‘the Exile’ was an unchallenged fact of sixth-century Judean history. Now ‘exile’ has tended to be replaced by the more prosaic and precise ‘deportation’ (more strictly ‘deportations’). Ahn now introduces a third category that allows him a broader comparative scope: ‘forced migration’. Our ignorance of how the Judean migrants responded economically and socially in their new homeland remains profound, but ‘the Exile’ became a central episode in Judah’s collective memory and a major trope in the Hebrew Bible. The memory/trope was expressed in a variety of perception: for the Chronicler it was a temporary reprieve for the land; for the authors of Daniel it never ended. Ahn focuses on the responses of the first three generations of deported communities which, as he sees it, expressed their own increasingly positive perceptions of their migration. To illuminate each of these generational perspectives, he compares a range of more recent ‘forced migrations’ into the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Germany, focussing especially on the economic causes and consequences of such resettlement. He takes the results as a template for the first, first-and a half, second and third generations of Judean immigrant communities in Babylonia.
The major part of the book then identifies biblical texts in which the voices of these generations speak. The first Babylonian generation is here represented by the communal lament (Psalm 137), the 1.5 generation by hope (Jeremiah 29), the second generation by the vision of a ‘new creation’ (Isaiah 43) and the third by the embrace of a new ‘home’ away from Judah (Numbers 32). At least to this reviewer, the attributions are less well-founded than such an ambitious thesis requires. There have always been doubts about the provenance of Psalm 137 (which refers to Babylon as ‘there’), while in Jeremiah’s ‘letter to the exiles’, the promises of return and threats against Babylon are probably secondary (and later); an earlier form, attributed to a protégé of the new non-Davidic régime, relays the message ‘don’t expect to come back!’ The ‘exilic’ dating of Second Isaiah is disputed less widely, but nonetheless with sound reasons; the reading of Numbers 32 is the most imaginative but also the most speculative. The discussion of these texts is in every case quite thorough and nuanced, but such uncertainties, while often recognized, are set aside. The Egyptian ‘forced migration’ in 582 (attested in 2 Kings and Jeremiah) might also have been more cautious: though widely rehearsed as a fact, it might well be a part of the ‘empty land’ fiction, conveniently disposing of remaining Judeans while according ‘exilic’ status to the Egyptian diaspora.
The contribution of this book lies for this reviewer not in recovering biblical history—forced migration served by forced exegesis—but in developing a theology of modern immigrant communities, to sit alongside liberation and postcolonial theologies.