Comfort for Jerusalem: the second Isaiah as counselor to refugees

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2004 by William S. Morrow

Phase three will refer to experiences of forced displacement among those deported to Babylon. We are not well informed about the conditions encountered by the Judean exiles. It appears that most became peasants who farmed plots of land assigned to them by the state. Their status was not as slaves or as prisoners of war, but rather as clients of the state employed to form a colony. They seem to have been settled on uncultivated agricultural land, perhaps as part of a deliberate policy to develop unused land or previously abandoned sites (Lemche: 179-80). The exiles were placed in various locales in lower Mesopotamia (Yamauchi: 365); later records from the fifth century (the Murashu archive) suggest a concentration around the city of Nippur, southeast of Babylon (Purvis: 207).

There are no indications that the exiles were under coercion to abandon their traditional cultural ways or social organization. They had some institutions of religious observances, including public prayers and fasts (Purvis: 212). Persons with Jewish names appear in the Murashu documents as small landholders and petty officials (Stolper: 928). So it does not seem that the exiles were restricted from improving their lot economically in the decades following their deportation. Nevertheless, there are indications that the violence of the Babylonian conquest and deportation affected the exiles' self-image and that continuing captivity considerably dimmed their hopes for Israel's future.

Symptoms of Psychological Trauma among the Babylonian Exiles

Van der Veer's work describes techniques of therapeutic intervention with contemporary victims of processes of forced displacement who are manifesting psychological problems. Application of such concepts to an ancient population has its pitfalls. The usefulness of applying approaches derived from Western psychology to persons in other societies has been called into question (Pilch: 114). Another concern is that a majority of those addressed by the Second Isaiah must have been second-generation exiles. The mid-540s places the first exile about fifty-five years prior and post-dates the second exile by more than forty years. Since the average life-span of persons in ancient Israel cannot have been much more than forty (Wolff: 119), those able to remember life in pre-exilic Jerusalem or Judah were probably few.

These objections can be answered. First, while certain psychological constructs may be culture-specific, there is evidence that abuse and violence have similar consequences across cultures. For example, child abuse and neglect appear to have consistent effects across race, ethnicity, culture and time period (Erkman: 384). According to van der Veer, "The way people react to psychological trauma does not seem to be very dependent on cultural background" (76). Moreover, these symptoms can be documented in literary forms. Comparisons have been made, e.g., between the contemporary diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Pepys' description of the reactions of London's citizens after the Great Fire in 1666 (Meichenbaum: 41). There are also convincing analogies between the PTSD symptoms of modern combat veterans and literary figures such as Hotspur in HENRY IV Part 1 (Shay: 165-69) and Achilles in the ILIAD (3-99).