Jeremiah 29.1, 4-7: Doing What God Says

Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens. Eat the food you produce. Raise your children. Have grandchildren. (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7) In other words, settle in. You are going to be there for a while. So the people do what God commands. And now we know that's exactly what they did.

In 2015 the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem held an exhibition titled "By the Rivers of Babylon." The focus of the exhibit was a collection of clay tablets - not a lot to look at, really - that offered a look at just what the exiles did while they were in Babylon. Written in cuneiform, the tablets gave details of life in the 6th century BCE.

Cuneiform tablet on display in "By the Rivers of Babylon." Bible Lands Museum of Jerusalem.

If your cuneiform is a little rusty (as mine is), I can tell you that the tablets are a civic archive: rental agreements, tax records, and land deeds. The names are Hebrew names (or Babylonian versions of those names). A collection of the tablets are connected to a town called Al-Yahudu (the City of Judah).

"By the Rivers of Babylon" opened at the Bible Lands Museum of Jerusalem in February 2015. 

See below for links to the exhibit. 

God instructed the people to make lives for themselves and seek the welfare of the city where they found themselves. And that's exactly what the people did. Which doesn't mean they weren't homesick for Israel, just that they looked ahead as much as they looked back.

For a virtual tour of the exhibit, click here.
Because of the success of "By the Rivers of Babylon", the core of the exhibition was reinstalled at the BLMJ in an exhibit titled "Jerusalem in Babylon: New Light on the Judean Exiles." For that exhibit, click here.

For thoughts on Luke 17:11-19, click here.
For thoughts on Luke 17:11-19, see Art&Faith Matters on Facebook.

Psalm 137: We Hung Up Our Lyres

How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? That is the question the psalmist asks (or sings) in the lectionary psalm (Psalm 137) for Proper 22C/Ordinary 27C. The original setting was, of course, the exile in Babylon, which is mentioned in the psalm.

Israeli illustrator Ephraim Moshe Lilien (1874-1925) used this text several times in his career. One illustration, a print depicts a German Art Nouveau interpretation of a realistic setting by the rivers of Babylon. Figures sit dejectedly, their lyres lying silently in their hands or by their side. In the background are trees whose branches are "decorated" with hanging lyres.

Ephraim Moshe Lilien. On the Rivers of Babylon (Plate 43). Etching and aquatint. 1910. 

Lilien's second example also uses trees and lyres, though there are no visible figures. The psalm is the source for the book cover illustration of "Lieder des Ghetto" ("Songs of the Ghetto"), a collection of songs by Morris Rosenfeld, the so-called "Poet Laureate of Labor." Though the collection was originally published in 1898, Lilien's illustrations were part of the 1920 edition in which the Yiddish originals were translated into German.  

Ephraim Moshe Lilien. Cover illustration for "Lieder des Ghetto." 1920. Poems by Morris Rosenfeld; translated by Berthold Feiwel. Berlin: Marquardt u. Co.

On the cover of the book is the willow tree on which hangs a lyre. The lyre's strings are broken, rendering the instrument unplayable. The background has a light cityscape at the bottom of the cover and rounds of thorns or barbed wire at the bottom of the willow trunk.

Babylon is not the only "strange land" in which God's people have found themselves...and found themselves wondering how to sing the songs of Yahweh. Even today there are all too many situations when we wonder about singing God's song in the strange lands in which we find ourselves. Perhaps those are the times we most need to sing.

For thoughts on Lamentations 1:1-6, click here.