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.

Lamentations 1.1-6: The Course of Empire

Was it inevitable? That the great city would one day fall? And by the scriptural description, the city has fallen. (Lamentations 1:1-6) Nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole created a series of five paintings he called "The Course of Empire." For Cole, civilization seemed to be a cycle (an inevitable cycle?) of appearing, maturing...and collapsing. The artist chose a line from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" as the motto for the series:
            There is the moral of all human tales;
            'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
            First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails,
            Wealth, vice, corruption, -- barbarism at last. (Canto IV, CVIII, line 964ff.)

It isn't especially optimistic. And "Destruction" isn't an especially optimistic image.

Thomas Cole. Destruction of Empire. 1836. New York Historical Society.

"Destruction" is the fourth of the five paintings in the series. The five pictures depict the Savage State, The Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. "Destruction"  shares the same broad perspective as "Consummation," though it looks more to the right side of the city built around this harbor while the third stage looks at the left. A storm appears in the distance, buildings are on fire, and there is a storm of violence throughout the city. A bridge close to the front of the picture space is broken, eliminating one way of fleeing the carnage, though a makeshift assemblage of some kind is shakily holding what appears to be too many people. The statue (reminiscent of this statue) in the foreground is headless.

It's a far cry from the height of civilization, shown below in "Consummation of Empire."

At the height of its glory and power, the city was shining with classical architectural perfection. A procession, seemingly in honor of a scarlet-cloaked man, has brought people onto the bridge that will be ruined by the next stage of empire.

It's not hard to feel the pain and despair in Lamentations because the text puts us in the middle of the destruction. Cole gives us the luxury of being more distant from events than does the writer of Lamentations. Is that a luxury for which we should hope?

For thoughts on Psalm 137, click here.
For thoughts on 2 Timothy 1:1-14, see Art&Faith Matters on Facebook. 

Jeremiah 32.1-3a, 6-15: A Long Time

This is one of my favorite moments in scripture. What a seemingly pointless activity: buying a field when the Babylonian army is at the city gates (Jeremiah 32:8). Why would any intelligent person invest in property just before the cataclysmic event that guaranteed destruction of home and field and livelihood? It makes as much sense as this fence.

The difference is that God is playing a long game. Yes, the Babylonian army is at the city gates. But they won't be there forever. There will come a time when the people are back in the land. They will build houses. They will plant vineyards. They will live on their family lands. God has promised. 

And that makes Jeremiah's real estate purchase look quite forward-thinking. What Jeremiah knows, of course, is that God's promises are true. So Jeremiah buys the field, has the legal papers drawn up, and directs the deed to be put in an earthenware jar so that it will last for a long time...long enough for the Babylonians to be gone and the people to come home. It's apparently a practice that continued long after Jeremiah's time.  

Dead Sea Scroll Jar and Lid. 2nd century BCE. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the 2nd century BCE, the people of Qumran and other nearby places put scrolls in jars, and they lasted for a long time. (Re)discovered in 1947, the jars held scrolls in a variety of conditions. Some still legible, others nothing but powder, but the legible pieces have yielded fragments from every book of the Hebrew Bible with the exception of Esther. 

Those scrolls survived more than two thousand years. Long enough for the Babylonian army to be long gone and done with the city of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. 

Two other passages seem to intersect with this passage. The discovery of the jars and scrolls in 1947 is attributed to Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost goat. We should be grateful for the shepherd who went looking for the lost (Luke 15:1-10). And Jeremiah 18 - the trip to the potter's house -has something to say about the role and symbol of earthenware jars. 

Garth Brooks' song "The Change" (1995/Written by Tony Arata and Wayne Tester) centers on actions that may look ineffectual in facing world events. The video for the song features images following the Oklahoma City bombing.

For additional thoughts on Jeremiah 32, see Art&Faith Matters on Facebook. 

For thoughts on Luke 16:19-31, click here.