What If There Were No Bible?

What if nobody had ever heard of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments? What if the walls of Jericho never came tumbling down? What if David never slew Goliath? What if Jesus never walked on the water? And what if Mohammed never rose up to heaven from Jerusalem?

What made all these might-have-beens moot, what relegated them to the pages of science fiction and alternate histories, was a singular event in 586 BCE: The Babylonian Exile.

Half the world’s population owes its religion and its views of humanity’s place in the cosmos to this searing experience. It affected a few thousand people from the tiny Israelite kingdom of Judah, but through it they transformed the world that came after them.

The End or the Beginning?

In the ancient near east, great powers conquered lesser powers, destroying or deporting the populations to places known and unknown, places where they disappeared into the dark, forgotten corners of history.

When King Nebuchadnezzar’s army conquered Judah, it should have been the end. Instead it was the beginning.

The people of Judah carried their sacred writings into captivity with them. Living in captivity in Babylon, they edited together many of their narratives, they updated others and they added new ones.

Babylon had severed the people from their land, but it couldn’t sever them from their God.

After the Exile

When the Persian conquest of Babylon ended the Exile in 539 BCE, their returning descendants brought the Torah back with them – the first five books of the Bible. They also brought back books of the prophets and books telling the history of their relationship with their God, from its earliest beginnings up to the Exile itself.

Over the next several centuries, in successive waves, these books became sacred writ. To this canon were added new writings from the period after the Exile.

Together these works formed the Hebrew Bible. It’s the foundation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Read About the Exile

I wrote my novel, By the Waters of Babylon, to bring this period to life through the experiences of a young woman named Ya’el. My next novel, Light of Exile (available late summer 2022) is set in the time of the return, when the descendants of the original captives came back to Judah to rebuild Jerusalem and reestablish the worship of their God in their own land.

You can read the story of the Exile in both of these novels.

Or, thanks to the people of ancient Judah, you can read it in the Bible.