ABSTRACT
It should be noticed that this prediction of Ezekiel, substantially templeand priest-centred, still cannot manage without a royal figure (David), whose title of ‘king’, however, it replaces by ‘shepherd’ and ‘prince’ – and I do not believe this was out of consideration for the Chaldean monarch. More poetically, (First) Isaiah had envisaged a king so perfect that the actual scion of the ‘house of David’, given past experience, could hardly appear a plausible candidate:
Next to the king and royal family were collegial bodies and classes: the ‘elders of Israel’ to whom Jeremiah (29.1) wrote a letter and who regularly consulted the will of Yahweh through Ezekiel (8.1; 14.1; 20.1); ‘the priests and the prophets’ (again Jer. 29.1); and finally a ruling elite, even though without any state apparatus. There is no palace nor temple, and this consideration, apparently banal, nevertheless carried grave repercussions for the way they conceived their function. In effect, a kind of invisible structure (or even a ‘shadow government’) comes into being, subject to the very visible government of the Babylonians (and then Persians) – a situation
that for a long time will cause the problem (particularly for those with political responsibility) of a dual loyalty arising from the choice between a formal allegiance to the empire (and loyalty towards the emperor) and an essential solidarity with their own people. Obviously, if formal political structures were inconceivable in the Diaspora, those of worship could easily be reconstructed; however, it was precisely the expectation of return and the symbolic influence of the temple of Jerusalem that prevented this from happening. In fact, there are no reports of ‘synagogues’ among the exiles in Babylonia motivated by hopes of restoration, while later, in the post-exilic age, those who wanted to remain in the Diaspora and did not entertain dreams of return needed places of assembly to hear and cultivate the Law in a decentralized structure.
