ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a selection of texts from the Christian tradition, dating from the first to the twentieth century ce. It focuses on the concept of intertextuality: the interrelation between two or more texts and between text and reality. The chapter illustrates how writers, from different ages and in varying circumstances, selected texts relating to the Babylonian Exile from the Hebrew Bible, read them, gave new meaning to them and transformed them according to their particular needs and situation, by using them in a new textual context. Some of the texts became authoritative sources for later works as well, especially the Book of Revelation as a biblical text, but also the Church Father, Augustine. Augustine wrote his De Civitate Dei against the background of the collapsing Western Roman Empire, Petrarch during the "exile" of the papacy in Avignon, Luther at the verge of the Reformation and Cannegieter just after the bloodiest war in the history of humanity.
