Nostalgia and the Exile...

When we speak of longing for home as a theme in the OT, things are somewhat different in the Exilic period.

Rather than being called out from slavery towards a new life of freedom with Yhwh, she now found herself re-enslaved and outcast. The laments of exile exhibit a powerful tone of disconnection and longing characteristic of the nostalgic vision:

By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4) (stop thinking of disco music...)

The memory of Zion is invoked with all the pain of its bitter loss – and a song about the end of singing. The circumstances are very different from those of the Exodus: here is the forced removal of a people from their homeland and the attempted destruction of their identity as a people through enslavement (as had certainly happened to the tribes of the North).

Nostalgia might be forgiven a people in those conditions. Yet the Hebrew Scriptures – many of which date from this period or after – most assuredly do not present a nostalgic vision of the past. The climax of the narrative of the Former Prophets in the David-Solomon era is not presented merely as some Golden Era to which Israel should return with all haste. The prophetic call to restoration came with recognition that the old order was even at its height not yet all it could have been. Jeremiah, for example, envisioned a ‘new covenant’ surpassing the Exodus covenant because the torah would now be internalized by the people and not just mediated through the writing on stone tablets (31:31-34). Ezekiel’s great temple (Ez 40-48), described in such extraordinary detail, clearly exceeds the former temple in its globally significant dimensions and in its overflow of the divine glory (43:1-12). In the book of Haggai, the rebuilt temple is compared unfavourably to the old one; but the divine promise is that ‘the latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former’ (Hg 2:9). The rise of apocalypticism in the latter half of Daniel and Zechariah suggests that longing for a mere repetition of Israel’s past was a cul-de-sac. On the historical horizon, no redevivus was possible. The consolation of Israel’s lament could not - would not - come in the form of a return to the past. Her previous faithlessness stood in the way of this; if the covenant were to be re-established, it would have to be on a new footing. Israel was to remember the past with tears; not those of longing but rather those of sorrow and confession, in preparation for the coming of Yhwh’s comfort and restoration (cf Is 40:1ff).

The scene which encapsulates this tension in the historical experience of Israel is found in Ezra 3:11-13. When finally the foundations of the new temple had been laid with the permission of Cyrus the Persian, there is described a scene of great celebration and joy. And yet, intermingled with this is the sound of the older generation – who had seen and now remembered the first temple – weeping aloud at the sight of the foundations. The result is a sound which is ambiguous:
…the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away (Ez 3:13)

The sorrow and joy blend so as to become indistinguishable. The text does not elevate one noise as the appropriate response to the moment over against the other here. The elders realize perhaps that the ‘Zion’ of their longings is not a matter merely of laying bricks in the ground. The new generation has on the other hand discovered in this moment not a new identity but the foundations of a new identity.