SIMUL
THE MINISTRY IN BABYLON AND ROME Roy A. Harrisville, III The Exile
“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:5-7). When the Israelites went into exile into Babylon in 587 BC, they doubted whether they could be the people of the one true God in the city of their conquerors who worshipped false idols. Babylon was as paganized a city as one could imagine. Temples to its gods and pagan carvings and bas-reliefs throughout the city declared in no uncertain terms that this was a city of common spirituality for that age. The Israelites were religious interlopers, idiosyncratic devotees to a singular God who seemed to the rest of the world morally rigid and spiritually confining. No doubt the children of the conquerors threw verbal invectives freely at their Jewish counterparts in 37
