Today’s
Scripture Reading (May 11, 2017): Jeremiah 52
They are the unbelievable stories of
my inbox – the Chicken Soup of the internet. Sometimes they are sent by
random people, more often they seem to be sent to me from people who think they
might make a good teaching illustration. They all appear to share a common theme, something good emerges out of
something bad; a miracle takes place that could only happen because of God. They
are also remarkably short on facts so that there is no way that they could ever
be verified.
Recently the story highlighted a hole
in a church wall and decorative carpet,
just the right size (of course) to cover the hole. In the middle of a storm, the pastor invites a random woman into
the church to dry off and offers to give her a ride home. She graciously accepts and then notices the carpet. On closer inspection, she recognizes that it is her
carpet from the old country, lost in the days of Hitler along with her husband
and all of her other possessions. The pastor offers
to give her the carpet back, but she declines. She is glad that it has found a
new home. A few days later, a man enters the church for a worship service for
the first time. He notices the carpet. Under closer examination, he realizes that it is his carpet from his home in the
old country, lost in the days of Hitler along with his wife and everything else
that he had to his name. The Pastor offers to give him a ride home after
service. But instead of taking him to his house, he makes a detour and takes
him to the place where he had dropped off the woman a few days earlier. And
then he sits back to watch the tearful reunion happen.
A heartwarming story? Definitely.
True? There have been many similar “Chicken Soup” stories that have graced my
inbox over the years. All of them brimming with a story that is akin to this one. Every one of them light on details and every one of them
fulfilling our need for a happy ending. And, maybe, they are all based on a
similar true story. Or maybe they are the work of someone who wants to make us
feel that good really can come out of bad; that even today we serve a miracle working
God. But the truth is that we want to know that reunions, like the ones found
in the story, actually do take place.
There is a problem with this verse in
Jeremiah. In light of what we know about this period, the number of exiles
recorded in Jeremiah is remarkably small.
Jeremiah maintains that only 4,600 Jews were
taken into the exile. After
seventy years of captivity, more than 40,000 Jews returned from Babylon. On top
of that, Josephus maintains that many times that number (40,000) remained in
Babylon where they had made their homes even after they were allowed to leave
and go back. The total number of Jews in
Babylon seems to be much higher than can be accounted for through three
generations of living and having children in a foreign land if Jeremiah’s 4,600
is right.
Scholars have devised ways of
explaining the discrepancy. One explanation is that Jeremiah was only counting
the heads of the various clans, that the actual number of people exiled was
much higher. Another is that there is a missing digit, or two, in Jeremiah
count.
But maybe the easiest explanation is
based on our desire for reunion. The Babylonian Captivity may not have been just
three involuntary events. We know that, against the wishes of God, many Jews
made their way to Egypt after the Babylonian invasion. It is also quite likely
that many of those who had been left behind simply
migrated in the direction of Babylon in search of family members. And once the
reunion was completed, they stayed in
their new land to create lives for themselves and their offspring. This would mean that the 4,600 officially
forced out of Judah was just the tip of the iceberg. Many more would leave in search of those who were taken. These people would have made up a
voluntary exile of the population of
Judah to Babylon that was much larger than the official one that took place
during the first two decades of the sixth century
B.C.E.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 74
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