Judah at the beginning of the sixth century BC lived under a double temptation. The small kingdom had come to believe that Jerusalem and the Temple were a magical guarantee of inviolability: since the house of the Lord stood in the city, no enemy could ever take it. It was the prophet Jeremiah himself who denounced this in his own people, standing at the gate of the sanctuary: "Trust not in deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD'" (Jer 7:4). And above all the Near East towered a power that had given in to a far greater temptation — the Neo-Babylonian kingdom, with its pride in a world-capital, with ziggurats and walls that seemed eternal. The pledge held by the conquered and the pride of the victor were one and the same idol: the belief that something man-made — a stone, a wall, a shrine-building — could guarantee salvation.
The pledge did not save. When King Zedekiah rebelled against Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to Jerusalem and in 587/586 BC took it; the First Temple, built long before by Solomon, was burned, the walls razed, and the Kingdom of Judah ceased to exist. The magical guarantee collapsed together with the charred beams of the sanctuary — it turned out that stone does not hold up heaven.
Captivity began in the most literal sense: the Babylonians drove away to their capital the nobility, the priesthood, the artisans — the flower of the people, torn from their land and from their shrine. By the rivers of Babylon the exiles sat and wept, remembering Zion — and here, in this uprooting, the essential thing took place. Deprived of the Temple-building, the people were forced to ask themselves anew what it was they lived by. And in captivity a different Judaism was forged: a faith gathered around the Torah, the Word, and the assembly-synagogue, a monotheism that has no need of stone walls, because God is not locked up in a building. When the Persian king Cyrus, having crushed Babylon, issued in 538 BC the edict permitting the exiles to return and rebuild the sanctuary (the Second Temple was completed around 516 BC), it was already a different, remelted faith that was returning.
And Babylon itself soon fell under the same law: in 539 BC the proud world-capital surrendered to the Persians of Cyrus — the enslaver that had imagined itself eternal was subdued in its turn. At the station of the Captivity, which leads to the station of the Waiting, the Babylonian story speaks twice over: of how the loss of a shrine can beget a deeper faith, and of how no realm ever buys itself immortality by the height of its walls.