A House in Shinar

It was easier to take the Jews out of Babylon than it was to take the “Babylon” out of the Jews. It is apt that Talmudism reached its final form in Babylon itself.

Adapted from The End of Israel: Jesus, Paul & AD70, and why don’t you have this book yet?

In a 1948 speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill quoted a statement from philosopher George Santayana but with one important change. Santayana had said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Unlike the rulers of Israel in Josiah’s day who neglected and lost the Torah scrolls and forgot the Law of Moses, those in the first century not only possessed the scrolls but also diligently studied them. They even honored the memory of the very prophets whose “poetic justice” had condemned Israel for its idolatry, immorality, and injustices. The ensuing Babylonian exile was the reason why the Jews were still subject to Gentile rule.

We know that they remembered the past, but why did they fail to learn from it? The answer is that a spiritual Babel is much harder to spot than a physical one. The old enemies of Israel were despatched by the sword on the thigh. The new enemies were conquered by the sword of the mouth. This is why the Revelation uses images from the physical battles of Israel to describe the spiritual warfare of the Firstfruits Church against her Jewish counterfeit.

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:11-12 RSV)¹Satan was thrown down from heaven’s court at Jesus’ ascension, but he still stood as a legal accuser in its earthly model, the Temple (Zechariah 3; 2 Peter 3:10; Revelation 12:7-13), abusing the … Continue reading

Priests deal with flesh and blood; kings deal with rulers, authorities, and worldly powers; but it takes prophets to deal with the unseen spirits that animate what is seen.

Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. And when the Syrians came down against him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, “Please strike this people with blindness.” So he struck them with blindness in accordance with the prayer of Elisha. (2 Kings 6:17-18)

It is easier to circumcise the flesh (Abraham) than it is to circumcise the heart (Moses). It was easier to take Israel out of Egypt than it was to take the “Egypt” out of Israel. It was also easier to take the Jews out of Babylon than it was to take the “Babylon” out of the Jews. Zechariah saw Israel’s Babylonian heart expelled to Shinar in a symbolic play on the rites of Yom Kippur (Zechariah 5:5-11). But, like the demon who returned to the cleaned and decorated house with seven spirits worse than himself (Matthew 12:45), in the Revelation, the “woman” who represented Israel’s spiritual adultery had returned. Even worse, she was no longer contained in a basket under a leaden lid carried by stork-winged angels (a forgery of the Ark of the Covenant), but now enthroned, a bloodthirsty Jezebel or Athaliah, sitting in the seat of Moses and offering her own children to a false god—the god of the Jewish rulers.

The once holy city, cleaned by the exile and decorated by the Herods, was now entirely possessed. The call from heaven to “come out of her, my people” (Revelation 18:4) was a call to be “born again”—not from the “flesh and blood” womb but from captivity in the “strong man’s” tomb. This was not a physical exodus (from Egypt) or a social exodus (from Babylon) but a spiritual exodus (from Jerusalem below). Thus, only those Jews who were cut to the heart by the words of the apostles and had received the Spirit of Christ were able to discern which was the true Jerusalem—the seen or the unseen, the harlot or the bride.

Judaism claims the Old Testament as its foundation but in truth it is a tell comprised of so many layers of ruinous constructs that the intentions of the Founder are obscured. Instead of being Jacob’s ziggurat, God’s answer to the Tower of Babel, it is simply a memorial pillar of Babel’s past. It is apt that Talmudism reached its final form in Babylon itself.

Long after the ancient city of Babylon and the kingdom of Babylonia had ceased to exist, the Jews continued to use the name “Babel” to designate Mesopotamia, the “land of the two rivers.” Indeed, the Babylonian diaspora did not resemble any other. Its antiquity and the fact that it remained the only large Jewish community outside the Roman Empire made it a world apart. Since Mesopotamian Jewry was never embraced by the seductive and highly assimilative influence of the Greco-Roman civilization, it could develop its own original forms of social life and autonomous institutions.

The roots of the Babylonian community were very ancient, dating as far back as the end of the biblical period and the deportations from the Land of Israel, which both preceded and followed the destruction of the First Temple (586BCE). As it grew and prospered, the community tended to emphasize its antiquity.

By the time it had produced its own version of the Talmud, it manifested a kind of “local patriotism.” Was not Abraham the Father of the Nation born “beyond the river” (Euphrates)? Were not the Euphrates and the Tigris the two rivers which flowed out of Eden according to Genesis (2:14)? The Jews of Babylonia, therefore, considered themselves the aristocracy of the Jewish people. Even the land of Mesopotamia acquired an aura of sanctity in their eyes, second to the land of Israel, of course, but holier than all other countries.

The history of this community during the first millennium of its existence remains obscure… The little that is known of the Jews there at the time comes from the quill of Josephus Flavius: they were very numerous and their brethren in Judea sought their help while preparing their revolt against Rome…

It is only after the fall of the Second Temple (70CE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135CE) that one can truly follow the history of Babylonian Jewry, which becomes even clearer after the fall of the Parthian regime and the accession of the Sassian dynasty (224CE). Sources relating to the first two centuries of the Christian era make no mention in any form of organized Torah studies in Babylonia and note hardly any Babylonian scholars. We do know that Rabbi Akiva, in his many travels, arrived in Nechardea where he announced the leap year.

After Bar Kokhba’s revolt, we hear for the first time about groups of sages who “went down” to Babylonia, undoubtedly following the religious persecution which followed the crushing of the revolt. In Babylon, the nephew of Rabbi Joshua, Hanania, attempted to proclaim the order of the Hebrew calendar, a prerogative which until then had been indisputably reserved for the leadership in Palestine. Although Hanania was forced to make a retraction, it was nevertheless the first manifestation of Babylonian independence from the Palestinian center.

During the late second or early third century, we hear about this community’s political leaders for the first time: Rosh ha-golah (the exilarch, “prince of exile”). Although nothing is known about the origins of this institution, it is certain that Babylonian Jews in the talmudic period regarded the exilarch as a scion of the House of David. Many talmudic texts compare his attributes to that of the nasi [prince] in the Land of Israel—another manifestation of the singular status of this Jewry…

The new Sassian regime, unlike the Parthian, was far more centralized and strictly Zoroastrian. Certain Jewish sages were afraid that the kind and the clergy would interfere in community affairs. Others, on the other hand, hoped to find a modus vivendi with the Sassians. The sage Samuel summarized this attitude in his famous saying Dina de-malkhuta Dina, the law of the land is law. On the whole, the Jews of Babylon adopted this view, which brought them an extensive period of prosperity and cultural blossoming.

It was during this period that Babylonia emerged as the great center of religious studies which rivaled Palestine. Between the third and the fifth centuries, Babylonian academies—the future yeshivot—established a method of commentary on the Bible which became the basis for the Babylonian Talmud. This tradition, later disseminated by the Geonim (heads of the Babylonian academies), was to be accepted by the entire Jewish world. Paradoxically perhaps, the sons of a community of which nothing is known prior to the third century, determined the norms and behavior of Jews throughout the world for fifteen centuries.²Eli Barnavi (editor), A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People: From the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present, 64-65.

The use of the origin of Abram to justify this shift to a Babylonian home is tragic and ironic. It was as if God had never called him out of Ur, or ended the Babylonian exile.

A further irony is the fact that these so-called sages were the continuation of a Jewish school that had rejected its Messiah even after Gentile wise men—sages from a faithful succession founded by Daniel—had traveled from Babylon to Israel to worship Him.³For more discussion, see “Babylonian Bookends” in Michael Bull, Inquiétude: Essays for a People Without Eyes. This comic reversal, one final bitter reminder of every previous dispossession of disobedient Jews for the sake of believing Gentiles, was a divinely ordered crossing of Jacob’s arms to bless the faithful younger brother—God’s firstborn, not man’s—with the abundant fruitfulness that comes only from His hand (Genesis 48:14; Matthew 23:12).⁴Jacob was only a trickster in the same way that Jesus was a thief, outcrafting the serpent and saving the inheritance of the saints.

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