Hey, this is John at the Bible Project.

Today we continue our conversation on the theme of exile in the Bible.

An exile is someone who lives away from their home.

They long for home, but they're unable to get there.

We're in our fourth hour of conversation on this topic and you can go back and listen

to previous conversations to get up to speed, but here's a quick recap.

In 586 BC, the Jewish people were invaded by the Babylonian Empire.

The city of Jerusalem was ransacked and many of the Jewish people were forced to leave

their home and find a new existence in a foreign land, the land of Babylon.

Exile is a traumatic experience for anyone or any culture, and it was so significant for

the Jewish people that when their prophets and scribes began stitching together the stories

of their people, they did so while considering what it means to be an exile and if there's

any hope of going back home.

As the authors of the Bible go back to talk about the history of humanity that Israel fits

into, that's Genesis 1 through 11, now the history of humanity is told as a story from

promise land to exile, from Eden, Genesis 1 and 2, to exile and Babylon, Genesis 11.

They found that it wasn't just their people who were an exile, rather all of humanity

was in a type of exile, cast out from the world as it ought to be.

In the book of Genesis, God called a family out of Babylon, the family of Abraham, to be

a representative family that comes back from exile and renews a relationship with God.

So in the same way, Israel, living in Babylon, looked at the stories of Abraham as hope and

inspiration that they too could one day go home and they did.

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