Exile

Exile
Exile is both a plot motif and a character type. The essential ingredient in both cases is a person who has been banished from a native place and is now living or wandering in foreign parts. While we ordinarily link the state of exile with judgment against someone for wrongdoing, in the Bible this is by no means always the case. In fact all true believers are pictured as being exiles from their true homeland.
An exile story is preceded by a scene of banishment and a subsequent journey, and the Bible contains some memorable examples. The prototype is the expulsion from the Garden (Gen 3:24), which in a single moment made the entire human race an exile from its original home. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this banishment, which not only awakens the wellsprings of human regret and nostalgia but is also the starting point of every subsequent human story—the backdrop to all that is recorded in the Bible.
Other scenes of banishment follow the original one. Cain is banished “from the presence of the LORD” (Gen 4:16 RSV) as the sentence for having murdered his brother, Jacob is forced to flee for his life after having cheated his brother (Gen 27:41–28:5), and Joseph is sold into slavery in a foreign land (Gen 37:25–28). Moses flees to Midian to avoid Pharaoh’s death threat (Ex 2:15). Similarly, David repeatedly flees from Saul, and later in life he is temporarily banished from the throne by Absalom’s rebellion. In the story of Jesus’ nativity, the flight into Egypt is a banishment (Mt 2:13–15). In virtually all of the older literature, life at court was a precarious existence, dependent on the whims of the ruler. The Bible accordingly records instances of people banished from court, including Adonijah (1 Kings 2:26–27), Shimei (1 Kings 2:36–38) and Haman (Esther 7:5–10). To see banishment “writ large,” we can turn to the OT prophetic books with their vivid pictures of what it will be like for the nation to be conquered and carried away into captivity.
While banishment is the moment in which a person becomes an exile, being an exile is the condition of life that follows. Exile encompasses a social role involving fringe status and a psychological state that includes as its salient features a sense of loss or deprivation and a longing to return to (or arrive at) a homeland. Whenever an exile is experiencing punishment for a crime, moreover, the state of exile is accompanied by feelings of guilt and perhaps remorse [251] (as in the book of Lamentations). Even more important for Israelite culture would be the sense of shame that attaches to such an exile. Above all, the exile is a displaced person. Moses sounds the authentic note when he calls his first son Gershom, “for he said, ‘I have been a sojourner in a foreign land’” (Ex 2:22 RSV).
Exile in the OT is mainly national. The nation that arises from the patriarchs and their sons in Egypt is the first victim of national exile in the OT. The journeying of the nation in the wilderness during the exodus is very much the story of exiles passing through alien territory, always longing for a promised land. On an even larger scale are the exiles of Israel and Judah later in Jewish history. The imagery of exile is mainly contained in the prophets’ visions of coming exile, but we catch the flavor of what it was like for a nation to live in exile in the narratives of Daniel and Esther. What emerges is the picture of a minority group with few rights, always threatened with the imposition of pagan practices from the surrounding culture, always vulnerable to the superior power of the surrounding political structure, always longing to get back to the homeland.
Individuals as well as nations go into exile. Such is the idyllic story of Ruth. Although the English poet John Keats pictured her as “sick for home … amid the alien corn,” the focus of the biblical story is instead on the way in which Ruth found acceptance in a foreign culture and religion. It is the happiest story of exile on record.
For the emotions that accompany exile we can turn to several psalms. Psalms that recall the banishment of the nation by conquering forces include Psalms 74 and 137. The spiritual longing that accompanied exile for a person whose religion centered around pilgrimages to worship God in the temple in Jerusalem is captured in Psalms 42–43, the song of the disquieted soul.
The imagery of exile reaches its metaphoric climax in Hebrews 11, which portrays people of faith as “strangers and exiles on the earth” seeking “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb 11:13, 16 RSV). At the physical level, the state of being an exile retains its negative qualities in this passage, as we read about people living in tents rather than houses, sharing ill-treatment with the people of God, suffering for Christ, being tortured and wandering over the desolate parts of the earth. Yet the chapter implies that the state of exile is the inevitable lot of all who follow Christ, who was himself an archetypal exile—a person who in his life had nowhere to lay his head (Mt 8:20) and who in his death “suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood” (Heb 13:12 RSV).
See also BONDAGE AND FREEDOM; EXODUS, SECOND EXODUS; GARDEN; LAND; RETURN; WANDERER, WANDERING; WILDERNESS.