the point he wishes to emphasize, in view of his readers’ difficult situation, is that as Christians they have no abiding home on earth. In earlier times the Jews read their successive deportations as divine punishments (e.g. Dt. 29:25–28; Jer. 34:17; Jdt. 5:18), but later, as their foreign settlements prospered and increased in number, they began to view them less gloomily (e.g. Orac. Sib. iii. 271; 1 Macc. 15:16–24: cf. TWNT II, 98–101). Even so, diaspora, adopted as a euphemism for the harsher